(but I’m singing in another room and it’s raining) – A cover/edit
While I may be a psychology major, music has always been a significant part of my life–I even wrote my personal admissions essay on the psychological effects of music on the brain. I love to sing, and I have been doing it for my entire life. Once I saw the option to do a “cover version” for this course’s final project, I was ecstatic! To demonstrate my Texas Creativity, I decided to do a cover of Cindy Walker’s song “You Don’t Know Me” but I wanted to add my own flair in the form of fun special effects. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, a next door edit is (what I would call) a fun editing technique in which the vocals of a song become “muffled” to sound as if it is being sung in another room. In a rainy day edit, rain sounds are layered on top of a song to change its “vibe.” These two effects are often combined, and there are so many fun examples to listen to on YouTube (I highly recommend them)! I wanted to add these special elements to my cover because I felt that it could add a another meaning to the song.
Executing the “rainy day” portion of the edit was easy, however, I found myself having a difficult time with the “next door” element. For my first time doing it, I believe that it came out fairly decent. (I would also like to apologize for the little breaks in the edited version, we’ll just say those are “record scratches” so it can connect to the time period of when the song was initially recorded).
While I did have fun creating this version of the song, here’s a normal cover:
My work is directly connected to our classroom discussion regarding this particular song. “You Don’t Know Me” has been covered by a substantial number of recording artists, some of which made it to the Billboard, OCC (UK), and RPM (Canada) charts. According to Wikipedia, here are just a few artists who have covered this iconic song:
While my work does not necessarily “advance” ideas from this semester, it can be used to demonstrate the power that this song holds, in that it has withstood the test of time.
All in all, this was a fantastic experience and I had a wonderful time recreating this song.
