I am a mahoosive fan of Elliott Smith and his former band Heatmiser and weirdly until this year I have never mashed or remixed his work. His chords and keys are quite complex, although as I found if you go back to what he cribbed (the Beatles mainly) you can sidestep that. Also until the rise of AI extraction – we had no acapellas or stems. Now the world is our oyster! So here are three Elliott Smith mashups – well Heatmiser really.
WINNER of the Crumplbanger Challenge!
The latest Crumplbanger Challenge set by vixoriadrift is limited to a few artists – one of which is Elliott Smith – so I had to breakl my hiatus to do a few E.S. mashups.
I chose Plainclothes Man cos it’s my favourite Elliott song, I indeed used to dream in black and white for decades (and used to do film photography, developing etc) so, that lyric hit me like a brick, I totally know what he means about gradual decline and photographs not only documenting that but reminding you of happier times. I don’t like looking at my old photos for this reason.
So to make it REALLY hard, I decided to have not one but two tracks with tempo/bar issues (one is pre click track helpfully with no drums in most of it, yeah, classic unequal bar length stuff, weirdly at the same points which helped, also I only have Lite so I can’t do fancy ‘Follow BPM’ so if someone suggests that, they can pay for my copy of Studio :-P), and also some fun extraction gremlins which I kind of tried to make a sort of feature interweaving the vocals…so it sounds less unintentional.
I also had to do a lot of hopefully subtle sneaky re-ordering.for key/sequencing reasons that you might spot if you know the Carpenters track well but hopefully it’s not obvious.
Also I worked out how you beat Elliott’s musical tricks – go to the homework he cribbed 🙂
tbc aka Instamatic – Plainclothes Ticket Man (Elliott Smith / Heatmiser vs The Carpenters)
The latest Crumplbanger Challenge set by vixoriadrift is limited to a few artists – one of which is Elliott Smith – so I had to breakl my hiatus to do a few E.S. mashups.
My favourite Elliott track is Not Half Right which I mashed with Billie Eilish, but my second is Plainclothes Man, partly cos of the ‘I dream in black and white’ line cos I used to do just that for decades…it’s a bit of a cheat cos it’s a Heatmiser track, but he covered it later solo.
In my head this isn’t a massive genre clash, but it’s an era clash and indie vs pop. Not a fan of Ed’s but this does work mood wise. I tried to redirect the purpose of the Ed Sheeran track about his friend to be about my feelings re: Elliott, still gutted he’s gone…and the 747 line and the mashup cover are both a reference to the cover of Mic City Sons album, where this song is from.
tbc aka Instamatic – Autumn Man (Elliott Smith vs Ed Sheeran)
Another one for the Crumplbanger Discord Challenge – (I usually avoid making these melancholic mashes unless I am drunk) emotional mashups – and I made the most depressing mashup EVAH! Go me. It’s about my depression, mixing Billie Eilish & Khalid’s lovely with Elliott Smith’s Half Right (although officially this is the Heatmiser version).
Cheery. This is the sound playing 24/7 in my head though, why I create silly mashups to drown it out.
Image is Mini Dall-E’s ‘idea’ of Eillott and Eilish together. Weirdly even munged like that, it looks like them.
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