Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. We had a fine time hosting family and friends. Even though we made a conscious effort to scale the food a little better to the amount of guests, we had way too much food. I’m still eating my way through the leftovers, so I thought I’d post some music to eat by.

Goat “Sugar We’re Going Down” (Fall Out Boy)
I never could take Fall Out Boy seriously, even before Pete Wentz married Ashlee Simpson. But I can take this percolating acoustic version seriously.

Casey Shea “Chop Suey” (System Of A Down)
More acoustic deconstructionism, this time with harmonies. It’s much funnier than the Richard Cheese cover.

Jack Jones “Dixie Chicken” (Little Feat)
I haven’t heard too many Little Feat covers, which is a pity. Jack Jones’ website (which is located on a Japanese server for some reason) includes a litany of praise by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, and Tony Bennett. And even a couple of people who aren’t dead.

Martin Denny “A Taste Of Honey” (Bobby Scott)
Martin Denny is one of the gods of the Exotica movement. His best music contains dense layers of exotic instruments, percussion, and bird calls. Presumably in an attempt to broaden his musical horizons he put our a record called Exotic Moog. As a moog record it’s pretty good, much more adventurous than most. As a Martin Denny record it’s kind of disappointing. I guess he just couldn’t get the synthesizer to do bird calls.

Smashing Pumpkins “Dancing In The Moonlight” (Thin Lizzy)
I used to know a guy who spent most of the 1960s eating LSD every day. He had many interesting stories, and you never knew how many of them were true. At any rate, he claimed to be friends with the Smashing Pumpkins folks. This was in the days when the Pumpkins were just a local bar band in Chicago. He kept offering to get me into their shows for free but I never took him up on it. I just wasn’t impressed by their original music. But I’ve always been impressed by their covers.