If You're Gonna Do It, Do It Right

As threatened, here's a whole post full of covers. It seems as though several new ones pop up in my feeds every day. I think I might be getting cover fatigue. Why should I be the only one?.

I was about to make some fatuous point about the way the worldwide web and music streaming services have shoved people doing other peoples' songs to the forefront of the culture but then I realized it was twaddle. It's been like that forever. The one really big difference now, in the days of the internet, is the speed with which it happens. 

It used to be that you'd go see a band and they'd come out for the encore and do some song by someone else you never expected them to even know, let alone cover, and you'd feel blessed and privileged to have been there and seen it. Now, every time any band covers any song by anyone even once, it's online in a dozen shaky phone saves before the band are even back on the bus. And if it's a half-way well-known band there's a squib on the music news feeds so everyone hears about it.

Plus you soon realize that band played that song on every fricken date on the tour so now it doesn't seem quite so magical after all. Ditto the endless albums of collections of curated covers by famous, semi-famous and wish-they-were famous artists of other famous or more often cult-famous bands and singers, not to mention the obligatory "my favorite songs or at least the ones we could afford the rights for" covers albums by acts maybe not quite at the top of their careers or conversely so at the top of their careers no-one can stop them indulging their every whim... 

...and the YouTube channels and radio stations that have everyone who comes in to do a set of originals also do a cover (Looking at you, TripleJ and Live Lounge...) and the bands and artists that make an entire career out of doing nothing but weird covers of unlikely songs (That'll be you, Nouvelle Vague, Postmodern Jukebox, Puddles Pity Party...)

So, yeah, there are a lot of covers. And yet, no matter how many there are, how glutted the market, a really good cover never fails to amaze and delight. I have a couple of dozen new or new-to-me covers in my covers folder right now, all gathered in the last month or so. It's too many for one post but we might get through half of them. I just have to make sure it's the better half.

Dog Days Are Over - The Last Dinner Party

 (Florence and the Machine cover)

Let's begin with the band of the moment. After a lengthy and extremely well-managed build-up, the debut album is finally with us and it's breaking sales records. There's a lot of hype and a deal of suspicion about Last Dinner Party but screw all that. The performances speak for themselves.

I've never been much of a Florence fan although she's always been popular in this house. I do like a couple of her songs, though and this is one of them.

It also gives me the opportunity to mention something really obvious about covers that I probably don't always emphasize enough, namely that for a cover to work as a cover you really do need to be pretty familiar with the original. Otherwise it's just a song. If they'd covered pretty much any Florence and the Machine song but this or Kiss With A Fist, I wouldn't even have known it was a cover without someone telling me.

This time, I think just about everything I've picked is so well known that shouldn't be a problem. Then again...

One Of Your Girls - The Last Dinner Party 

(Troy Sivane cover)

Case in point. I've never heard the original of this. I want to now, though. That's something a good cover of a song you don't know always does - makes you want to go listen to the original. Partly to compare, partly just to know. I always want to know.

Come to think of it, I probably should always include a link to the original. Or to the version that's being covered, since sometimes what you're hearing is someone's cover of someone else's cover. Hang on a moment - let me just go back and retro-fit a link to the original on that first one...

Okay. We're good!

What I Was Made For - Troy Sivane 

(Billie Eilish cover)

 

No excuse for not knowing this one. How many times has this song turned up in a post here, now? Gotta be four or five. I'd bet it won't be the last, either. 

There are a few ways to do a cover:

• You can take a very well-known song and do it very differently, which can be either genius or hubris or, in the case of transposing an upbeat, cheerful song into a minor key and playing it at half the original tempo, or taking a slow, sad song and punking it up, incredibly clichéd. 
• You can - and far, far too many people do - take a well-known song and do it exactly the same as the original, like it was karaoke night at your local bar and there was a prize at the end. 
• You can take an obscure song and do it however you like, same or different, because everyone will think it's yours anyway, unless you tell them. 
  

Or you can do it the hardest way of all, which is to take a great song, sing it straight, and still hope to make it seem like it was worth doing and you brought something new. Congratulations, Troy. It was and you did.

Barbie Girl - Janet Devlin 

(Aqua cover)

And now, in a practical demonstration of why you should never listen to anything I say, here's an upbeat song re-framed as a slow ballad in a minor key that's the very antithesis of cliché. Instead, it opens up the original, revealing a raw interior I, for one, never realized was there. 

I mean, come on! Did you? I've heard Aqua's Barbie Girl a thousand times. I've always loved it. It's a happy, bouncy, singalong nursery rhyme with a glam sensibility and a mindless refrain, made for bawling ironically when drunk. Isn't it?

No, apparently not. I'm ashamed to say that until I heard this cover, I'd never really listened to the words before. And, yes, Janet Devlin has, as she says in the notes on YouTube, given the lyric a bit of a re-write, but after I heard her reading I went and read the original lyric and she's done no more than change the emphasis to bring out the dark desperation already there, trapped in the Aqua original. 

That's what a really good cover can do. Open up the original so you see it afresh. I have several more examples. Here's a good one.

 Super Trouper - The Japanese House

(ABBA cover)

I don't like ABBA. I have never liked ABBA. I'm as sure as I can be I never will like ABBA. Consequently, I have never really listened to the words of any of their irritatingly chirpy little ditties. I assumed, if I ever thought about it at all, that they'd be as dimly facile as the infuriatingly catchy melodies. 

Obviously, I was wrong. I won't say this cover opened my eyes to ABBA's virtues the way Sonic Youth's incandescent, revelatory version of Superstar revealed to me the sheer majesty, tragedy and genius of Karen Carpenter that had previously been hidden behind the glare of her public image, but it's certainly gone some way to make me take the Swedish legacy act a little more seriously. Or at the very least, to listen to what they're actually singing about.

Lose Yourself - Kasey Chambers 

(Eminem cover)

 

While we're on the subject of incendiary covers...

 

This is over eight minutes long but I insist you listen to it all the way through. It builds and builds until the catharsis of the release comes as a glorious explosion. This is a prime example of taking a song so perfect in its original incarnation it seems impossible to match let alone better and then doing it anyway.

 

Not that I'm saying Kasey does it better than Eminem. Not better, any more than Tori Amos' cover of Bonnie & Clyde is better. In each case, it's just better that both versions exist. Together they are more. 

 

Eminem is a legend for reasons and one of those reasons is his storytelling. All good stories thrive in the telling and Kasey Chambers knows how to tell a story. That's all.

Fade Into You - American Football 

(Mazzy Star cover)

 

There are songs no-one can cover and there are songs everyone thinks they can cover and all too often they're the same songs. No-one should cover Fade Into You. No-one can hope to match Hope. 

 

Unless...

Fade Into You/Lover - Suki Waterhouse

Mazzy Star/Taylor Swift cover

 

Or ...

 

Seriously, if you can do it that well and you have such great ideas for the visuals or you can make those kinds of connections... y'know what? Go for it.

 

Sweet Jane - (Hardly Strictly) Bluegrass

(Velvet Underground cover)

 

There are a lot of Velvet Underground covers. Really far too many. And of all the classics in the Velvets' back catalog, Sweet Jane has to be the most covered of them all. I once made an entire C90 cassette of Sweet Jane covers and that was in the 90s, when I didn't have YouTube to search them out for me. I didn't need it. I had enough on vinyl and CD already. Right there in my house!

That was about thirty years ago. How many of the things do you imagine there are now? Who'd imagine there'd be anything new to do with the old chestnut? Well, I guess you could get a bunch of bluegrass musicians with banjos and mandolins to back Chuck Prophet from Green on Red and see how that turned out...

I'd say it turned out just fine.

Flowers - Bowling For Soup

(Miley Cyrus cover)

Now we're out of the woods! Bring on the fun stuff!

I love Bowling For Soup. I particularly love the way they just go on and on being Bowling For Soup, never trying to be anything different or cooler or more respectable. Really a lot like Miley, now I come to think of it...

 

 

Intergalactic - ATARASII GAKKO! 

(Beastie Boys cover)

Some covers just feel inevitable.

Now all I need is for Atarashii Gakko! to cover Death To The Apple Gerls and my life will be complete.

Blue Skies - Lana del Rey

(Irving Berlin cover)

I may have been a tad sniffy about a few of Lana's covers in the past - I really don't like her version of Blue Velvet but then it's a very dull song - but she's done some absolute corkers, too. This is just wonderful. A complete re-imagining of a song so old and tired you might have thought it would be cruel to wake it up.

For once, I've had to attribute it to the songwriter, not the original performer, because honestly I have no idea which of the many recorded versions of this is reckoned to be the original. The true original version was by Belle Baker, who first sang it in an all-but forgotten musical called Betsy but as far as a cursory google search will tell me, she never set it to shellac or whatever they were using back in 1926.

I say we all agree this is the definitive version now and leave it at that. And the same for this post. I got half-way through the pile and I think I used all of the best ones so it would only be downhill from here if I carried on.

  

Okay, granted I didn't get to give you Rick Astley's take on Yes's Owner of a Lonely Heart but you can't have everything, now, can you?

I'll maybe save that for next time. Because there will be a next time. It's not like people are going to stop making covers any time much before the heat-death of the universe...