[Editor’s note: Ball of Wax 67 is out now! And today, Bandcamp Friday, is a great day to buy it, and/or a ticket to the Ball of Wax 67 release show on March 12th! You can do it all right here.]
Longtime friend of Ball of Wax Seth Howard is back with a little something different this go-round. “Ever Given (Space Cowboy Version)” is, as the title suggests, a new version – a “radical reworking,” in Seth’s words – of the song “Ever Given,” which was included on his lovely Uneven Bars EP, released last fall. In addition to his obvious skill as a songwriter and singer, I know Seth primarily as a supremely talented guitarist, so it’s fascinating to hear him put the guitar down and rework this song entirely from the ground up as a spacey, tripped-out electro jam. The lyrics and melody (and chords, I presume), are all the same, but everything else is completely new. And it works! Lo-fi, delay-heavy drum machines keep the relaxed beat going, tinkling and pulsing synths phase in and out delightfully. I love this idea of covering one’s own work and bringing a completely different approach to it, and I kind of want to hear a whole album of Seth doing this to his (or other people’s?) songs.
Seth will play as part of the Ball of Wax 67 release show on March 12th, but I’m pretty sure he’ll be leaving the synths at home in favor of guitars, which is always a delight as well. Join us!
Thanks for the lovely writeup. There *is* guitar on this, but it’s been chopped up, copied, pasted, reversed, and heavily filtered.
As for the chords, this whole project came about when I was playing around with what I thought was a “new” chord progression. After sitting with it a bit I realized it was just the Ever Given chords in different voicings. Rather than toss the whole idea out I decided to try what I’d always wanted to and build a recording around mangling a guitar performance.
Having an existing song structure to hang it all on really helped. One of my favorite previous experiments was my cover of Johanna Kunin’s Mobius Waves for BoW #4 for the same reason.
Yes, the bleep and bloops will stay at home on the 12th, but I have something special planned that’s more… human.