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.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

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.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

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.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.