Colors From The Future
The Covers Project
Book of Bad Advice
Nine Days Wonder
Other Recordings
The Jennifers commit some of their favorite cover tunes to mp3 format. We emailed these out to our fan list once a month while we worked on finishing our Colors From the Future CD. Most were done using Apple's GarageBand software.
This is our version of the broadway fake-hippy anthem "Good Morning Starshine". There are certain songs that become tattooed on your subconscious, not because they are great songs, but because they were played a lot when you were a kid. When your parents had the soundtrack to the musical "Hair" featuring this slice of post-summer-of-love commercialism, it becomes lodged in your brain stem, (along with equally timeless classics from The Carpenters and Rolf Harris.) The melody and some of the words were vaguely and somewhat fondly remembered until Skizz dredged up an actual copy of the original - good lord! We decided to leave out the "Glibby Glop Gloopy" parts and add a riff we stole from Stereolab. We hope it will now become tattood on your subconscious. Play it at your kids.
This song, from Television's utterly great 1978 debut Marquee Moon album, has been a live favorite for us. We had hoped to set up a gig to record this song in particular, but that hasn't happened. So here it is, live-in-the-studio direct to Skizz's 8 track quarter-inch reel to reel machine, and subsequently dumped into Apple GarageBand for further scrubbing and mastering. Yes Joe Stone played all those cool guitar licks (right channel) in one take. That's how the snake got out of its skin.
An unjustifiably obscure pean to 60's obscure pop culture icons, this tune was originally concocted on a "mud-cooled" home tape machine somewhere in England in the early '80's by the Cleaners from Venus. Led by Martin Newell, the Cleaners were making DIY pop gems waaaay back before there were laptop computers or digital mixing programs. Rumor has it that Captain Sensible had a hand in writing this one. After dozens of Cleaners cassettes, Newell went on to make a swell record with Andy Partidge of XTC, and is now poet laureate of Wivenhoe. Illya Kuryakin is still, however, a man of mystery.
Years ago we wrote a song called "Pretty Things", and hip fans were always asking if we were referring to the 60's British group the Pretty Things. We weren't. And we weren't cool enough back then to know how great that band was. To make amends, this month we bring you our version of their psych-pop song "Walking Through My Dreams", which we like a lot. Hope you do too.
Bring your sello-tape. The pinnacle of Echo and the Bunnyism - a loopy classic. Concocted October, 2005 in the basement using Mac's spiffy Garageband software. Yes the horns are real - no canned loops here.
We started off our covers project with this Robyn Hitchcock-penned Soft Boys song. The world needs more songs about queens and pigs. It was one of the first songs the current Jennifers line-up learned, and we still love playing it live. Since it is already perfect, we didn't change it much. Recorded in 2002 in John's basement on 1/4" analog 8-track reel-to-reel. We later re-recorded it for the CD.
