January's Cover Song Of The Month: Above It All

Yes. I know it's February. Some complications got in the way of my finishing on time.

This first cover (with one to come for each month of this year) is a re-recording of The World They Loved To Hate by Cry For Life AKA Crystal Walters. While blindly searching for (Creative Commons) music to play around with at the Internet Archive, I came across two songs that stood out from the rest. One was a song about eating fascists that sounded like fun, but deciphering the lyrics (or writing new ones) would've taken more time than I wanted to spend. The other struck me both with it's sound and a rare sentiment not often found (I think) in pop music. In other words, something I wished I'd written myself.

I simplified the arrangement, approximating what I heard as best as I could and re-arranged a few of the words to make the song more accessable to whatever style of singing I have and went to work on recording. There were some problems reaquainting myself with recording on Linux and then some stuff went wrong at the end. I managed a few mixes (rough as they may be) before that happened and when I got to the end of the month, decided I had enough for now.

I exported the tracks into separate wav files and then FLAC'd them, except for the drum tracks which wouldn't cooperate. Those were ogg'd. I wanted to proved those as well as the (somewhat) finished song.

Uploading then became the problem. ccPublisher kept freezing up after uploading the first track. I had all the files go up together, so I thought maybe it was the size of the upload, but after reducing the number of files (intending to divide them into three or four batches) I still had that problem. I decided that the source files should probably go in a separate batch anyway and attempted those after restarting my computer with success. No go for the mixdowns, though.

After a brief investigation, found out about OurMedia.org and registered there, but their publishing tool is just another version of ccPublisher (uploads go to Archive.org) and I encountered the same problem. Also, I wasn't crazy about the format of the OurMedia publisher. Went back to doing it with ccPublisher and figured maybe the FLAC file is the problem. That made no sense, of course. The source files were almost all FLAC, and I've uploaded that format, at least once before with no problem. But since nothing was making sense anyway, it was worth a try.

Holy shit! It worked. But then I noticed a previous upload showed up as well and when I got home from work today, there were seven separate uploads for Above It All. There may be more coming. I've been at this for a few days. I'll have to take care of that some other time. I need to move on and get this week's song written and pick out this month's cover.

The song can be accessed by clicking the title above or here.

Thankfully, the songwriter has approved of this effort and that clears away one last anxiety.