Here’s the third video installment of our set at the Green Turtle. It’s a cover of Hurt, by Nine Inch Nails. Unfortunately, the beginning of the song wasn’t caught by the video so it starts off in the second verse.

Hurt by chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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Here’s a slight change of pace with Amber Scott covering Angel from Montgomery, an old country song written by John Prine in 1971. Amber and myself recorded this live just the other night because Amber felt like singing again after all these years. This is a song we always played well together. Matthew Hundley added some sweet guitar licks that put it all together.

Angel from Montgomery by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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This week’s post is a Christmas mix coming from Tony Biedenkapp. Some time ago he used all the 7″ vinyl that he’d collected over the years and sliced and diced them up using 3 Technic 1200′s, a DJM 600 mixer and sampler.
Happy holidays to all, even if it’s a tad late.

7inchXMAS by AntShaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
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After some of the Beatles covers we did over the early summer, we started playing around with some other covers during our jam sessions. I can’t remember all of the songs we played, but this version of Redemption Song by Bob Marley was one of the recordings that worked out. Please enjoy!

Redemption Song by Bob Marley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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This one is great. We decided to record Neil singing and playing guitar to his favorite cover song he likes to play. It turned out to be amazing. Neil’s voice covers this classic song very well and the Hammond organ fits nicely in the background. Enjoy!

House of the Rising Sun by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Download Cover Band from chilljam.com.
One day, while we were playing in Neil’s loft, I noticed some lyrics on the floor for The Grateful Dead’s Brokedown Palace. I guess someone was jamming on the song with Neil at some point. While Jeremy, Neil and Jim were jamming on something, I decided to pick up the lyrics and just sing along to what they were playing using the lyrics. It worked out well and spurred us into trying some songs by other artists. We didn’t try to play the original song in music, but often, I’d listen to what everyone was playing and just look up the lyrics for something I thought would work on my iPhone.

To download the album:
1 Go to the The Flame Listen :: Album page.
2 Scroll down past the player and you’ll see a link labelled “Download this Album”.
3 Simply click on this link and the album is yours, complete with the album artwork.

High Lonesome, by The Gaslight Anthem, is a personal favorite song of mine and it was really fun to play the song here along with Jim Stuby on banjo. It was the perfect song to have banjo on. Unfortunately, the vocals and the banjo were recorded to the same channel which made it tough for Jeremy to mix down in post production, but it still comes across pretty well.
Gun Street Girl, by Tom Waits, is an interesting one. Bob Peters jammed with us that evening on Banjo and Drums (he plays drums on this particular song). Neil is playing bass here. It was fun to do a different kind of spoken word take on this classic.
Red Rain, by Peter Gabriel, has always been one of my favorite songs. I would probably rank it somewhere in my list of top 5 best songs ever so it was exciting to get to try a different take on it. When reading through the lyrics, Red Rain is a pretty intense piece and it was interesting giving it a more aggressive feel in our version of it here.
Looks Like Rain, by The Grateful Dead was a fun song to do. Although our version of Brokedown Palace didn’t survive well in the recording, we did do several other Grateful Dead songs. Now, I have to admit that Looks Like Rain is not one of my favorite overall of their songs, but the lyrics sounded like they fit the feel that the guys were playing here.
Split Open and Melt, by Phish, has some really crazy effects on my voice. It was fun to play around with some effects again and do a song like this in a really strange surreal manner. It feels like the song is melting as your listening to it.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest!

Cover Band by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
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Blackbird – An a cappella cover of the Beatles song by chilljam.com
Continuing on our Beatles kick, we’ve got an a cappella cover of the Beatles song Blackbird. Last weekend, we didn’t get together to jam as Jeremy is out of town. However, I ended up not being able to sleep later that night and decided to work on a version of Blackbird that we were toying with several weeks ago while hanging out on my deck.

When we were hanging out, Neil and Jeremy were playing acoustic guitars and playing around with different ways of playing the song based on the original song’s guitar line. I’ve honestly not heard the song in many years, so I think I was actually throwing them off while they were trying to figure it out.
However, when we were jamming on it, it felt like a song that would naturally translate to an a cappella performance. The melody in the lyrics carries the song in an easy way so, I just decided to lay down a track for fun.
Also, last week was my wedding anniversary and my wife and I went out to dinner. At dinner, there happened to be a decent bluegrass band playing and I was really into the way the band carried their four part harmonies. So I decided to try working out a four part harmony to this song for fun as well. I sang through the song in entirety 4 times, each time in different pitches. Afterwards, I mixed it down so to make use of the harmony lines better in contrast to the single voice lines.
Anyways, this is the result.

Original song written by Lennon/McCartney.

Blackbird by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Imagine – A cover of the John Lennon song by chilljam.com
Following the Beatles cover from last week, we’re releasing our cover of John Lennon’s song, Imagine this week. This song was played during the same outdoor session as last week’s version of Strawberry Fields Forever, but Imagine was played earlier on in the session. Actually, you can hear the wood crackling quite a bit in the background of this recording as it was still pretty wet at the time and hadn’t yet settled in for the quiet burn.

This song was a bit of a surprise to me. Jeremy just started playing the keyboard line, mostly to warm up and just jam on it by himself a bit as the rest of us were still setting up. I thought it’d be fun to try so I looked up the lyrics real quick on my iPhone and just started singing it. I probably hadn’t heard the song in 10 years but it felt pretty natural singing the lines, which just goes to show how amazing Lennon’s songwriting is.

Original song written by John Lennon.

Imagine by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
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A mostly acoustic version of Strawberry Fields Forever played live outdoors.
A couple of weeks ago, we did a little jam set on Neil’s back patio. It was nice relaxing scene with a little chiminea burning and some tiki torches as our only sources of light in the darkening summer evening. I played Neil’s dreadnaught acoustic guitar and sang, Neil was playing an assortment of percussion instruments and Jeremy was playing through a little Fender bass practice amp I bought years ago. The recordings were done through a single omnidirectional microphone on the picnic table into my Macbook Pro.
Surprisingly, this setup yielded quite a few songs that sounded pretty solid on the recordings and we’ll be releasing those in the coming weeks.
One of these recordings was a version of Strawberry Fields Forever, by the Beatles.

During the recording of Cover Band, we actively worked to take songs that we enjoyed but play them in a way that we thought significantly differed from the original versions. It was fun to take lyrical ideas from songs we liked and set them in a different environment, perhaps even relaying some different ideas from what the original versions represented.
However, during the last couple of weeks, we’ve worked more on playing some covers in a more recognizable method, utilizing the original artists’ intended melodies and structures. However, we still want to play the songs as ourselves, in our own way, rather than simply mimicking the work of the originals.
This version of Strawberry Fields Forever is one of the results of these attempts.

Original song written by Lennon/McCartney.

Strawberry Fields Forever by chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
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Split Open and Melt is a goofy use of Phish’s lyrics from the song of the same name. I thought it was fun to play around with the huge flange effect that was found on our mixing board and drastically change pitches through it so that it sounded like my voice was melting at times.