'Handle With Care' (Home-Recording)

Day 2 of the November Celebration:

Back in 2008 I was recording very quietly. My oldest daughter was two then, so when she was finally tucked into bed I was able to switch on the multi-tracker and do some recording in the evening again. Still, I couldn't do anything really loud, because she was asleep in the room next door ...

This is the main explanation why I decided to turn this rather exuberant Traveling Wilburys hit into a slow and ponderous acoustic grumble.

That being said, I was quite pleased with the result, as it got rid of the many-cooks novelty-mood of the original (which happily veers from George Harrison's sweet-voiced but biting sarcasm, to Roy Orbison's operatic pathos, to Dylan and Petty's sand-papery lustfulness), and replaced it with an all-encompassing gravitas. Yeah yeah ...

  Handle With Care by Ymaginatif

'Child Of Nature' / 'Here Comes The Sun' (Home-Recordings)

This month I've been going back and forth between angry protest rock and sweet Beatles-covers. Tossing a coin on which ones to 'entertain' you with (first), the choice fell on the Beatles-covers. Lucky you! Maybe because there has been a lot of sunshine over the weekend? ...

Anyway - time for a thematic 'virtual single', I thought. Or afterthought, it was. But is somehow seemed to fit ...

A. Child of Nature (Lennon)

Or 'Jealous Guy', as most of you might know it. I started to record this song as 'Jealous Guy', but these 'great classic' compositions are always a bit daunting to pull off. I found that once I decided to re-instate John Lennon's original 1968 lyrics, suddenly things were a whole lot easier: now it made sense to have a sitar in the arrangement and to replace the whistle-solo with a vintage synth sound. At least, that's what I thought.

The vocal is way too high for me, but as usual, I did't let that stop me ...

B. Here Comes The Sun (Harrison)

Finding that I was able to play the acoustic guitar riff of this one (after 15 years of looking for it, haha), I gave it a quick recording. The sound turned out quite nicely (despite the barking dogs outside and the crying daughter in the background), so taking my cue from the original Beatles arrangement (not trying to copying it, but thinking of this as a quiet acoustic song with some surprisingly robust band-backing), I added drums, bass, percussion and synth.

Let's see whether you can spot the dogs and the daughter!