FriendBurst Blog

One thing about borrowing songs from popular bands with fanatic followings as I have done many times for both making videos and covering songs is that you have to do a good job with whatever it is you are trying to accomplish, otherwise these fans get all over you!

I can understand the sentiment.  If someone took a piece of music I loved and used it in some hack job that totally sucked, I might be upset!  If they didn’t pay proper respect to the music and just used it as some accoutrement without regard to it’s significance, yeah, that would suck.

Significance is, of course, relative.

Late at night, when I’ve run out of things to do on the Internet, I begin reviewing my video archives.  Narcissistic as this statement may seem, I’m the most entertaining thing to me that I can find to watch at times.  I fill my videos with songs I like, so going back on YouTube and watching them is like my own personal jukebox, featuring… me!

I ran into this video tonight from 2007 which I haven’t viewed in a while, and based upon the feedback I got from the YouTube community (which is generally very negative), satisfied the necessity for a great song to be accompanied by something that at least respects the quality and sanctity of the song in the ears of the fanatic fan.  Soon after I first moved here to Seattle, without really planning it out or knowing precisely where to go, I went off in search of a place I had only heard of, the Sound Garden.  A facility on the shores of Lake Washington which inspired a name for one of the best bands in the last 25 years…

Sometimes, my musical endeavors have NOT lived up to the expectations of the fans.  Some of this is related to relative fanaticism.  Those Blue October fans who love the song “Hate Me”, well, they REALLY love the song “Hate Me”… My cheesy cover got me more hate than any other piece of music I’ve made… and it features the voice of my actual mother on the phone!  Geez.. No respect for the effort!

7 thumbs up… 19 thumbs down… feel free to click off the song when it gets annoying.

Come to think of it, I think this song garnered more criticism than Hate Me, but primarily for political reasons, as I made this in the height of the 2008 elections.  Hey There, Obama.