Tag Archives: recording music

blog news, music, YouTube

Could I be a v-logger? Maybe. Do I want to be one? Not particularly…

Yesterday, we got more snow, and I expect that today, it will all melt. We’re expecting warmer temperatures that will dissolve the snow from yesterday, along with the snow that didn’t melt last week. This weather is more like what we had in Jettingen, circa 2014-15. I remember then, we had snow that hung around for weeks and looked horrible, because it was all dirty and covered in dog pee.

We moved up here in late 2018, but until this year, we’ve had little snow. I think there was a good storm last year, but I don’t remember it being even as much as what we had last week. I like snow fine, as long as I don’t have to go out in it. But sometimes, I get tired of it, too.

I mentioned yesterday that I was feeling a little worried, depressed, and nutty, which isn’t too abnormal at this time of year for me, or for a lot of other people. After I took a nap, I decided that maybe it would be good to record some music. When I saw that Karaoke-Version.com had just released a karaoke version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” by James Taylor and Natalie Cole, I decided I had to try it.

I know not everyone likes the song, mainly because people today think it glorifies date rape. Well, I’m here to tell you that glorifying date rape and ignoring consent for sex is not what was intended when the song was written. It was meant to be a cute parlor song for ending the evening, not a song about sexual consent or lack thereof. But, leave it to today’s social justice warriors to cancel something they don’t really understand.

When “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was written by Frank Loesser, no one was thinking about spiking beverages with roofies. People were worried about their reputations among friends and family members. Those who had the hots for each other had to think of respectable ways to get around the rules regarding the mores of the time. Hence the excuse that it’s “too cold” for the lady to go home… It has nothing at all to do with being “rapey”.

In any case, I didn’t even think James and Natalie had that much chemistry in their version of the duet. However, I am very familiar with their version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, and Karaoke-Version had a good rendition of it with a competent male singer doing James’s part. So I gave it a whirl. Below is the end result.

I think it turned out okay, if I do say so myself…

This morning, I woke up to the below comment…

“Great cover. I especially liked the facial expressions. Can you tell us what life is like in Germany? Maybe just little slice of life moments that intro us to your next song?”

I had to laugh at this comment, because obviously this guy doesn’t know about my blogs. If he really wants to know about my life in Germany, he can hit the motherlode on WordPress. He’d probably learn a lot more than he even wants to know. I even put the address of my blog on the channel. And while I appreciate both the compliment, and the time he took to comment on my cover, I really just go to YouTube to sing. I’m not there to talk much… although I suppose I could. I just don’t see the point, because most of my videos aren’t monetized. I do occasionally put up non musical videos, but most of the stuff I do for YouTube is copyrighted by someone else. And I sing on YouTube because I enjoy making music. I write here because I enjoy writing.

I also wonder why people feel like they need to offer unsolicited advice to other people on how they do things. I don’t mind when people make song suggestions, although I can’t promise I can always deliver. Sometimes the song doesn’t work for my voice. Sometimes I don’t like the lyrics. That happened to me once on SingSnap. Some guy wanted me to sing lyrics on a song he’d written, but it was a song about a woman who was addressing a homewrecking hussy. Since I am a second wife who has been falsely accused of being a homewrecker, that song didn’t sit right with me.

La Twat told her kids that Bill cheated on her with me. That’s NOT the truth. In fact, the opposite is true. She cheated on Bill… and she cheated with Bill on her first ex husband. So, generally speaking, I don’t want to do songs about homewrecking hussies. There are other topics that are off limits, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head right now.

But anyway, although I can think of other songs James Taylor has done that I’ve liked better, I decided to do his version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, because that song has become a Christmas staple, even though it’s not really a Christmas song. And yesterday, we had snow, which is not so normal in Germany anymore. After I uploaded that song, I decided to do another… Below is my take on Ella Fitzgerald’s version of “I Get a Kick Out of You.” I think it turned out okay, although I’d rather do Dinah Washington’s version, which is a little more upbeat and has a great horn solo. But there are no backing tracks available for Dinah’s version yet, so I was stuck with Ella’s.

I had to learn the first part of this, since I’d never heard it before…

I physically felt a lot better after I did these songs, by the way… even though it took forever to get them uploaded. Our Internet has been very slow lately.

I was doing well until this morning, when I woke up to answer the call of nature, and checked the Internet. There, I was confronted with a scary YouTube video about pancreatic cancer. I do have some of the symptoms, but my guess is that I have gallstones. I think that because if I had cancer, I’d probably be dead by now. Or, at least I’d be a lot sicker than I am. Anyway… sooner or later, I’m probably going to have to deal with this problem. Or, it will deal with me… 😀

I don’t want to be a v-logger. I don’t want to ruin the vibe of my YouTube channel by speaking. Because when I talk, I tend to say way too much. My “slice of life” in Germany quips would probably not be lighthearted and jolly anecdotes that make people feel good. I really think I’m better off just singing. And if you want to know more about me than that, you can always read my blog… and get a lot more than you ever bargained for.

I’ll tell you something else… when I make recordings, I tend to focus a lot on making the recording and not messing up. If I have to talk, too, then the song part will be less “perfect”. I know perfection generally isn’t possible, but I like to get as close to it as I can.

This all being said, I won’t necessarily rule out the guy’s suggestion. I never thought I’d actually appear in my videos, and yet, here I am. It took awhile before I felt confident enough to be on camera, but now it’s no big deal. And I mainly go on camera now, because it’s easier than making videos with photos, and people tend to watch the videos I’m actually in. So, I guess I’m not ugly to look at… in spite of drive-by assholes who occasionally drop by with mean spirited comments.

Well, yesterday, we put a new feather topper on our bed, so I may need to adjourn so I can enjoy it some more, having risen at 4:00 AM. Gonna practice my guitar and get on with the day. Perhaps I’ll be back tomorrow.

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Bill, complaints, modern problems, music, rants

It’s already been kind of an exasperating day…

Like many good children coming of age in the South in the 70s and 80s, I was well-acquainted with the corny hillbilly variety show, Hee Haw, from an early age. This morning, I am thinking of Kenny Rogers’ ex-wife, Marianne Gordon, who starred on that show in the 80s, as a southern belle who regaled everyone with stories about her fictitious daddy, “The Colonel”. She always started her skits off by saying, “It’s been an exasperating day.” That’s kind of how I feel today.

I have to admit, I liked this show. It’s less toxic than ANTM is.

It started with washing the sheets… always a pain in the ass, but especially when I also wash the duvet covers. We also decided to rotate the mattress, to redistribute the lumps in the mattress. My lower back was hurting, so I wasn’t much help. Bill got it turned on his own. Then, I realized the issue probably isn’t the mattress as much as it is the feather topper. It either needs to be replaced, or we need to get used to sleeping without it. Really, we need a new mattress, but it’s not so easy to get an American king sized mattress in Germany.

Then, once I got that mess straightened out, I had to wrestle the duvet into the duvet cover, which is quite an annoying task with a king sized duvet. I managed to do it without breaking out in too much of a sweat.

I sat down to write this morning’s blog post, but then got sidetracked by my music library. A few months ago, I replaced my old computer, but not all of my music moved over on the cloud. Consequently, I’ve got some “greyed out” files on my new computer. I end up having to manually move the music by using an external drive. The files don’t always successfully make it on the external drive, so I have to do it again. It’s a hassle, but worth it to me, because I love my music collection that much. I think I spent about an hour on that today, and I’m not even done with the task. Every day, I move more files, and it seems like the job is never ending.

I finally had to quit moving files, because I was getting so frustrated. It is kind of satisfying to see the greyed out files turn black, though.

I recorded a couple of new songs yesterday. One song went off pretty much perfectly. The other one was a real pain to get right. It’s not actually as perfect as I’d like it to be, but I was determined to get it up yesterday, so I settled for less. I got a comment from someone who thought it was my equipment that caused the issue, but no… it was a psychological issue. You know how, when you try to do something and you mess up, you kind of psych yourself out when you try again? That was me when I was trying to record “All I Have”. I did it nine years ago and it turned out just about perfectly, but no one ever hits that video because it has photos instead of me on camera. Nine years ago, no one watched my channel. Now, I have more people who pay attention to it.

Oh well. Maybe I’ll try again in nine years.

Last night, I found out that a British guy I met in 2011, while on a SeaDream cruise, is going to be joining Bill and me next month on our Regent cruise. He and his wife hung out with us on that cruise and we kept in touch for awhile, but then drifted apart. Looks like we’ll be seeing each other again. What are the odds?

Actually, that kind of stuff happens to me a lot. I have a knack for running into people I either used to know, or who know people I know. Here’s an example. Back in the late 1990s, I waited tables at a nice restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia. One day, I waited on a couple with Irish accents. I asked them where they were from, and they said they came from Belfast. I told them I had a friend from there who lived in Newtownards (a suburb). We worked at a tiny Presbyterian church camp in the summer of 1994, then we traveled through Europe with his now wife, who’d also worked at the camp. The couple said, “Was your friend’s name Chris Sheals?”

Sure enough, it was… and it turned out he was their next door neighbor. What are the odds? There are lots of restaurants in Williamsburg, and plenty of waiters. Somehow, they found their way to my section.

Another time, a friend and I crashed at a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer’s apartment in Sofia, Bulgaria for about a week. When we got back to the States, I went to the Peace Corps office in Washington, DC to do some career networking. There wasn’t an event going on, or anything. I just went there on a whim. Sure enough, I ran into that guy whose apartment we crashed in Bulgaria… he was from New York and had come to the office for the same reasons I did. Again, totally unplanned…

And, here’s a final example. In the spring of 1999, I went to the Peace Corps office in DC again, that time with a friend I knew from Peace Corps/Armenia. I had planned to meet that friend. We went into the office and ran into another person from our group, Matt Jensen. And it’s funny that I’m writing this today, because Matt died two years ago in Brooklyn, when someone ran into him and left him for dead. I’ve written about Matt before… and that was the last time I saw him, on that day in the Peace Corps office, completely by chance. Incidentally, we’re still waiting for justice regarding Matt’s death. The wheels of justice are moving way too slow.

Those are just a few examples I can think of offhand of my running into people, but it actually seems to happen to me a lot. I run into people, or find out I know someone another person knows… or I end up connecting them with someone else who has a connection. It seems to be one of my special and more memorable traits. So I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised to be bumping into someone I met years ago on another cruise… My world seems to be particularly small. 😉

Even meeting Bill was kind of like that. We met in a chat room in 1999. In 2001, before we met in person, he went to a convention in Little Rock, Arkansas… where he ran into my aunt’s brother, Ralph. Ralph was a member of the Kansas National Guard, while Bill was in the Arkansas Guard. But Bill wasn’t with the Arkansas people, because he was federalized. Ralph was in the Kansas Guard, but he lives in Virginia… Sure enough, they bumped into each other, and chatted. Later, Ralph told me he’d met my “boyfriend”. I laughed and said he wasn’t my boyfriend. We hadn’t even met in person at that point. Ralph said, “Oh, trust me, he’s your boyfriend. And don’t worry. He’s okay.”

I was nervous about meeting Bill, since we met online. Ralph also had the benefit of being a former Virginia State Trooper, which made him a pretty good judge of character. Twenty years later, you can see that Ralph was right that Bill is “okay”. And I guess he WAS my boyfriend, after all.

Well… I guess I should end this post. I am feeling calmer now, so I guess I’ll practice guitar and take Noyzi for a walk, then maybe make another video, or finish reading my freakin’ book. Later, y’all.

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