High School (the song)

mini music Monday

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High School is the most requested song during my solo-shows and the one I am most tormented by. Why can’t I play it? I’ve told people it was too complicated, that it is in an undocumented tuning, it has the word ‘diarrhea’ in it. Excuses upon excuses. The reality is that I needed to learn the song and nothing is INpossible. Adelle asked me if I had -really- never performed the song live. Maybe I did, somewhere, sometime, but as far as I’m concerned I never have and the recent exhumation of the original tape and the re-creation that followed is the maiden voyage.

  I noticed, after listening to the original 4-track tape from 1993, that I edited an entire chorus out of the released version (on Winning Losers C.D./10” vinyl). At the time I thought it was too long and having the chorus repeat was a ‘sell-out’. So young, so nonsensically principaled.

I’ve remixed the song, quickly and very imperfectly, to let y’all hear the original, top to bottom, version.

My hammer-strum style on acoustic guitar makes it very difficult to capture in a mix. It’s why I began streamlining my songs into standard tuned electric 6-string guitar during the mid-90s. My RAW approach caused too many problems in recording and, most importantly, performance.

  If you’d like to remix it yourself I’ve included downloads of each ‘stem’, all 4 of them! Otherwise, enjoy listening to each individual track just because it’s interesting!

here’s the hack /quick mix of the original , stems, downloads, and lyrics below.