from
Leftovers,
released March 15, 2015
This is a cover of Al Anderson’s amazing NRBQ song – really one of the best songs ever written.
It was something Dave Green (drums) and Mike Randle (bass) and I worked up during sound checks and occasionally played live. (Dave and Mike both play in the amazing band Baby Lemonade, and backed up Arthur Lee in the re-formed Love).
On a break in a late 1998 tour we booked a 1 or 2 hour session at Studio G in Brooklyn to record the fast version on “Summer I Pissed You Away” (see track 10 below). We cut the basic track of that (trying to achieve a sound reminiscent of The Zombies) finishing with only a few minutes left in the hour and the engineer started cleaning up – we were able to stop him and cut one take of “Ridin’ In My Car” – in the remaining 5 minutes.
All the overdubs & the mixing were done in Jay Sherman-Godfrey’s Queens living room, with Jay adding some guitars & keyboards.
I think the background vocals are the highlight of the song: Mark Bacino, Jon Niefeld (who also played bongos) & me.
It was released in Sweden on a compilation called “Hit The Hay Vol 3” on the Sound Asleep label, which is run by music enthusiast/hardware store worker Jerker Emanuelson.
It was eventually remixed by Peter Katis and included as a bonus track on the Japanese version of “Half Empty”
This version is an edit of both mixes!
At the very end of the song (the “I’ll never forget you when I’m riding in my car” part) I sing in a higher voice and my wife though that sounded great – and subsequently I worked hard on my next album, “Goodbye Cheater” to make the highest notes of each song’s chorus to be in the highest key I could sing it in.
Produced by Michael Shelley & Jay Sherman-Godfrey