A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
First listen: The Sour Notes cover Galaxie 500's Fourth of July
A couple of years ago Jared from Austin band The Sour Notes got in touch with me before Xmas asking if I could plug their upcoming New Year's Eve set they were playing as Galaxie 500. I liked what I heard of the band and did what I could - not sure if my influence sold any tickets but I always like to pretend my influence is greater than it is!
The band have now been in the studio and recorded a cover of Galaxie 500's Fourth of July along with a bunch of other cover versions by artists as diverse as The Beatles, Patti Smith, Beyoncé and The Ronettes (and many more).
Last week Jared of the band got in touch with me and let me hear their cover it's rather lovely, he then asked if I'd like to premiere the track on A Head Full of Wishes…
I figured it'd be cool to premiere the Fourth of July cover through AHFoW, since we're all fans, doing it for the fans! I mean, I wouldn't be playing and recording music at this rate, if it weren't for that desire to achieve the sonic bliss I hear in bands like Galaxie 500. We're just showing our appreciation to the bands we love by releasing a covers album for free.
We got the idea to record the track after we learned and performed a set of Galaxie 500 songs a couple New Year's Eves ago at Hotel Vegas in Austin.
We had a few recorded covers sitting around, that we'd released as bonus tracks previously, and decided to record a bunch more to make an album out of it. I tried to make each cover a little uniquely-different from the original and ended up substituting Dean's lead guitar for analog synth. After picking apart every piece of this song from the original recording and even Galaxie 500 / Luna live performances of it… it still sounds as exciting and new to me as ever!
Listen to The Sour Notes cover of Fourth of July.
The band are releasing a new track from their covers album, This Is Not Our Music, each week - Fourth of July is out now. They have a stack of other great music to check out on their bandcamp.