Indy, Indie

My good friend Elijah spent last summer in Northern California trying to dig up whatever work he could find. Craigslist is a good place to start when you're a damn good drummer, guitarist, bassist (in my band), mandolin player and songwriter, so he spent his first weeks checking posts on a daily basis.

One day he came across a post by a man named Bret looking for someone to help arrange and record a song he'd been working on. Bret was not a musician and had never written a song in his life, but with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull coming out he'd been touched by the muse. An Indiana Jones die hard, Bret had memorized all the lines from the first three films and counted himself among the members of a variety of Indie fan groups.

He had the song all worked out in his head. Every harmony, background vocal, lyric, and rhythm change was clear in his mind, he just didn't know how to put it all together.

In stepped Elijah. Unaware of how absorbed he would become in this project Elijah agreed to arrange and record the song for a small fee. They decided that the best approach was to have Bret call on the phone and leave a message on Elijah's answering machine in which he sang his musical ideas for the song. After being cut off by the machine six or seven times because of the length of his messages Bret had finally communicated to Elijah every detail of the song.

Elijah set to work and spent all waking hours for three weeks working on the tune. He recorded all the vocal parts, the bass lines, percussion and guitar solo one track at a time on Protools through an Mbox. Bret was thrilled with the result and doubled his payment to Elijah in appreciation of his work.

Those one hundred dollars were the only income Elijah earned that month. He's still never met Bret in person.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO "OH INDIANA JONES" BY BRET MOSELY AND ELIJAH TUCKER

Bret made a video once the song was done. Here it is on Youtube. Some of the comments by Youtube users about the video are unappreciative at best. As for me...looks like a nice bike ride.

(I posted the mp3 version of the song separate from the video because the sound quality in the video is low. I think the cameraperson had positioned a stereo playing the song near the camera while they were filming to capture the audio.)