Dangling Conversations

Posted 27 Oct, 2005 at 20:19 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

So what does make a good cover? Here are some songs that (I feel) exemplify the breed.

All Along the Watchtower (Jimi Hendrix): The canonical example of a cover that's better than the original. Bob Dylan wrote this one -- the evocative lyrics and the foreboding tone are all Dylan -- but Hendrix brought it to life. (And Dylan even agrees; I heard that after the Hendrix release, Dylan started to perform the song less like his original conception and more like a fusion.) Jimi brings two things to this song: his fabulous guitar work, and a passion to the vocals that contrasts sharply with Bob's slight detachment.

Boyz-n-da-Hood (Dynamite Hack): West Coast gangster rap done in the style of the Everly Brothers, more or less. The original NWA track is pretty seminal; Dynamite Hack (a punk-lite band that had their 15 minutes) subvert it wonderfully with plucked acoustic guitars and occasionally soaring harmonies. Possibly the best example of "cover as novelty" I've heard.

Downtown Train (Everything but the Girl): Most people from our generation associate this song with Rod Stewart; actually, its first appearance was on Tom Waits' Rain Dogs. The original is hard to beat -- Rockin' Rod doesn't even come close -- and EBTG doesn't even try: their moody duet hits a different tone than Waits' savage isolation: still lonesome, but wistful where old Tom's despairing.

Everybody Knows (Concrete Blonde): You might remember this from the soundtrack to Pump Up the Volume. It's originally a Leonard Cohen song, driven by a steady, relentless tempo and delivered in Cohen's usual half-declaiming style. Concrete Blonde speeds it up and smooths it out, and in doing so refines the insinuation and the biting wit of the original. (There's also a version by Don Henley, which is far less interesting.)

Mad World (Gary Jules): This one's come up before on this site, and I have little to add to prior commentary. Tears For Fears wrote and performed it first, and it sounds like any other Tears For Fears song. Jules turned it into something sweet and sad, far removed from the slightly preachy synth-pop of the original.

Run Run Away (Great Big Sea): Tight and fast: two adjectives that describe the opening track to GBS's major label debut, which coincidentally do not describe the "glorious glam" approach of the Slade original. A marvellous rendition, and a great way to kick off an album.

The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead (Crash Test Dummies): This one's a bit of a split decision for me: I like the Dummies' woman's delivery much more than the XTC original, and I like the faster tempo. I think the loss of a verse weakens the narrative, though, and the guitar in the cover doesn't quite have the crunch of the original. Still, an excellent rendition and one well worth seeking out.

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Posted 25 Oct, 2005 at 16:09 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

As a starting point, let me throw out the following guideline, which you should feel free to deconstruct or rip into or whatever: a proper cover should have two things going for it:

1. It should bear the stamp of the performing artist, as much as possible;
2. It should retain the virtues of the "original" version, as much as possible.

Now one can record a cover which fails to meet one or both of these criteria, and still have an adequate song; but true cover greatness, I feel, requires the above strictures.

Among the songs which fail #1 are the note-for-note covers: trying to recreate the original version as much as possible, whether out of devotion for the subject or more mercenary concerns. For instance, you may remember a Toronto singer named Allanah Myles, who had a big hit (in Canada at least) called "Black Velvet". This was covered by an American country singer -- the two were on the charts at the same time -- and the cover version was almost identical to the original. What's the point?

Sixpence None the Richer covers fail in this regard: their versions of "There She Goes" and "Don't Dream It's Over" are fairly pleasant light listening, but remain to close to their sources... and quite frankly, the Las and Crowded House, respectively, did it better. The Letters to Cleo version of the Cars' "Dangerous Type" (from the soundtrack to "The Craft") is note-for-note with the original down to the vaguely annoying little synth figure after each chorus, and is saved from mediocrity only by the Cleo singer's voice being somewhat more pleasant that Rick Ocasek's.

The second criterion's a little harder to gauge, since one has to separate the song from the singer; for some songs this is impossible, and so effective covers for these songs -- that still allow for the performers' own styles -- are almost unimaginable. (Many of the songs on the newest Tom Waits album, for instance -- without Waits' delivery and the Marc Ribot guitar work, they would be much paler, sadder things.) A few punk/ska-style covers I've heard go too far in this respect; they manage to wrest the song into their genre of choice, but the result ends up sounding either generic or just odd.

(Of course, both of these are subjective; I find the Quicksand version of "How Soon is Now?", originally by the Smiths, to be too far from the tone of the original and without the same brooding melancholy; the Love Spit Love version is too close to the original, with the changes mostly being Pro Tools-style overprocessing. Others will no doubt disagree.)

So those are the rules of the game, at least for now. I've mostly talked about covers that I don't like; next installment I'll get to some that I do.

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Posted 21 Oct, 2005 at 21:21 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

Because I clearly don't post enough about the music in my life...

Cover songs in modern pop music are an interesting phenomenon, because they're something of a throwback. Time was, a popular song was not just for the people but of the people: you heard it being sung on your wireless set, and you could go into town or downtown the next day and the music stores were selling copies of the sheet music. It was expected that a good song would be done by multiple artists, each having their own take on it.

Rock music was born into an age of recording technology, though, and all of a sudden the idea of ownership of a song became... relevant? Conceivable? Between that and the rock mythos of individualism, it gradually became the norm for an act to perform (and record, of course) its own original songs, rather than just performing cover versions of others' works.

(This was a gradual process: much of the Beatles' first couple of albums consisted of songs written by others, and of course the whole industry of white people playing rock started out with producers putting together groups of bright-eyed boys to cover songs by black artists... slightly cleaned up, for the most part. Bill Haley and the Comets' version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" doesn't make a great deal of sense lyrically, mostly because the majority of sexual references in the original verses were bowdlerized into nonsense.)

So now when an artist does a cover -- particularly, when they record a cover -- it's something special. It's a tribute of sorts.

Next week I'll be writing intermittently about specific covers: what works, what doesn't, when a cover beats the original version, and why "Master of Puppets" is so perfectly suited to the right kind of cello quartet. If you've got suggestions for exactly what you'ld like me to talk about (or not), feel free to leave them in the comments. Or, you know, just babble randomly as is the blog-standard across the world. It's all good.

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Posted 18 Oct, 2005 at 17:01 by matt in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

John Scalzi's latest book's been released on this continent: The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies. Among other things, he gives a list of what he considers to be The Canon: 50 sci-fi must-sees. As such things do, this has transmongrified into a blogthing: bold the ones you've seen.

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