I spent some time digging around the 365 days site today. It’s a great project, but to be honest, I find it so overwhelming that I don’t have room for it every day. But it’s great to throw yourself into it once in a while. Of the ten or so tracks I downloaded today, the standout tracks were this steel guitar version of ‘And I love her’ and this remarkable karaoke singalong version of ‘I’ve had the time of my life’. I don’t normally have a huge interest in the ‘outsider’ music genre, but I find this recording fascinating, and have listened to it half a dozen times already. Particularly cool are the whispered instructions and moments between the two singers (particularly audible at the beginning of the track). The story of how the track wound up in the 365 days project is pretty spooky and interesting as well.

UPDATE: Listening closely to ‘I’ve had the time of my life’, I think I can hear some crowd noise in the background, as if the recording and karaoke performance were made in a mall or some other public place. Perhaps this is the key to how much I’ve enjoyed the track. About 10 or 15 years ago I did a similar performance in public, singing ‘We can work it out’ by the Beatles in London’s Trafalgar Square. I genuinely thought I was going to be pretty good, but as soon as the backing track started, I realized it was far too high, and I was horrifically off-key for the whole song. I wasn’t exactly delighted when they handed me a plain white-stickered cassette of my performance afterwards. To my shame, I can remember very deliberately taping over my performance soon afterwards. Hey, blank tapes were a valuable commodity in those days…