I am going to try this little thing out on here, rather than posting my usual hour long playlist, which I think only I listen to anyway, I am going to focus on just one track. That in itself is a bit of a challenge-anyone that has had misfortune of catching me at home, drinking and listening to music, knows ( sorry guys, really I am ) that I get really carried away, telling stories, digging out mad shit and just getting really into it, if you think these hour long playlists are crazy, you aint seen shit yet, and I hope you don’t, for your own sanity. Anyway. so one track. The way I will choose these is at total random, even though I must admit that, the way I geek out about a single usually comes from being fed up of looking at my computer screen and taking a break to play some guitar. So in a way these choices all in a way evolve around my lunch brakes & playing guitar, maybe, maybe not, and the stories that surround the song, memories past and recent. As you can tell I am slightly hung over ( slightly being very positive about it ) and I am rambling again. So I’ll get into the first track now.

Chris Cornell - Seasons.

Chris Cornell is my opinion of the most underrated and talented musicians of our times. In a way I would be happy to leave it at that, seriously. I agree, his most recent solo work as well as that stuff he did with RATM dudes wasn’t my type of thing, at all to be honest. However, if you listen to entire Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog and his early solo work, I don’t see how you could disagree with the above statement. Granted, Kim was an amazing guitar player but Chris wrote most of the songs for Soundgarden, and he is killer guitar player. As a guitar player myself I have always loved the multiple and very unusual tunings Chris uses in his songs. It’s one thing to simple down tune your guitar to get that crunchy sound of it, but Chris, similar to bands like Helmet and Sonic Youth, used a lot of very odd open tunings, and modified them. Same with this tune. It is originally from the “singles” soundtrack and it is a brilliant example of what Chris is good at in terms of guitar playing.

I was working on something exceptionally boring yesterday and this tune came on, and again, I thought to myself, “damn, that is a great mix of songwriting, that weird Indian/Citar drop with the obvious dropped tuning is killing me!” ( I kid you not-these sort of weird offbeat thoughts occur me everytime I hear any song, it’s kind of been driving me crazy these past 15 years ). So, pulled up the guitar tabs of the song and was really weirded out by the tuning. To you non-guitar players out there, this is your standard guitar tuning, high to low: E B G B A E, for this tune, this is tuning was used, again, high to low: C ( down 2 steps ) C ( up 1.5 steps ) C (down 3.5 steps ) C ( down 1 step ) F ( down 2 steps )  F ( up 1 step ).  This is probably the weirdest tuning I have ever used, but let me tell you, it’s amazing. It’s a little hard to get used to at first but I’ve been jamming this since then and it’s fun. Ok, enough of the guitar nerd stuff. If you want to get into it, here is the link to the tabs.

This is a video of Chris jamming this recently in a studio. Apart from maybe Mike Patton, no one can even touch Chris’ voice, his range & clarity is unreal. For the studio recording of this song he actually only used one guitar with some overdubs, but there’s two guitars here, which actually adds to it, also the drumming is different from the studio recording, again, it actually is better here. This is song is so beautifully grunge, in the way that it is just what the early 90s were. It’s hard to explain if you weren’t there but this is it. Let me know what you think of this one.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 13:49 and is filed under music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.