I Can't Help Falling in Love with You (cover)

February 1, 2012 12:44 PM

This corny old thing just crept into my head this morning and I decided to record it, all quiet and romantic like.

I knew of it as a UB40 song before I'd ever heard Elvis or anyone else cover it, so it was kind of odd to discover in the long run that it wasn't traditionally done in 4/4 time with a horn section blasting little riffs throughout.

At one point in middle school I had this idea that I could enter a lip-sync competition that the school was organizing as a student activity, where I would recruit a girl and have a like Parisian cafe set up with a couple of tables with umbrellas, and it'd be a choreographed sort of flirtation/romance stageplay music video thing to the UB40 song.

I mulled that idea over for probably a good week until the deadline for entering the competition passed and I could write it off as too late to do anything about. And it's a good thing, because my specific thoughts on how the whole thing would have been executed weren't any more detailed than the paragraph proceeding; I had a vague mental image of about five seconds of the performance, I was a horribly clumsy kid, and I have no idea how I would have recruited anyone to play the love interest that I'd be stumbling around on stage lip-syncing at.

Still, it was this grand idea, this romantic delusion, and I think I played it through in my mind a lot with a couple of the girls I was miserably crushing on at that point.

posted by cortex (10 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite

Nice. Who was that doing harmony?
posted by lysdexic at 12:52 PM on February 1, 2012


My twin brother, Evil Cortex.
posted by cortex at 12:53 PM on February 1, 2012


He sounds nice.
posted by lysdexic at 1:48 PM on February 1, 2012


Yeah, but he kicks puppies.
posted by cortex at 1:58 PM on February 1, 2012


Evil puppies?

More seriously, this is pretty cool
posted by Blasdelb at 7:53 PM on February 1, 2012


So is it you, or evil cortex, that has the mustache?

I like this. I heard the elvis one first, but really like the UB40 version. same thing with Red Red Wine and Neil Diamond / UB40

Anyway! sounds good. harmonies are nice. What'd you use to record this?
posted by dubold at 4:31 AM on February 2, 2012


Almost everything was done through my Studio Projects B1 condenser mic, though my new Tascam US-800 audio interface (my FastTrack Pro just went on the fritz in December, unSane pointed out the firesale on this thing, so far so good), and into Garageband. Steel-string acoustic, baritone uke, upright bass, two vocal tracks, all as separate overdubs.

The piano was done as a direct line into my wee old FastTrack USB interface, and the levels were actually being kind of weird and super low on that, which is why I ended up hitting the notes extra hard instead of playing that bit more mezzopiano like I'd originally thought to. Decided I liked the weird contrast.
posted by cortex at 7:30 AM on February 2, 2012


oh yeah, saw there was a massive sale on that interface, but they don't ship to the UK. Those Studio Projects mics! my mate Geoff has one and every time I'm impressed by how nice it sounds.

excellent work.
posted by dubold at 10:58 AM on February 2, 2012


Lovely!
posted by TwoWordReview at 12:02 PM on February 2, 2012


Elvis? UB40? You must be mistaken, it's a Corey Hart song.
posted by stp123 at 6:53 PM on February 3, 2012


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