Creative Covers # 1

Cover versions are only as good as their interpreter's vision. By that I mean their ability to imbue someone else's work with their own personality, style and emotions. By simply parroting off another's song verbatim even if pitch perfect, the song is inevitably inferior to the original. It communicates nothing, apart from implying that the performer has nothing to say himself.
              Truly great cover versions are not really covers at all but new songs in themselves- they may use the same chords and structures as the originals, yet in tone and meaning they are changed beyond recognition. One artist's song of praise can be another's lamentation. Joy can become despair in the hands of another. It all hinges on their ability to inhabit the song, the ability that we, as listeners do unconsciously, each time we hear a song we love.To inhabit, to haunt, to occupy the vessel of the song. This subjectivity is what is great about art, and songs especially, being inherently unstable and malleable.
             There are countless songs which could fit this criteria, yet the one which sparked the idea was Elliott Smith's version of Big Star's 'Thirteen'.
             On the posthumously released New Moon, a fecund collection of offcuts from throughout the troubled bard's career, the song comes over as a simple almost parenthetical conversation the artist is having with himself. With just a guitar and vocals, Smith's take has none of the polish of Big Star's original version. Yet with the fragile intimacy of his voice he manages to transform the gentle wistfulness of the original into a lover's desperate plea.
  It's easy to see what attracted Smith the the song. It's a slice of classic, understated songwriting.The melody perhaps too conventionally pretty to be a Smith original, but the lyrics suit his exquisite sensitivity. They play to his outsider sensibility. The line "would you be an outcast for my love", becomes especially poignant, transforming what could be read as tenuous optimism in the original, into a yearning from a wounded lover at odds with the world and everyone around it-"tell your dad get off my back". The romanticism of the song becomes something tragic, as if Smith knows too well what the answer to the question will be, and the futility of his asking.
            It's also a perfect example of the show not tell aesthetic, every detail combining to the overall picture. So spontaneous sounding, yet beautifully crafted. This is why the sparseness of Smith's take lends itself beautifully to the song. It helps create the intimate illusion that we are eavesdropping on Smith's fresh thoughts: that he is the lover. There is always this slightly uncomfortable sense that Smith's songs are a part of the very core of his being. Just a cursory glance at some of the footage on you tube of him shows a man possessed while playing. Impelled to perform from the powerful emotions that no doubt led to his tragic demise.
              Despite the inevitable confusing and overlap between artist and man, it is futile to look at Smith's oeuvre in light of his suicide. As tempting as it is to morbidly pore over his songs as if a kind of slo-mo post mortem, this is unhealthy. And it's an injustice to the songs, implying that they are only fascinating as a glimpse into mental illness, only interesting because he died (which is patently not true). So as awful a footnote his death is, it is but that: a footnote. It is more worthwhile to separate the songs from the life and celebrate them for the glimmering pearls of beauty they are, of how his life produced these in spite of the suffering, not because of it. How it's a boon that this guy hung around long enough to produce a body of work that is now a solace for anyone experiencing a tough time. Just a shame he couldn't work out his own troubles.
           So (apologies for the digression), a worthy start to a new subsection on the site, I feel. Here the artist puts something into the song that definitely was not there before. Using it as a vessel for translating his own turmoil and experience, as we all do when something moves us. Thus making the music more than just a series of notes or sound vibrations, making it mean something.
                       
        

Obviously not the same version as that on New Moon, though appropriate in light of the discussion I feel.


                      



        

The President's Dead

Conspiracy theory or not, today will be a day to remember. The day Obama declared Osama no more.
            It made me think of an Okkervil River song which quite beautifully captures the "what were you doing when" moment that events like these inevitably produce. So out of the blue and seemingly portentous, yet ultimately, just one insignificant life.
            What Will Sheff, songwriter for Okkervil River, does brilliantly in "The Presidents Dead", is to capture the microcosm in an event of magnitude (the macrocosm). The songs narrative zones out from the present to the narrator's future self looking back on this day in "lets say 30 years" on, noting accurately and beautifully what the human memory really records: sensory experience. No lumbering political message or diatribe; just the "eggs on the plate and the bacon hissin' ",  with "spring on the wind." It's the sights and smells that really shape our experience and how an event is recorded in our minds. And it is events like these that, I feel, give our lives shape, or at least the semblance of it.
 I mean, who didn't flinch today with the 'news' that it was nearly 10 years since 9/11. Ten years..... God! So regardless of their political significance, or lack of, these events serve as kind of pesonal bookends and landmarks. As, indeed, do songs. So in a way its a kind of meta-song; a song about itself.      
                     There is also the unexpected empathy for the individual; the man, not the president. The life lost no matter how misspent that life was. "The early obits say he was a good man, and you cant argue with that, not today you cant." This is where todays events aren't obviously relevant, (who can label, from a western perspective at least, Bin Laden "a good man"!), but nevertheless, a man he was. I think Sheff was envisioning a presdent like Bush or Nixon being assasinated, and these sentiments are spot on. It takes a cold hearted person to rejoice at another humans death.
                                   Anyway its a fantastic song, and its worth checking out the lyrics too.               
See it performed live along with "Black", probably their most accesible song, in quite shambolic footage here.

Radiohead's best song.end of.

The recent release of Radiohead's eighth LP has got me listening to their back catalogue again. Back to a time before Yorke and co became completely immersed in electronica, and increasingly outre sounds. This isn't to say Radiohead's later output is any less than brilliant, I just feel that the band reached their zenith with the twin peaks of The Bends and OK Computer. These albums transcended the drab brit pop of their peers, with intense, intelligent, truly epic guitar music.
                   If The Bends was a giant leap forward from Pablo Honey, OK Computer was a paradigm shift. Sonically, the band went to a different plane, there was just so much more going on on every level: lyrically, musically, and rhythmically. Anyway, this album has been rightly lauded, coming top of "greatest album ever" polls with  almost boring regularity, to such an extent that its greatness has become a kind of cliche.So I will say no more about the album as a whole, just one song. Let Down.
             This is without a doubt my favourite Radiohead song. It can be read as a comment on the emptiness of modern consumerist living, mortality, motion sickness, or just the essential pointlessness of life generally. Cheery stuff then, I hear you sigh. Well, yes, actually, not to be perverse but i find the whole thing mesmerising and, especially the second half of the song (from about the three minute mark), defiantly life affirming.
      As the drums get more and more complex and Yorke increasingly emotional, it's as if the song enacts what it describes and truly "grows wings;" leaving the monochrome everyday behind in a glorious crescendo of noise. The "wings twitch" image always reminds me of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, transformed, just like Yorke's voice, from the mumbling sullen first verse, to the translucent urgency of the ending coda. The second half of the song has a liberated feel, like a kind of letting go; an acceptance of our state perhaps, or simply a successful escape from it.
                                  Regardless of the meaning, the result is a song of shimmering beauty. "Hysterical and useless" we may be, but if capable of making sounds like this, perhaps life is worth living after all.
And if Yorke's soaring falsetto doesn't give you the goosebumps then check yourself  for a pulse.......