Welcome to A Sea of Heroes!
This is my tribute to the bands and artists who have been an inspiration during the years and have helped to shape the aura around the sound of The Fisherman & The Sea. This is by far not everyone though. I think my initial list of acts to cover was something like 50-60 names long. Obviously I had to narrow that number down, but let's just say that there's a distinct possibility for a "Season 2 and 3" if you all take a liking to these covers. This first "season" is going to be 14 songs long plus a few bonuses, I hope. There's a lot of crazy and funny stuff to look forward to, but I wanted to start things off on a very small and intimate scale and build from there. Slow & easy, eh?
Also, a small (obvious) disclaimer: I don't own the rights to any of these songs, but I'm also not releasing them anywhere else but Youtube. Should that change, I'll try to get permission from the rightholders to release them properly. Also, if my cover suddenly disappears from Youtube, that'll be because of the wishes of the rightholders which I'm more than happy to comply with.
A few words about my process and why these songs don't sound exactly like the originals:
HI wanted the songs to be true troubadour covers in the same sense in which songs were passed on from musician to musician in the Middle Ages before notation and certainly records. The troubadours back then taught eachother the songs or played it by ear. That way every song sounded like the artist himself despite it being a commonly known folk song.
So I wanted to apply the same philosophy to my covers, and the way I did that was to simply not listen to the songs I decided to cover and just play it by ear, no matter if I'd last heard the song ten years ago or just last week. What I quickly realized was that with every song there was always some detail that I just couldn't remember how to do, but I embraced that fact and just came up with something of my own for that part. I'm awful at remembering lyrics, so yeah, those I did look at, but all the songs I've covered here - I still haven't listened to the originals again after deciding to do them. I imagine it'll be really funny and fresh to hear them again after having been absorbed by my own versions for such a long time!
Listen Up (Oasis Cover)
Noel and Liam Gallagher were my absolute childhood heroes, full stop. And Noel was the reason I picked up a guitar in the first place. I'd listened to some dance and punk records and my father's Beatles albums before but when I discovered Oasis I became obsessed with music. I collected every single thing they'd released from a plethora of record shops (I know, good old days!) and was blown away - as so many others were - how much good music there was beside the album tracks, hidden on b-sides of their singles. Listen Up was one of those songs. It's a b-side on the 'Cigarettes & Alcohol' single along with another total a-side (for me) 'Fade Away' and one of the coolest covers of 'I Am The Walrus' that I've ever heard.
Now 'Listen Up' is a song that I haven't heard in ten, maybe fifteen years, but something that's such an integral part of your childhood you just don't forget. In this case I didn't even have to take a look at the lyrics. That song just came flowing out of me right there and then in it's entirety. I couldn't remember all the chords correctly (there's some cool ones in the bridge!), but I just went for it without thinking, and the version you can hear me do here is pretty much exactly how I played it the first time.
I hope you enjoy this version of Oasis' 'Listen Up' and look forward to sharing the next track with you on October 14th!
Here's the original by the way:
All the best,
Jon