Songs for Saturday: Band Practice

[mdlbear]

We took advantage of the fact that N and her kids are up at this end of the household for Thanksgiving to get in some practice. Mostly this consisted of songs we are working on harmonies for; in addition the idea is to go down to Everett tomorrow and sing for Colleen in her hotel hospital room. Fortunately there's a lot of overlap. I'm not entirely sure of the order, but we worked on:

• "The Mary Ellen Carter" by Stan Rogers. (If you remember, this was the subject of last week's Songs for Saturday.)
• "The October Country" by me and N. It's about, well... growing up and growing older, I suppose.
• Ship of Stone by Don Simpson. It's loosely based on Riding the Torch by Norman Spinrad.
• "Lord of the Buffalo" by Dave Carter. (here, on YouTube)
• "Gentle Arms of Eden", also by Dave Carter.

There's a story about "Gentle Arms of Eden". Back in 2009, at Consonance, I was in two different groups, Tres Gique and Tempered Glass, which had consecutive concerts at Consonance. We also had a problem -- we wanted to move a song out of the second set so that Tres Gique's bass player wouldn't have to come back on stage during the second concert for that one song. N thought for a little while and pulled up a set of lyrics and chords from some website or other, and asked if I thought I could play guitar on it. I looked at it -- it's in G -- and said yes. I spent the next 20 minutes running through it with N before going on stage for the Tres Gique concert; we sent Tres Gique's drummer down to the lobby to print it out.

We got the printed lead sheet about half a minute before going on stage for the Tempered Glass set, and pretty much nailed it.

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Comments

[madfilkentist]

I'd never known what "Ship of Stone" is based on, if anything. It obviously has a lot more background than it makes explicit, which is what makes the song interesting.

[mdlbear]

The song stands on its own very well; I don't think the book adds much, if anything. "Loosely inspired by" would have been more accurate.