Friday Music Day

FMD: Proposed Covers

18 Comments

There's something about cover songs that really appeals to me. Probably the obvious: someone putting a new spin on a classic makes it fresh again. Or maybe it's the less obvious: like a Star Trek alternate universe, it lets you reimagine the world with things changed, but somehow still familiar?

Anyway, this week I thought it might be fun to talk about cover songs that you'd like to see happen.

To kick it off, I'd say Marilyn Manson covering The Police's "Every Step You Take" could be interesting. I'll see if I can think of others.

18 thoughts on “FMD: Proposed Covers”

  1. I love it when Willie Nelson covers a song; his phrasing & lyrical sensibility are completely his own, rooted in jazz as much as anything. I love sad songs, songs of longing, and anything that sounds like a Gram Parsons tune. Whether as a duet with Emmylou or on his own, I'd love to hear Willie sing "The Sweetheart of the Rodeo."

    I was thinking the other day that Phil Ochs' "Links on the Chain" is due for a modern cover.

    1. Willie Nelson's version of Coldplay's "The Scientist" is exactly what you're describing.

      I want to hear his melancholy version of Yeah Yeah Yeah's "Maps". Can you imagine Willie's take on "Wait, they don't love you like I love you"?

  2. 1. Gas “[untitled 3]” Pop
    2. Courtney Barnett “Avant Gardener” The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas
    3. Simon & Garfunkle “Hazy Shade of Winter”* Bookends
    4. Bitchin Bajas & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy “Your Whole Family Are Well.” Epic Jammers and Fortunate Little Ditties
    5. Bitchin Bajas & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy “Your Hard Work Is About to Pay Off. Keep On Keeping On.” Epic Jammers and Fortunate Little Ditties

    6. Underworld “Boy, Boy, Boy” Oblivion with Bells
    7. Ha Ha Tonka “Westward Bound” Death of a Decade
    8. Peter Gabriel “That Voice Again” So
        a. Snowy Owl “Male Bark Call” (Voices of North American Owls)
    9. Lupe Fiasco “Kick, Push” Food & Liquor
        b. Yellow-throated Vireo “Typical Short Scold Calls”* (Cornell Master Set)
    T. Johnny Cash “In My Life” American IV: The Man Comes Around
    E. Elza Soares “Maria da Vila Matilde” A Mulher Do Fim Do Mundo

    *Notes:
    3. My first memory of this song is the Bangles' cover. I may have heard the original before that, but never noticed it.
    b. This is mis-labelled. It's a song, not a scold. Yellow-throated Vireo songs are barely different than the generally more-common** Red-eyed Vireos, but I can usually tell the difference: Yellow-throateds are a bit slower, more relaxed sounding. They put fewer notes in their songs, and have fewer versions of their songs that they rotate through more quickly. Red-eyeds have been documented singing every five seconds all day long for thousands of songs per day, and they can have about 20-30 versions that they cycle through. Yellow-throateds have less than ten versions. If you hear the same song twice over five songs, or three times over 15, it's probably Yellow-throated.
    **though it varies by habitat and region. Red-eyes prefer wooded areas with less understory, while Yellow-throateds can be found more often in groves and mixed woodland/scrub/grassland areas.

  3. What's really great is when an imagined cover happens.
    I think I've had that twice, thought I don't know if I really dared to imagine them.
    Bonnie 'Prince' Billy covering Coil's "Ostia"
    Tracey Thorn covering Judy Garland's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"
    Both pretty much lived up to expectations.
    BPB is so mercurial in his vocal takes that if he were to cover it again it could be different (no wonder he's in to self-covers).
    Thorn's is an equal to the original, if more approachable.
    (Garland's a bit too lost in her thoughts: she's singing to herself; we're just lucky to eavesdrop on it. Thorn's singing to share her thoughts and feelings with us, for communion.)

    What would I most want to hear now? I'll have to think.

  4. I signed up for a Grammofy account yesterday, thinking I'd test drive the service. I selected the "At Work" playlist and was immediately rewarded: the San Francisco Symphony playing the third movement of John Adams' Harmonielehre, followed by a recent RPO recording of Ravel's Pavane pour under infante défunte, and then the fifth of Edgar's Enigma Variations. I'm kind of skeptical of "curated" streaming content, but the rest of the playlist was pretty strong & held together well. Services that primarily stream non-classical content rarely present performer/composer/track data well for classical works; Grammofy's UI is the best I've seen in this regard. I like that they calculate distribution of revenue according to duration of each track rather than simply gross streams, and that they pass 70% of their revenue to rights holders, which hopefully means the orchestras/performers are getting a better cut. If they can keep the playlists from getting too laden with classical standards, I might spring for the higher-tier plan.

    1. That sounds cool. My work computer speakers wouldn't be enough to make regular classical listening worthwhile. (So I use ambient like Gas when I need to not focus on it.)
      If I drove a lot and the mobile connectivity was good, maybe...

      I read that Arvo Pärt is the most-played living composer each year for like a decade running.
      I know he's definitely got a niche: sounding modern and "Classical", but not sounding "Modern Classical" (read: difficult, atonal, unpleasant).
      There are probably others around, but the presence of Pärt removes any market need for them (and the only ones I know of are soundtrack composers who can get too Romantic).

      1. I like Pärt quite a bit, too. I'd put Górecki in the same class, particularly anything he wrote after his modernist early days.

  5. Had a good conversation with the 13 year old about covers last night. She prefers Disturbed's Sounds of Silence to Simon & Garfunkel. I told her that this is my favorite version.

  6. 1. Someday, Someone -- Jeremy Messersmith -- Heart Murmurs
    2. Stir It Up -- Bob Marley & The Wailers -- Legend
    3. Barely Legal -- The Strokes -- Is This It?
    4. Child of the Moon -- Yung Wu -- Shore Leave
    5. Options R -- Wire -- Pink Flag
    6. Lost All Day -- Dinosaur Jr. -- Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not
    7. Thank You For Sending Me An Angel -- Talking Heads -- More Songs About Buildings And Food
    8. The Corners are Glowing -- Guided By Voices -- The Bears for Lunch
    9. It's A Hectic World -- Pavement -- Wowee Zowee
    10. Miracle Man -- Elvis Costello -- My Aim Is True

    B1. Friday I'm In Love -- The Cure -- Staring at the Sea
    B2. Mr. Soul -- Neil Young -- Decade

    I love covers. Not sure if I have a good potential cover, but I would like to see more things like Ryan Adams covering song-for-song Taylor Swift's 1989. Luther Wright and the Wrong's song for song cover of Pink Floyd's The Wall is cool too. More stuff like that. How about Japandroids taking on The Replacements Tim or Guided By Voices taking on the Beatles Revolver. That would be cool.

    1. Speaking of Ryan Adams' covers... I swear I once heard him covering "Driving Nails In My Coffin" but I cannot find any account of that song existing, anywhere. Indeed, I can't even find anyone else whose cover of that song I might reasonably interpret as being the song I thought I heard.

      So I guess I want to hear that as a potential cover.

  7. There was a period in the late 90s/early 00s where covers were getting a little overdone, probably falling out of the British chart singles rules where B-sides were needed to justify multiple versions of singles to boost sales and thus chart position.
    Travis's "Hit Me Baby One More Time" (1999) seves as an epitome of what I'm talking about. This might have been peak covers.

  8. Ooh, here's one. I'd love for a band like J. Roddy Walston & The Business or Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats to cover The Specials' "Enjoy Yourself" in particular, and really any second-wave ska "hit" generally.

  9. I'm listening to Julien Baker this afternoon because I'm a glutton for punishment . . . or something. I desperately need to update the playlist on my non-phone electronic device to reflect what I've actually been listening to lately and then I will once again have random-10 lists to share. I'm hoping that stating all this publicly will give me the motivation I need to do just that.

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