DJ Shadow – This Time (I’m Gonna Try It My Way)

When I first wrote about This Time (I’m Gonna Try It My Way) by DJ Shadow it was as an aside in my post on Baby Charles’ cover of I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor (they had covered This Time as well). But after listening to it properly a couple of days ago I’ve started to realise just how good it is.

This Time (I’m Gonna Try It My Way) sounds absolutely nothing like most DJ Shadow tracks, or at least none on his first couple of albums. Rather than being a melange of samples & beats, it’s a fully fledged bit of 21st Century soul – kind of like a Zero 7 track released on Stones Throw Records: soaring strings, plaintive vocals, an utterly organic sounding beat – This Time has the lot. I seem to remember ingnoring The Outsider, the album This Time was on, when it first came out but may now have to re-evaluate that decision.

As I’ve also mentioned elsewhere This Time (I’m Gonna Try It My Way) is also interesting because of the fact that the rather lovely video you can see at the top of this post can’t see here because the numpties at Universal don’t want me to promote their content, was chosen after a competition asking people to submit a video for the track. I’ve put a load of them below of which my favourite is the one at the top – for some reason the clips of open roads on a sunny day just seem to go perfectly with the rather wistful nature of This Time. I’m obviously not the only person to think so as quite a few of the tracks seem to involve journeys of one sort or another.

Whatever the case, considering that the winner of the competition received just £1,000 (probably less than the catering bill for a normal video) and they received over 200 entries, they must have considered the competition a success. Sadly, as far as I can tell the same can’t be said of the competition being organised to find new versions of the video for Wylie’s new single Money In My Pocket (again with £1,000 as a prize).

I can’t find anywhere on the microsite that’s been created for the competition detailing where submissions can be found, or even how they should be entered. And judging by the fact that I can only find one video on YouTube which might be an entry I guess that I’m not the only one who’s struggled. Then again the origina’s pretty funny, as is the version which has Gordon Brown miming the lyrics, both of which you can see below. I guess so many people have done competitions like this now that even in a recession people don’t want the money in their pocket that much.

Hat-tip to Andy for the Wylie video.

4 comments

  1. Hello!

    Thanks for the post! I found it because I was trying to find information about who covered who and who wrote it first. (DJ Shadow or Baby Charles)

    I have the Baby Charles album and they credit themselves as writing the song. Is it possible that DJ shadow was covering Baby Charles? Just wondering. Cheers!

  2. I’m pretty sure that it was written by DJ Shadow – it was on his album The Outsider, which came out in 2006, whilst the Baby Charles album wasn’t released till 2008.

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