Covers!

I've got a couple of projects coming up and some philosophies I've been considering of late and it's led me down a path I hadn't planned on going down at this time - coming up with some covers to play. 

It's likely that I have a 45 minute gig coming up this summer and it's probably going to be in a more family friendly environment. Which means my repeated and persistent use of the F-word is probably best to be avoided. In a few of my songs, I've got good replacements I can make. For example in Beef Dylan, I can replace "I don't give a fuck" with "But I think you suck". The joke persists. But for some of my songs like Goodbye 5G or Fucking Fridge... replacing lyrics kinda kills the joke. 

Thanks to all of my hard work last month during FAWM, not to mention all the writing I did before that, I have a lot of originals I can play. But it's no secret that a long set of originals to an uninitiated audience can be tiring. You've gotta put something familliar in there to keep their attention. 

So for all those reasons and more, I've decided to extend my current setlist (that's about 20 minutes long), to 45 minutes using the new stuff I've written and then replace the more objectionable songs with covers. 

But picking covers hasn't proven to be as easy as I expected. I want to keep my songs within the comedy genre so that obviously narrows the options significantly. Further complicating matters is the fact that not every song is going to be something I can do. Duos like Tenacious D or Flight of the Conchords write songs that are for duos to perform. Others are maybe too much of a stretch genre-wise or are just so niche that they really don't provide the familliarity I'm hoping to get out of them. And of course, about 90% of the comedy songs out there swear just as much as I do - so they don't make much progress. 

So all those things considered, I've spent the last couple of days with guitar in hand plonking through songs trying to decide what I should cover. And I think I've come up with  some stuff that speaks to my influences, the audience I'll be playing to and will fit with the rest of the songs I'm going to do. Let's see what my starting list looks like!

• Walmart - Jesse Welles - I've made no secret that I've taken a lot of inspiration for this project from Jesse so I just had to do one of his songs. This one will need a few words switched out - it needs censoring too. But it's just so funny and is less topical than his usual stuff so I'm confident it'll still be good in July.
• Be My Yoko Ono - Barenaked Ladies - I had to do a BNL track off their album Gordon, it's such a strong early influence for me. This was the only one I thought I could do solo and pull off nicely. But I'd prefer to do $1,000,000.
• All By Myself - Green Day/Tre Cool - this might be the first one to get dropped. The subject matter isn't exactly #MeToo friendly. But it's one I've known how to play almost as long as I've played guitar and most people my age will know it. 
• Terriers - Kids in the Hall/Bruce McCullough - I could do a few of his songs, but this one is really fun, matches some of the other subjects I sing about and another strong influence on the stuff I do. 
• Galaxy Song - Monty Python/Eric Idle - Big time early influence and the song I'm going to straight replace Goodbye 5G with. They come from the same place. Plus I think I can do a fun kazoo bit to replace the orchestral part in the bridge.
• It's Hard to be Humble - Mac Davis - A song my Dad would play all the time growing up. Plus I've got another song that borrows from this musically so it fits the work I'm doing. 

While I haven't made much effort to do covers in this project, I am a bit excited to tackle a few. I think it will help with my own comedic writing and should hep bring people into my world a bit. Plus it help expand my setlist. It's going to help me get to the point where I can play a full evening gig. 

What are some fun covers you can think of that I should take a look at?