A good friend of ours, journalist Victor Infante, for an upcoming story (allegedly) has for the second time tortured — um, recruited — a bunch of his musician friends into covering the work of questionable performers.
The rules of this particular fiendish challenge: you don’t get to choose the artist or song. All participants will get a song assigned from a particular artist being featured, and there’s no appeal — you either do it or you don’t and suffer eternal shame…
Victor’s first go around with this sort of venture was with the work of Phil Collins; we couldn’t be part of that one because of a time crunch, but this time around, we joined in and were given:
“I Can’t Get Excited,” by Air Supply.
We were taken aback, at first. We also had minimal time to do the cover and needed to record our contribution live in our basement headquarters…but in two marathon sessions, we developed and recorded this…a slow burner of a song with a muted trumpet (synthesized by Faro on the keyboard), a minor key guitar throb courtesy of Mr. Lawton, and the usual steady punctuated by explosive moments drumming of Mr. O’Donnell. Tony took the oddly irritated yet upbeat lyrics of the original and delivered them in full Duende Project style with a tacked on freestyle rant at the end. (SNAP).
Or, as we put it when we introduced it to the world on the special Facebook group for the participants:
“A foggy night…a trenchcoat…a cigarette in the dark. An Australian pop group. A song with vaguely peevish lyrics, and a relentless upbeat melody…a group of twisted musicians and a poet…a sadistic challenge…and thus, we find ourselves HERE…The Duende Project as their alter ego, Noir Supply, with ‘I Can’t Get Excited.’ ”
Here it is:
Seriously, this was a LOT of fun. We might even add the piece to our live sets.
Enjoy.
The Duende Project 