Lauren Banjo - "Everybody Knows You're Crying"

Mar 27 2019 · 4:00 PM

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Welcome to another Wodnesdæg, friends, eaxlgestealna, shoulder companions, wherein I present yet another Song for Odin™ in the form of a youtube video link and attach some words thereto. https://youtu.be/5ng4pif-_Sk What we have today is a recording from our dear friend and confidante, @laurenbanjo, a swell interpretation of the song "Everybody Knows Your Crying" (from the 2004 MTX album Yesterday Rules.) This acoustic arrangement slows the pace to a less jaunty tempo, arguably more apt considering the subject matter. There are some subtle shifts in the chord voicings that serve the melodic content quite well, and some great vox too. It really gets the song across. Well done, Banjo! It's the "getting the song across" that matters most, and though theoretically that shouldn't be too much trouble when you start with a good "text" it is actually fairly elusive in practice. You can do everything right and still not manage to make even a great song land effectively. I like our pseudo-Byrds arrangement of the song a lot, though I have criticisms of it sonically (I wanted the guitars to chime more and sound bigger.) But sometimes it takes hearing someone else's take on a song to bring home what's great about it. This is a song I'd rather taken for granted, to be quite honest. We used to play it, pretty much in every set on the Yesterday Rules tour as I remember, but never since; and I used to do it solo from time to time, but I never really felt it connecting, and I don't think I've done it in years and years. I don't know why. Anyhow, I wouldn't necessarily have thought of it if asked to list, say, my five best songs. But being compelled to revisit it now, if I do say it myself, it's really pretty great, probably one of the best I've come up with ever, and it probably should be on that list for what it's worth. One goal in lyric-writing that I've had ever since I noticed it as a "thing" is to make the delivery sound conversational while simultaneously doing all the compositional "poetics" things lyrics need to do (rhyme, scan, cohere, develop, set up and deliver punchlines, etc.) It's way harder than you think, which is why so many songs out there (including some of mine I won't lie) require the singer to emphasize the wrong syllables and otherwise mangle the delivery to make it all fit. I spent a whole lot of time and frustrated effort to make it happen on this song. It was begun in the pre-Alcatraz era (there's an early, much less lyrically-together version of it recorded on the four track cassette machine among other Show Business Is My Life and Alcatraz numbers.) It was years before it reached this form. But, you know, it worked out in the end. One thing I learned, the hard way, is not to release songs before they're ready to be hatched. That can take awhile. It's tedious when writers explain their songs, and I don't want to do that. A song good enough to warrant such explication should be good enough not to need it. But it's a song about depression, one of several I've written, and probably the best of them. It's a character study, but the "you" in it is ambiguous: it's one of those where the "you" could be another person, addressed in a spirit of empathy, or it could be the narrator addressing himself in the mirror. It doesn't matter all that much which it is, and don't know for sure which. A lot of my songs are like that. The figure that ends verses and choruses, the melodic line that goes with "no one ever really cares," is a kind of punctuation, sung on the verses but not on the choruses -- that's a neat trick that glues the song together. I think the bridge is one the best I've ever managed. And I still find the double-entendre of "you can't escape the conclusion, though you don't like what it was" immensely satisfying even after all these years. But enough blowing my own horn, so to speak. I'm kind of rediscovering this song, is all. Thanks for bearing with me through it, and thanks, most especially to L. Banjo for presenting me with an occasion upon which to conduct said rediscovery. She really brought it back to life for me! The original recording, by the way, is here: https://youtu.be/A4rBN4HUSiw Like, share, subscribe, praise Odin, all that good stuff. #music #songs #mtxforever #laurenbanjo #minds

Lauren Banjo - "Everybody Knows You're Crying"

Our friend Lauren with a swell cover of the MTX song (from the Yesterday Rules album.) "Minor secrets" will be here. Original: https://youtu.be/A4rBN4HUSiw medium: https://medium.com/@drankf/latest minds: https://www.minds.com/frankportman twitter: https://twitter.com/mtxforever instagram: h...

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This is informative. I'm interested in that "canary" thing but hesitant because things are working pretty well for me as it stands (the links work - that's been my main issue since the beginning) and I'm reluctant to mess things up and possibly upset the precarious balance by plunging into a beta-test. It's not clear to me from the description if you can go back to "vanilla" after you've opted in. Still, maybe I'll try it if I get drunk enough some time. UPDATE: a nice person in the comments to article informed me that you can indeed go back to vanilla - there's a "turn off" button when you're in. Sounds good, I"m gonna try it.

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Lauren Banjo - "Everybody Knows You're Crying"

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