Good Times (Times Two)
My friend Bruce Golden once told me that “a good song can stand a good jumping up and down on.”
I like that. And I believe it.
(continued below)
For me, a song is an elastic thing that can be arranged and performed in multiple ways. I’ve always felt the best ones could be communicated with a single instrument or with elaborate orchestration.
Genres? We don’t need no stinking genres.
A song should be able to stand on its own two … er, feet? It shouldn’t be tied to a singular style. Country songs can make good rockers; rockers can be good folks songs. Traditional blues songs have been turned into amazing jazz pieces.
As I like to say, we’re all playing the same three chords, so who cares what you call it?
A few years ago, Susan and I decided we wanted to play some of our songs in a different setting from the Tim Lee 3. So we called on our friends, cellist Cecelia Miller and multi-instrumentalist Greg Horne, and formed a loose collaborative we called the Quake Orphans to play quieter (usually slower) versions of our material.
It was a lot of fun and turned out to be a successful experiment. By successful, I mean it was a lot of fun.
For this week’s Friday Freeload, we’re offering two versions of the same song: the TL3’s version of “Good Times” from Raucous Americanus and the Quake Orphans’ version from the limited-edition EP we released as a premium for pre-ordering “Devil’s Rope” in 2013.
The original version was recorded at Wavelab Studios in Tucson by Chris Schultz and mixed by Craig Schumacher and features our good friend Winston Watson on drums. The ’Orphans take was recorded live by Greg on a Sunday afternoon at the Parlor music store in downtown Knoxville. Greg also mixed it.
These versions are not as drastically different as some of the others we recorded for the EP, but they give some indication the kind of thing I’m talking about here.
Hope you dig ’em.
— TL