March 16, 2009

Cover Your Monkey! Revisited

For those that don't know, Cover Your Monkey! was the album I created back in 2003 about the time I was hitting the road, car-touring the United States. I didn't own anything at all during this time and the production process was very difficult and very limited so I thought I should re-issue the album digitally now.

You can request copies of the album via email or make your own from the information presented here.

My concept for Cover Your Monkey! was to show how all songs come around again in different formats and to show that great song-writers are also great song borrowers. At the time, on my website I published an accompanying paper classifying all the various types of covers. In my memory, this document was an excellent well-thought out dissertation worthy of a PhD, but in reality it may have been only a napkin doodle. If anyone has a copy of that column, I would be willing to purchase it at great personal expense.

As I was saying, Cover Your Monkey! was a study of the cover song, showing how some artists do covers and then write something which in turn gets covered. You can see that the album is Jimi Hendrix heavy, showing what I was in to during that period. The idea was to have one CD of originals and a second CD of covers. All the covers are, in my opinion, better than the originals. No song made it on the album without being an improvement upon the original or at least a drastically different take on the original (such as with the Cure, who could improve on Purple Haze?).

Here is the song list. Enjoy.