Saturday, February 26, 2011

Don't stop... writing the plurals of words however you want to write them. Reach for those stars! (Awesome Covers of Already Awesome Songs.)

When I got up this morning and had to get the Babies! ready for a rare Saturday visit from their therapists -- we call them their "friends" and encourage them to be excited -- I opted to try to get Mr F pumped up for what's essentially a day of being pestered by singing about his day-to-come, to the tune of Don't Stop Believing. The lyrics were:

Just a little guy
Has to get up early, why?
Friends are coming here to play
So let's get up.


Sweet, right? It's like I channeled Steve Perry. But that got me in the mood to hear "Don't Stop Believing", which I think might actually be the best song ever... I haven't made up my mind yet... only I didn't want to hear the original, I wanted to hear covers of the original. And, as you'd expect, there were covers a-plenty.

I began with what I knew would be out there: A ukulele version of the song. There's tons of those; America is filled with ukulele players, judging by Youtube. This was the best of them:



Then I went for classic Petra Haden, who, prior to today, had the absolute best cover of Don't Stop Believing I've ever heard:



And I'm not including Glee's cover in this list because I'm sort of Glee-d out. Petra Haden's cover is incredible, though, and I thought it'd never be topped except that it was bested -- [SPOILER ALERT!] twice. First by this, which starts out rough but stick with it:



And then, by this next video, which I'll introduce by saying that I wanted to see if it was possible that someone had covered this song on the harp, and it's not only possible, but phenomenal:



I played that about four or five times, with the results being that I was pumped up to clean up the house, put Batman shorts and a pirate shirt on Mr F, get Mr Bunches into his Spider-Man shirt, mop the floor, and even vacuum. This song is awesome, in whatever version it takes.

Yes, whatever version:




In conclusion, I'd like to note this: When I first started writing this post, I had the song as Don't Stop Believin', but I thought "that must be wrong," even though it's the way I always wrote the title to the song and I've always believed that was the title. I changed it because there's lots of things I always do and have always believed even though I know they're wrong, like how I write the plural of nacho -- I write it nachoes even though I know that's wrong because it looks right. So I just write nachoes that way and ignore the fact that it's wrong, because who cares? It's not like I use it in formal writing:

Dear Supreme Court and/or Pope: Would you like to come over for the Oscars? We're serving nachoes, if that's a plus. Signed, me.

I don't do that. I'd probably just call them.

But when I started posting this, I thought "It's probably not called Don't Stop Believin' " so I'd better not post it that way, and I wrote believing instead, only to then actually go google it and find out I was wrong about being wrong, or that I'd actually been right when I thought I was wrong, or however you want to say it, but I'm too lazy to go back and change it.

The moral of the story is: Now I'm kind of hungry for nachoes.

1 comment:

Michael Offutt, Phantom Reader said...

You know, Home Simpson singing this song just automatically started playing when I visited this page and I had my volume up. It kind of startled me as I was like...wtf! I came to your page as a result of the blog post you left on Rogue Mutt's blog. I too was a fan of the Prydain chronicles (and still am). Lloyd Alexander was a great writer...very inspirational.