For the foreseeable future, I am planning to blog about the songs I have chosen to cover. Five songs have already been released; they can be heard at https://music.apple.com/us/album/all-covered-up-ep/1690240415.

You know how sometimes you just hear a song over and over again till it starts to play on a loop inside your mind? George Ezra’s “Budapest“, the first of the five songs on my five-song EP “All Covered Up” (linked above), was that kind of song for me.

In 2015, the year after Ezra released the original version of the song, I began working in a restaurant which shall not be named here. Said restaurant had its own software which played music from a pre-selected list of songs. Most of them were midtempo pop or rock numbers, and “Budapest” was one of those.

It’s a catchy little number, no doubt about it. I found the lyrics a bit boastful at first – “look at all these awesome things I have, but I’ll take you over any of them” – but that impression faded over time. The thing about the original recording, though, is that it is fairly plain. The chord structure is extremely simple, and in my mind that warrants perhaps a bit more complex of an arrangement. So, in my head, I gradually began working on one!

The vocal harmonies were fairly easy to come up with. The “ah-ooo-bop-di-dit” in the chorus is my little tribute to The Beach Boys’ “This Whole World“, which used a very similar vocal chant. I’ve always loved the idea of starting a song out simple and gradually building it up, verse by verse and chorus by chorus, before scaling it back at the end – and that’s exactly what I did here. While “Budapest” is the first song on my EP, I actually decided to include it, then recorded it, almost at the last minute – while “Sweet Pea“, “My Sentimental Melody“, and “Souvenir” had been in progress for about a year before their release, “Budapest” took just a little over a month from start to release.