The Cowboy Song

Below is a clip from Hulu of The Cowboy Song Part 2 with Kyle MacLachlan  Dana Carvey and the Late Phil Hartman. The original Cowboy song was done with Woody Harrelson, Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman.

This clip was the basis of one of my most recent Fiverr Gigs.

Here’s a link to the lyrics http://www.faqs.org/faqs/tv/sat-night-live/song-lyrics/#b

When you think of family time you might not think of people singing about slaughtering cows with the family. At least not in as graphic a detail as this. But as I many of us are omnivores and so we eat meat. Someone has to do it. Someone has to lead the cows to the slaughterhouse (as the song states).

For this fiverr gig someone sent an inquiry to my write a custom song, for me to sing this song from Saturday Night Live. I didn't realize it at first as they sent me the lyrics to The Cowboy song (Tame version) so I decided to look it up to see what it was. The non tame version is, well, disconcerting to say the least. It paints rather a horrific yet clinical picture in nature the describes large scale slaughtering of these animals for food. In the same vein it also romanticizes they journey, because, well we're singing to these poor doggies. I looked up the term doggies and it probably means a calf with a distended gut, although in modern cases it might just mean any cow, I'm not really sure as I'm not a cowboy.

But lyrics aside it is a rather fun song to sing. A slow paced country or maybe I should saw old style country western song. I can understand why they requested this tame version that a family would choose to sing now.

I listened to the SNL original song and it’s considerably longer than the tame version they sent. So I had to take some liberties with melody (they sent me some examples of the singing of the song but well it was rather incomplete and by their own admission they were no singers, hence why they ordered the gig)

So I thought the quickest way rather than trying to learn the whole song would be to chop up the SNL version and put it into my audio editor and then attempt to sing along to the SNL melody while singing the tame lyrics. Once I did that. I was able to sing along to myself doing a better job this time. Then I added some harmonies. That is always a more challenging part. You see with most music the melody is prominent and loud enough that you hear it the most. Hearing the harmonies takes a little more doing. But after a little work it was done. Add in the guitar strumming, and guitar simple bass line, take away the SNL version and there we have my rendition of the tame version. All in all, it was another unique Fiverr experience. It didn't involve much songwriting but it did involve some song arranging and a lot of mixing and song engineering. Another great Fiverr experience where I again learned a lot. 
Take a listen here to hear for yourself how I did!

Check out this and other gigs at http://fiverr.com/tulleuchen