“Game Of Pricks” is arguably the best song on arguably the best Guided By Voices album, Alien Lanes. Inarguably, it has become a standard of sorts in recent years, one of the most common GBV songs to cover. (And a scan through our archives will show you indie artists cover GBV a lot.) Touché Amoré covered it with Joyce Manor’s Barry Johnson. Greta Kline covered it too. Ahead of the curve, Owen Pallett covered it way back in 2010. And now Sarah Beth Tomberlin has taken a crack at the same tune.
On Instagram, Tomberlin posted footage of herself performing a solo acoustic rendition of “Game Of Pricks,” adding a few beats in the verses and essentially turning it into a Tomberlin song. “stuck in my head so i had to learn how to play it in a very complicated (for me) picking pattern,” she writes in the caption. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you can hear it below.
