Though it was released a decade and a half into his career, “Addicted to Love” is Robert Palmer‘s most iconic song. It is also, unsurprisingly, his most covered song with basically twice as many covers as his next most popular. Of course, so much of the popularity of the song comes from the famous music video.
Barry Gottlieb, known as Mad Dog on the internet, is a humorist and novelties producer who has been active in music on and off over the decades, briefly performing in some new wave bands in his native Richmond in the early 1980s, for example. mad/no/mad is his latest music project, with the first album composed almost entirely of cover songs of hits from the 1970s and ’80s.
The cover begins with a muted guitar and a vaguely country-ish spoken-sung vocal, punctuated by occasional percussion. But for the second line of the verse, there’s a little bit more instrumentation. The pace is laid-back and there’s some swing to it. For the chorus the instrumentation is a little denser. But it’s only for the second run-through of the chorus that there are any backing vocals and the horns – or keyboard facsimiles – don’t come until the coda.
How tongue-in-cheek this all is depends very much on the listener’s attitude, as Gottlieb never quite winks with his vocal delivery and, if you don’t know anything about him, this appears like an entirely sincere pseudo talking country lounge cover. (And based on a live performance he gave of another cover, he seems sincere.) Whether or not it’s a joke, it works surprisingly well as a serious cover, completely avoiding the ’80s sheen of the original.
