I put my Zune on shuffle at work today, and Aretha Franklin's cover of "Let it Be" came on. My boss hated it; remarking, among other things, that she was "singing it too fast," and that "this isn't the Beatles."
I complain about my boss a lot on this blog, because he and I have very different tastes in music, and even different basic ideas about what good music should be like. For him, the more mainstream music is, the better, and I don't mean better as in more to his tastes - the more mainstream it sounds, the more he feels that it represents good quality. He truly believes that bands that aren't on the radio aren't getting play because they aren't as good - conversely, if they were as good, they'd get played on the radio. I don't subscribe to this view.
Anyway, back to Aretha. I will say, her cover of "Let it Be" is ... idiosyncratic. Her phrasing is either before or after the beat, and the the whole song is uptempo. Basically she sings it like you might hear in a gospel choir. I like it, but it's a very different song than when Paul McCartney sings it. Now, part of what my boss didn't like about this music was its unfamiliarity - this can be especially unnerving for someone when it sounds kind of like something they know, but is clearly also very different. Kind of a musical uncanny valley.
But it got me thinking about cover songs in general. They tend to diverge in two different directions. Some people want a cover to be as transformative as possible (this partially explains the popularity of the punk-cover subgenre) and if the song is nearly unrecognizable, the better. Tori Amos Strange Little Girls is the perfect example. On the other hand, a lot of covers try to be very "true" to the source, and differ from it only in the attempt to put a performers fingerprints on it - i.e., the Beatles own cover of "Mr. Postman."
I don't think either of these is right or wrong, (even though sometimes toward the Tori Amos end of things you start to wonder why you even bother calling it the same song.) but it seems like most artists shoot for the middle - i.e. Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower".
To me, the truly great covers make you realize something about the song you didn't know before - Aretha's gospel "Let it Be" does this to a degree, but Hendrix's "Watchtower" made Dylan change the way he'd been performing it in concert.
Two of the modern examples I can think of come from Iron and Wine: "Such Great Heights," and "Waiting on Superman" - he truly transforms both songs, but it's in a way that it feels like he's stripped something out of the way - there was something in the songs that he discovered, and pulled out to show us.
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Yes, but Strange Little Girls is cool and it really is better than the original. Actually, I like most of that album, which if I remember, is an album of covers of songs originally done by men.
ReplyDeleteI think doing a cover is much like playing the Bach cello suites. There is no one right way to do it. You just have to own what you do, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It never works for every listener.
For better or for worse, you have to make a cover your own, whether that is highlighting the greatness of the song by leaving it alone, or adding your own special twist.
If you want to hear something that sounds to me like the equivalent of a cover of the Bach cello suites, listen to Paolo Pandolfo's version of the suites. He plays it on the viola da gamba, and plays more in the spirit of the suites than just the straight notes - he adds full chords, and extra voicings occasionally, but the dances jump up and move.
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