It’s almost cliché at this point to label anything recorded last year as a “Quarantine Record,” but from long gestating passion projects to spur of the moment whims, musicians across the globe were taken off the road and cocooned in their homes for over a year and used the time to record during their forced sabbatical. The result, as we have been finding out this year, can be exercises in pretentiousness or, in other cases, quite inspired. Colin Hay’s quarantine record is definitely the latter.
For I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself, the former front man for Men At Work (and yes, every reviewer is required to make that reference to his old band), recorded classics and one should-be classic from a slew of musicians that span several generations and genres. In the linear notes, Hay details hearing these songs growing up in his parents’ record store in Scotland, or – in the case of The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” on the docks getting on a boat with his family. The selection of covers ranges from the norm, The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” and “Norwegian Wood” to the inspired The Faces’ “Ooh La La,” and Del Amitri’s “Driving With the Brakes On.”
“This record was unplanned, but I’m glad it came to be. Gerry Marsden sadly had just died, and I was sitting around in the basement, playing major 7th chords, as you do, and I started singing “Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying” to myself. So, I switched on the machines with the pretty lights and recorded it. Just vocals and guitar.”
Hay sent what he had to his friend, producer and fellow musicians Chad Fischer, who asked for another, then another. When they had 10 songs, they figured they had enough for an album. Though there are several high points on the record, like the spirited take on “Ooh La La,” the album’s opening title track from Dusty Springfield, and a crushingly beautiful cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers To Cross,” bookend the record perfectly. A record that probably never would have happened, but thankfully it did.
