I set about to rip it apart and reassemble it. First I managed to approximate the bass line on my own keyboard. At this point the inspiration - if you would call it that - to speed it up and turn it into the lo-fi punk thing it became, hit. I stripped the bassline down to a more basic level, cobbled together a bunch of drum loops, and off I went. The most enjoyable part for me was taking Tom's detuned synth lines and playing them on guitar. It's possible I replicated the harmonies he used, but at a certain point in the process I stop thinking about little details like that.
I was happy about the way it was sounding. It came time to put the bridge section in, and another 'inspiration' hit - to transpose my own voice up an octave as a replacement for the choral samples. It came out very strange, particularly because my vocal takes were really gravelly. And by 'strange' I decided I meant 'good'.
I love the word rhythm to this song, and it was a pleasure to record the vocal. I have yet to come upon a truly satisfactory recording technique for my voice, what with being lazy and all, but since this track was absurdly lo-fi I could be content with the result.
I was pleased that Tom enjoyed it. I realized doing covers of Song a Day tunes was a wonderful exercise, as it enabled the discovery of some core to the song that the composer might not have even noticed yet. A perfect example of this is Daniel Berkman's cover of Derek Greenberg's "Naked and Scared"
which in the words of one comment was even 'nakeder' than Derek's original, and really laid out in beautiful, clear detail the purity of the song.
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