Gold dress, blue dress. Young woman, old woman. Yanny, laurel.
Ever listen to a song and convince yourself that your hearing something that isn’t even there? Better, have you ever wished you heard something so badly that you retroject your own experience of it when you play the song back in your head (and then get disappointed when you actually hear the song or passage, because your sonic fantasy isn’t there)?
A longstanding personal favourite of mine is little-known Turn the Page by the broodiful Chantal Kreviazuk. It’s not because it’s such a memorable song – it’s a postscript murmur that ends the album. Rather, there’s a voice harmony for the chorus that I absolutely adore, and I sing it out loud when I have my AirPods (which keep the cement from falling out of my ears), going for walks out in public around my neighbourhood, the needles slamming into the red on my personal brokenfilterometer.
Just one thing, though: that spellbinding voice harmony isn’t actually on the recording. Nor has Chantal (to my informed knowledge) ever embellished the song any way likewise in live performance (absent cameos by her husband Raine Maida, she often performs solo). I composed that brilliant counterpoint all by my lonesome, and, I do declare, it’s my favourite part of the song.
[ed. I’ve reached out to Chantal to ask her for a songwriting credit. I think she’s ghosting me. In fact, the follow-up album to this one is titled Ghost Stories. Co-inky-dink? I think not.]
Anyhoogles. There are three principal reasons why an artist will cover a song. In ascending order of noble intentions, they are: 1. to make money on someone else’s work (how and how much will vary by copyright jurisdiction); 2. to pay homage to one’s favourite artist and their music, and; 3. to re-frame an existing piece that’s been eating one’s ears from the inside out with their own true creative spirit.
Far beyond spraypainting The Great Self all over someone else’s hard work, a great cover happens when an artist hears a song as it really isn’t. There’s a, a thing that you hear in the song (or as the song), and you can never, not ever, not hear it that way. It can be a simple musical parameter – the texture, the rhythm, the tempo, the mode (don’t get me started on that again). It can involve just one particular passage, perhaps a crafty renovation of the chorus. It can be the grafting of a catchy hookline onto an otherwise faithful re-do. Or it can be a stripped-down wireframe of the song’s essence (and its alter-ego, a full-blown symphonization).
This themed thread will look at song covers that are so creatively rendered that they amount to a brand new piece of music. They don’t just re-compose everything but the original’s notes and words; they actually out-song the song they cover.
The fun begins on the morrow…
