The Morning Benders and Their Free Covers Record ("The Bedroom Covers")

The very cool Berkley, CA band, The Morning Benders have a great new record out, Talking Through Tin Cans. For the past couple of weeks, they've been posting covers of different songs they recorded around the same time on various blogs, saying they'll post all of them on their own blog at some point in the near future. Well today is that day and I received this note on it this morning that gives some background on the project, affectionately called "The Bedroom Covers."

hey gang,
here are a few tracks, that we are calling the bedroom covers. as you may have guessed, all these songs are covers… and yes, we did them at home in my room! the songs that you hear here are just songs we really really like. we didn't deliberate over which songs to pick. we didn't try to stick to a certain time period or genre. we just recorded songs we were going to be playing around the house anyway...

these songs sound the way they do, because we recorded them with a laptop and one mic. we used mainly acoustic guitars and shakers because that's what we had lying around, and we couldn't make much noise in our apartment anyway. we didn't spend time arranging any of these either. we learned the chords and the lyrics (which was pretty easy because we've heard all these songs hundreds of times), and we played 'em. what you hear at the basis of the recording is generally a first take.

sometimes we added some background vocals or another guitar part here or there, because the songs we were covering had a lot more going on than us, and we were feeling a bit inadequate…

but hey, you're always fighting a losing battle when you're recording covers, because 99.99% of the time the cover isn't going to be as good the original. well, for the record, let it be known that none of our covers are as good as the originals. that's part of why we wanted to give all these tracks away for free. if you haven't heard one of these songs before, you should go out and buy it from the original artist, RIGHT NOW. disclaimer aside: if you want to hear some kids having a lot of fun playing some of their favorite songs ever, check these out.

love,
the morning benders

You'll want to check this out, I've listened to most of it thus far and it's top-notch stuff. Track listing is as follows:

1.crying - roy orbison
2.mother and child reunion - paul simon
3.Why dont they let us fall in love? - the ronettes
4.lovefool - the cardigans
5.i won't share you - the smiths
6.he's a rebel - the crystals
7.marie - randy newman
8.fools rush in - johnny mercer/rube bloom
9.temptation inside your heart - velvet underground
10.dreams - fleetwood mac
11.pull up the roots - talking heads
12.caroline, no- beach boys remix (bonus track)
13.why don't they let us fall in love? (live Daytrotter version!)

Go here to download your free copy.

(The Morning Benders are currently touring and will be performing many dates this summer with Ra Ra Riot. They will also be playing at the Monolith Festival in September.)