Radiohead: Daydreaming (cover)

So, without sounding toooo dramatic....Hannah Calistri helped me achieve a lifelong dream. Recording a Radiohead cover. Words cannot and will not convey my gratitude. (Too dramatic already)

I worked for about three weeks on this. Because 1) I am amateur, and 2) I can’t read music. I was also quite nervous, and repeating quiet refrains like “really Brian, are you seriously going to try to record this for others to see? Don’t be so foolish.”

But a fool I was. And thanks to my man Covid I had some extra spark and need for creativity, and lo, impossibly it all started to come together, enough where I felt at least 40% confident to share it with someone else besides my wife, who was surely beyond on the point of no return hearing me clang it about.

So, I texted Hannah with a random question and then followed up with another before finally throwing caution to the wind and asking if she’d have any interest to sing a Radiohead song for me. I was expecting silence or laughter. But she only expressed excitement and gratitude. It was almost like scoring tickets to see them live (31 times btw), I was that excited.

Then came the logistics of how and if. But both were conquered rather seamlessly. I waited with some measure of teenage impatience for her vocal recording to appear, before I could interlace it over my piano take. And then came a text, and an upload to the google drive, and in seconds I had it. I knew from the moment I heard her first “Dreamers” that it would be perfect. I had goosebumps up on my arm. Literally, I checked. It was just a vocal track without the piano, but even without me clanging along it was just so damn beautiful.

A couple minutes later, with the help of FCPX, she was then soaring above my piano; and like magic, 20+ years of waiting on a childhood dream was incredibly achieved.

Thank you, Hannah. I have literally lived a dream.