Sea Pap (Derek Greenberg Cover)

Note: This post was written in 2025 and backdated to appear on the day I wrote and published the track.

Another Song-A-Day, another cover. I’ve written about my love/hate relationship with cover day before, so let’s just assume I rehashed it all. Most years, I struggle to pick something and then deal with all sorts of self-inflicted angst about covering a song that I know the original artist will hear.

2024 did give me a lot of possibilities, though. When I looked back at my notes, I had nine different songs written down as cover options. Surprisingly, Sea Pap wasn’t one of them. I say “surprisingly” because my personal recollection was that not only had I had that in my head as a front runner the entire month, but I remember my neighbor mentioning it as one that I should cover if I didn’t already have something chosen.

A Pirate’s Life for Me!

The clincher, of course, was the appearance of the pirates earlier in the month. How could I not cover a sea shanty when I already had the pirates hanging out in the studio? The real chicken-and-egg problem, of course, is: would the pirates have shown up in A Songwriter’s Lament if Derek hadn’t written the sea shanty a day or two before? And as it turns out, Derek ended up having pirates of his own. 2024 was clearly the year of the pirate.

Amusingly, Sea Pap also had some help in that it seemed like it would be the least amount of work. Some of my other possibilities, particularly Night by Darin Wilson and Skittish Pony by Seela, would have been either musical or production challenges. My take for Night was going to be a full orchestration or maybe even a hybrid orchestral / synth thing. Skittish Pony, on the other hand, has this ominous note next to it: “Trent Treatment.” Clearly I was planning on going full Nine Inch Nails on it.

I think I made the right overall choice. Humor is normally received well, I’m a huge Derek Greenberg fanboy, and the pirates just made it the right path to take. Because of the logistics of recording not only the music but all of the character voices as well, I worked fairly linearly. What I mean by that is that I’d record the music for a section, add the pirates, do the sketch bits, record the next bit of music, do the next bit of pirates, and so on. I had a fairly rough idea what was going to happen, but nearly all of the dialog was improvised with me going back and forth between “me” and “Lester.”

I wish I could say that my opening performance of Night in the introduction was intentionally bad, but that was actually me in real-time trying to plunk it out. I recorded some of the initial pirate disappointment in that performance while listening back to it the first few times, which is funny to me when I listen to it now.

My accents are all over the place, and the acting’s not up to my usual snuff, but I’m still pleased with the way this turned out. I wrote it to amuse myself, hoping that others would also find it funny. The squeeze boxes ended up being just the right amount of “extra.” I also liked that the “Yo Ho!” call back worked so well with the song.

This is one of my more successful covers, due in no small part to the original composition. It’s more of a comedy sketch than a cover, but it all works in the end.

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Keyscape, Trilian, Omnisphere

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

FabFilter, Gullfoss, MOTU Trim, Dynamics, & Masterworks EQ

Image generated from prompt by DeepAI.org