Stuff I'm Listening To - The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Artist: the Tokens 

Title: The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Lyrics: 
A-weema-weh, a-weema-weh, a-weema-weh, a-weema-weh

Why?:
I baked today. It seems to be the in-thing lately with SARS-CoV-2 (I recently learned that this is the name of the virus and coronavirus and COVID-19 is the disease caused by said virus) running rampant. 

Baking and posting your successes (and if you're brave or oblivious, your failures) on-line is what you need to do in order to let people know 'Hey! I baked stuff and didn't burn the house down!' I like to bake and I think I'm ok at it... Except for the one time I made singularity banana bread muffins*, everything else has eaten and complimented immediately. 

I discovered that when I bake, there are specific songs that I need to start off on to get me inspired. Today I decided to start off my baking exploits with the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight. 

Then I remembered that Tim Friese-Greene had something to do with the song and in the time between plunking the tin in the oven to the time it was going to be done, maybe (given I'm like this raging Talk Talk fan) I should look up what it was that he'd done. It obviously wasn't the version that kicked off my baking. But here are three more versions of this song (that's been covered a billion times it seems). I'll let you guess which one inspired me to bake my banana bread today.

*Singularity Banana Bread Muffins: when you toss caution and the recipe instructions to the wind, and triple on the number of bananas and have a little less flour than you were supposed to add. And forget baking soda. You get these dense pucks of banana goodness with it's own gravity and event horizon. 

Also special thanks to threadpennyvinyl on Instagram for bringing the documentary ’ReMastered: The Lion’s Share’ about the origin of this song originally called ‘Mbabe’ composed by Solomon Linda and the where all the royalties went. It was super informative for me. I strongly suggest if you are interested to give it a watch. It is currently available on Netflix. 



Artist: After Hours



Artist: the Scallwags



Artist: Tight Fit
 

Stuff I'm Listening To #101 - Guilty Pleasures #7 - Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies

Artist: Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies

Title: Over the Rainbow

Why?: I noticed when it came to new punk bands (and some old ones) a cover meant you're playing the song twice as fast, with pumping guitars. I remember working my second job, in publishing, and a co-worker (Thanks Jeremy!) had introduced me and my best friend to them, along with a couple of compilations called Punk Chartbusters, which were exactly what I described above. Songs you know, played faster and louder. The result, this glorious cacophonous mess of delightful punkified karaoke. 

My days in publishing are long gone, the company I worked for got rid of their print department in favour of pushing their online product. 

But I met some really great people during my time there and whenever I hear a punk cover I'm brought back to those super late nights, during my earlier days there when they were located up near Yorkdale Mall. Late night server crashes, moody plate machines. Our downtime was like school. Rolled up pieces of film became baseball bats, hockey sticks or lightsabres. We smoked in the courtyard and had snowball fights. I once decided to see how many paperclips fit in someone's legendary hair. Someone allegedly moved around artwork late one night to see if anyone would notice. Super marathon shifts (72 hours for my supervisor, 19 hours was my record).

Trader peeps? You were the best. I have fond memories of those days because of you guys.