I liked the sound of the electronic cover of Carbona not Glue so much, that I decided to retoractively call it a Hitmaker Algorithm song, and do a whole Hitmaker Algorithm album of classic punk covers. This will also come in handy when the baby is born, and I need to mostly do songs on autopilot. This is another song I’d been wanting to cover for a while, so this was a good excuse to finally do it. I have a few other songs in mind, but I’m looking for requests of other songs people would like to hear me do.

I had an idea for a song for this week but it wasn’t quite coming together, so I decided to go with a cover. This is a song I’ve been thinking about covering since before I started the song a week challenge, so it was fun to finally do it. If you’re not a Ramones super fan, you probably haven’t heard this song before. It appeared on their second album, and served as a sort of sequel to “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” After the initial pressings went out the song was pulled because Carbona was a trademarked name, and future pressings replaced it with “Sheena is a Punk Rocker.” Wikipedia has a different explanation for why the song was removed, but this is the version of the story I’ve read many times, so I think Wikipedia is wrong.
When working on a cover, it’s always good to get some distance from the original and really make the song your own. My rock songs are so heavily influenced by the Ramones that I was afraid my version would be too similar to the original. Solution: no guitars, fully electronic. I even decided to use vocoder effects on the vocals to make them sound electronic. I think the vocals will make the listener feel like you’ve been huffing Carbona, glue, and/ or roach spray. But not paint, that would sound very different.

This is a cover of a rare James Kochalka Superstar song. He wrote it for a movie (I don’t know if it ever came out), and as far as I know the only way to get a copy of the song is to subscribe to his website. I started working on a cover of this song four years ago, but gave up because I couldn’t get it to sound right. I was thinking about the song recently and figured I’d come far enough that I could finally do it right. It’s still not perfect, but I’m pretty happy with it. I did a little experimenting with the guitar sound, and had fun playing with the cricket sound effect.

Last Wednesday I was so shocked to hear about the death of Jay Reatard, I almost stopped working on Pi to 100 Digits to cover one of his songs. Later that night, I heard that Teddy Pendergrass passed away as well. In tribute to the two artists, I covered Pendergrass’s biggest hit, in a style as close to Jay Reatard as I could manage.