Sometimes, things come together so nicely that it's downright uncanny. This is one of those times. ;)
Today, a song on my SoulseekQT "wish list" appeared and I was able to download it. It's a Sheryl Crow song from 2013 called "Leaning in a New Direction." It's a very good, poppy song, and I'm guessing it's one she wrote. I could even see it being a hit. But unfortunately, it was never released at all. It was shown in the comedy movie "The Hot Flashes." The file I found on SoulseekQT was simply an audio recording of that scene from the movie.
Unfortunately, as sometimes happens, the song playing was just one thing happening in the movie scene. I haven't seen the video myself, but there were all sorts of other sounds going on in the audio, especially different people talking. At more than one point in the song, the music volume dropped way down so the talking could be the main focus. Upon first listen, I thought the audio might be unsalvageable.
But I got lucky, very, very lucky. It turns out nearly all the talking parts took place during the chorus, which was repeated three times. All three choruses had lots of talking over them. But by combining the best bits from the three different choruses, I was able to make one good one. Then I replaced all three of them with the better version. There were some other parts of the song with talking or other annoying noises. But, amazingly, virtually all of them were in instrumental parts or vocal lines that were repeated elsewhere. Some more audio cutting and pasting took care of those.
So here's the fixed version. Is it perfect? Definitely not. You can still hear some stray noises and talking here and there. But I'm downright shocked at how well it turned out, considering how bad it sounded at first. I plan on posting this in one of the future Sheryl Crow stray tracks albums I'll be posting here, but it'll be a while before I get that far chronologically into her career, so I thought I'd post it here today.
https://www.upload.ee/files/15239463/SherylC_LeannginNewDirctionSongEdit.zip.html
You are right, it's a cute, catchy song.
ReplyDeleteYou should post the original track for reference.
A 'before and after', if you will.
Hmmm. I don't want to help spread the bad version. But since you're a glutton for punishment, I'll post the unedited version here for a limited time:
Deletehttps://www25.zippyshare.com/v/oar09fgW/file.html
Nice save on this one. It reminded me of a version of Cat Stevens' "If You ant To Sing Out" that I had on a bootleg so many years ago. Before the song was finally released officially someone pieced all the bits from the movie together but they couldn't remove some sounds from the soundtrack so there are crazy incidental sounds here and there that I was so accustom to that it took awhile to get used to the clean official version. I'm sure I have that somewhere, gonna have to dig through my old CDR backups. Thanks for your work.
ReplyDeleteInteresting story. I think that was a real mistake on Cat Stevens' part. That song and "Don't Be Shy" are two of his very best songs! "If You Want to Sing Out" at least should have been a hit. It was downright cruel to only let fans hear it when they saw the movie. The vast majority never even got the bad bootlegged version you did.
Delete