Boots makes songs (mostly covers) and posts them here

[Boots Raingear]

I joined a group last year that collectively makes a tribute album for a different artist every month. Sometimes I do solo entries under the band name Asbestos Canoe (see. Ep. 185), lately I've been collaborating with other members of the group, always using a new invented band name. Every month I try to challenge myself in new ways.

Here are a few of my favourite entries so far:

June 2019 - Madonna
Asbestos Canoe - Material Girl


August 2019 - Black Sabbath
Asbestos Canoe - Paranoid


March 2020 - Dolly Parton
Mouth Sounds - Islands in the Stream


I'll post the rest of them in the next post.

[Boots Raingear]

July 2019 - Elvis Costello
Asbestos Canoe - (I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea (But I Do Want To Destroy All Humans)

This is my favourite Elvis Costello song. At the time I felt I needed to cut it off early because the synths were "too jarring". My opinions on that have changed since then.


September 2019 - Captain Beefheart
DJ Boots Raingear ft. Gloria Hole - I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby (Live at XStacyFest 2019)

I feel like this is my worst one. I was going for Scooter and it kinda worked but mostly it's not very pleasant to listen to. Also I don't care for Captain Beefheart.


October 2019 - Simon and Garfunkel
Asbestos Canoe - The Werewolf

I knew I wanted to do a spooky halloween song this month. My first instinct was Me and Julio with a Bela Lugosi's Dead vibe but I couldn't make it work. I was going to call it "Me and Ghoulio". I ended up Paul Simon song from like 5 years ago that had a sorta halloweeny theme and did this. Ventured into some lead guitar work that I am quite happy with.


November 2019 - The Cars
Asbestos Canoe - A Short Study on Toxic Friendships and the Objectification of Women

I left this one until literally the last day for submission entries, so it's a lot of real rough takes of a lot of guitar parts that are beyond my ability, and the gimmick only sorta half-works. Still gonna call this a success.

[Boots Raingear]

December 2019 - Faith No More (Mike Patton)


1 - Delsishisoux - Book of the Month
Did this Lovage cover with Bumpgrrl. She was not down for making sexy sex noises in the breakdown and so we made goofy sex noises, which is the better choice. Also in order for me to record the low and raspy bits we drank an awful lot and did a karaoke party for 2 the night before. That stuff was all done with a terrible hangover. The band name came from her bilingual phone doing some very strange thing with autocorrect.

2 - Asbestos Canoe - Just a Man
Got overambitious with this one. End result is a bit of a mess, but the idea I was going for is that this song is being performed by dueling factions of AI long after all biological life on Earth has died moments before the sun envelops the planet.


January 2020 - George Harrison

Asbestos Canoe - Cheer Down
I wanted this one to be drowning in FM synths, and I would say I accomplished that task. I overdubbed the vocals 5 times to get a more full and eerie sound but I think they still ended up a bit too washed up in the mix. The solo in the middle sounds just perfect though.


February 2020 - Diana Ross

Valium and the Tripmunks - You Keep Me Hangin' On
This one is a direct cover of the half-speed version of the Chipmunks' cover of the Kim Wilde cover of the Supremes' You Keep Me Hangin' On. A thing I've been obsessed with for years. I recorded everything at this speed, downsampled all of the drums to make them sluggish. I'm so very happy with how this one turned out.


March 2020 - Dolly Parton

The Stay At Homes - Everything Counts
A discussion in the group about what's allowed and now allowed in the rules (which are extremely loose) lead to one of the long-time members saying "everything counts". So the natural progression here would be to do a country version of Depeche Mode's Everything Counts. Got a couple local friends to provide me with bass, guitar, and lead vocals. It's not exactly what i was intending, but it does the job.

[Boots Raingear]

April 2020 - Low


1 - DJBJINA3WAY - Low Get Low
I don't particularly like the choice of Low. This band was chosen 2 weeks into Covid-19 lockdown while I was hoping for something upbeat and fun. Ended up with the most miserable band on the planet. I decided instead of suffering through doing any of their actual songs, I'd just do a mashup of Lil' Jon - Get Low and Cracker - Low at the start of the month and then come back in May.

2 - Flampile! - Let's Stay Low Together
Then I agreed to help with a cover of Low's admittedly nice version of Al Green's Let's Stay Together. I did some synths and mix fixin's on this one. This one sounds goddamn magical.

3 - The Low Jobs - I'm So Excited
Okay, so then 5 days before the end of the month I was on a Zoom call with 2 friends in the group. I offhandedly said as a joke that we should do a Slowcore cover of The Pointer Sisters' I'm So Excited and woke up the next day to rhythm section tracks in my inbox. I did the guitars, eerie sounds, and mix on this and it's the one I'm most proud of so far. A 9.5 minute adventure of dreary horniness.

[Boots Raingear]

Oof, it's been a while since I updated this.

May 2020 - The Magnetic Fields

1 - Asbestos Canoe - Long Forgotten Fairy Tale
I struggled to get this one to sound like how I intended and ran out of time. All of the synths are samples of me making noises with my mouth. Still a fun song, just sloppier than I wanted.

2 -  The New Normals - Born on a Train
This one is a lot of fun. My good friend Dr. Coffee wanted to do Born on a Train (which is about the inevitability of death) as a "community band" having a fun time and having no idea what the song is about, during a rehearsal. I got to be the band leader. I also sang in the chorus. I love this one so much.


We went from such a delightful month into this fucking band
June 2020 - The Smashing Pumpkins


Flampile! - Turn My Way
By this point I'd pretty much joined a band with 4 other people, using a different name every time we record. The rules of the club are very loose so we did a cover of a New Order song that Smashing Pumpkins performed live at some point or something. I did the whammy bar guitar and.. uhh.. drums? I think? It's boring.

[Boots Raingear]

July 2020 - Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was such a good pick!
Johnny Asbestos and the Canoes - Rock Daniel
Did this one solo. I'd wanted to do a Ramones-ish punk cover for a while and this was a perfect chance. Gradually it got a bit Misfits-y but that's okay too. I think I recorded and mixed this all in one afternoon. A very fun afternoon.

August 2020 - Cockteau Twins

Death, My Bride - Song to the Siren
I provided an arpeggio guitar that you can barely hear in the background of this, but it sorta fills in the sound. Really I'm just happy to be a part of this stunningly beautiful This Mortal Coil cover.

September 2020 - Jandek

Asbestos Canoe - Grgglrgglrbrgrrglrggrgl
Jandek is an outsider artist who has put out over 100 unlistenable albums. I was busy working on Garbage Day 2020 music so I repurposed a very annoying song that I'd put together on a Twitch stream using a gargle sound effect that is included in Arturia's Pigments synth plugin and threw some Francis E Dec rants on top of it.

[Boots Raingear]

I didn't do fuck all for October (Stevie Wonder) and November (Paul McCartney)

December 2020 - Sparks

Chonky Swoosh - Cool Places
I enlisted the singer from Song To The Siren in Cockteau Twins month to do this Sparks ft. Jane Wiedlin pop song, but noisier. She did the synths, I doubled them all with weird noisy guitars, I love how this one turned out.

January 2021 - Electric Light Orchestra

1 - Bog Vox - Mister Kingdom
I don't really like ELO but other people did and were very excited and wanted to work with me so I rolled with that. Gary messaged me and said he wanted to do this song with all the strings replaced with saxophone so he sent me a ELEVEN GODDAMN saxophone tracks and the vocals and I filled the rest with synths and drums and somehow this turned out really cool sounding. The original song is a garbage ripoff of The Beatles' Across the Universe, we fixed it. Good job, us.

2 - Robot Flavor - Telephone Line
I spent all day Sunday mixing the vocals on this one. I threw some vocoder vocals in with them that filled it out in a very nice way without taking away from the gorgeous real voice tracks. This one won the vote for best song of the month (out of 46!) so we get to pick the next month's artist.