Oh! You Pretty Things…
Performer Magazine premiered a video (and David Bowie song) that Tim Huggins and I recorded recently.
Here’s what I said about the track:
Every February I go to Kansas City for Folk Alliance International. It’s a really special event, and it’s always inspiring but after four days and nights of un-amplified acoustic music you kind of need a palette cleanser.
So for the past two years, on the last night of the festival, my buddy Tim and I have gone late-night to a local studio and recorded a bunch of 70’s pop and rock covers. We only have a handful of hours until dawn to get the takes, so we try to keep it un-fussy: put down the basics live, throw on some extra guitar, sing the vocals, mix the song, go eat breakfast. This year we did “Oh! You Pretty Things” and a swampy version of Badfinger/Nilsson/Mariah Carey staple “Without You.”
By next year we might have enough of these sloppy cover songs to release a whole record, but for now I at least wanted to put this video out there, since Bowie’s passing was still very heavy on our hearts when we went into the studio. It’s a song I’d covered live a few times, but we’d always done it the faithful way, with the drums only coming in on the choruses.
That night Tim got his friend Mike Patrum, who plays with Kerry Livgren, to come and record drums, and I figured if he’s gonna be here, we might as well have him play on the whole song… thus the bigger arrangement.
As for the song itself, the chords kill me. So good. Not sure Bowie gets enough credit for how genius his harmonic changes were. And the lyrics, so bizarre, with the Ubermensch starman stuff amidst the cozy domestic details…
I just watched the preview for Werner Herzog’s “Lo and Behold” and started really obsessing over the obsolescence of mankind. Gotta make way for the Homo Superior!
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