“Dancing On My Own (Solo Country Version)”

Popular songs are always in danger of becoming mangled whenever I have access to my dad’s sadly neglected guitar—an early 70s Epiphone acoustic model that sounds glorious, given how it’s had the same strings for years and probably needs neck-realignment.

I’m home in Oregon right now for the holidays; yesterday there was a minor family debate about the level of blues feeling built into Robyn’s most critic-slaying single from 2k10. I was on the “are you kidding me? It’s super bluesy” side of the argument, and so I went upstairs to my childhood bedroom and tried to prove it—in this totally amateur, ham-handed way. (Guitar + 2 vocal tracks put to GarageBand, via the MacBook microphone.) I didn’t clean up the flubs. Sometimes my mind still thinks it belongs to a proudly shambolic 15-year-old punk kid with a foot-tall Mohawk.

Also: hi, Tumblr. This is what you’re for, right? Tomorrow I’m driving to a boat that goes to an island where you drive to a subsequent ferry that drops you off at an even-more-remote island without electricity. See y’all in 2011.