Too Good for Me

If I laid my coat in the rain

would you watch my hopes go down the drain?

If I laid rose pedals at your feet

would you still walk all over me?

‘Cause when I make you laugh you only make me cry

When I say hello you always say goodbye

If only I could make you see

I'd be good for you if you weren't…

…too good for me.

If I wrote a poem for you each day

Would you crumple them up and throw them away

If I wrote a song just for you dear

would you turn up your iPod until you couldn't hear

‘Cause when I make you laugh you only make me cry

When I say hello you always say goodbye

If only I could make you see

I'd be good for you if you weren't…

…too good for me.

WHIPPLE - vocals, guitars, bass, and accordion
EMILY WILLIAMS - violin

Back to Liner Notes

I bought an ukulele a year or two back and almost immediately I wrote this song with it. Since then, I translated the song to the guitar which gave it a more classy jazz feel but somehow that made the song sound too serious. It isn't a song that should be taken seriously. That just makes it all sound so sad and pathetic rather than just plain silly.... which it is.

When I started recording it,I was not too thrilled about it. I thought a fiddle might be the ticket. Tracking down a fiddle player can be difficult. I had few players all psyched on it but they were... well...

flakes....

It was looking like I was going to skip this song all together but then I found out that Emily Williams was going to be in town on tour with her duo, Ember. She is an excellent fiddle player from Wales that I had met several years ago. It is funny how you keep in touch with certain people (...ahh... the blessed miracle of Facebook).

She came in with her violin and pretty much nailed it the on the first take. That put the pressure back on me to put a decent vocal track on it.

Sometimes, I like to do things wrong. It is pretty much the standard thing to record everything as clean and pretty as possible... It is not a bad way to go but with some songs, being all bright and sterile can make for some bland listening. I really wanted the song to have a warm and jazz era vibe to it. Sure, these days there all these effects you can run with the computer but it always sounds a bit fake.

To get the effect I wanted, I turned my 1960's record player into a tube pre-amp. I use that old record player to play my 78 RPM records and it has a natural warm sound that new tube pre-amps can't touch. Making this happen was easy. I just wired an vintage SM55 microphone to the record needle. It worked beautifully (...at least I think so). I tracked the voice with two microphones simultaneously. One through the record player and one clean.