Jan 152025
 

Welcome to Cover Me Q&A, where we take your questions about cover songs and answer them to the best of our ability.

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Here at Cover Me Q&A, we’ll be taking questions about cover songs and giving as many different answers as we can. This will give us a chance to hold forth on covers we might not otherwise get to talk about, to give Cover Me readers a chance to learn more about individual staffers’ tastes and writing styles, and to provide an opportunity for some back-and-forth, as we’ll be taking requests (learn how to do so at feature’s end).

Today’s question:

What’s a cover that hits differently when the covering artist keeps the original lyrics?

Patrick Robbins

“Frank Mills” was one of the quieter moments of the Broadway musical Hair. Inspired by a Rave Magazine column, the lyrics find innocent Chrissie in search of a crush she loved and lost. No rhyming couplets, no chorus, and music that was almost as stream of consciousness as the words. It was a soft breath in the middle of the show’s raucous celebration of the ’60s.

When Evan Dando covered “Frank Mills” on It’s a Shame About Ray, he put that soft breath at the end of the record, wrapping up a short sweet album with a short sweet song. (This was before “Mrs. Robinson” got tacked onto the re-release.) He also sang, free and easy, the lines “I love him, but it embarrasses me / To walk down the street with him.” Keep in mind that this was 1992, when homophobia was still the default setting in America. Dando (who released “Big Gay Heart” the following year) sang words that could have been construed as controversial, and he kept them just as conversational as they’d been in the original. Just as confessional, too – but something else was being confessed now, and again, at a time when such a confession carried an element of danger.

I like to think that the Lemonheads’ “Frank Mills” gave pause to some of its audience. Hearing the song’s narrator out himself so nonchalantly may have been a guiding light for a questioning listener – so this is how it can be done. Evan Dando turned a little ditty into a bold statement, proving that boldness doesn’t have to do with volume, but with heart.

Curtis Zimmermann

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I became interested in cover songs in part because of my experience studying Shakespeare. I remember taking a class by a professor with a background in theater. With each play we studied, he would show us multiple examples of how different performers interpreted the material in various productions, which in turn changed how we viewed the plays.

As someone who obsessively listens to and writes about covers, I’m equally fascinated at how different artists can take the same source material and completely change everything about the song, just by the very nature of who they are. I can think of many instances where the covering artist’s race or gender completely upended my view of the song simply because they didn’t change the lyrics. Some favorites include: the Indigo Girls covering Neil Young’s “Down by the River,” the White Stripes covering Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” Nina Simone covering Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.”

In my view, one of the most striking examples is My Morning Jacket’s take on Erykah Badu’s “Tyrone.” Originally released on her 1997 live album, the track is considered by many to be Badu’s masterwork. “Tyrone” is the ultimate insult record as well as a cheating song. With the audience egging her on, Badu keeps telling her boyfriend she better “call Tyrone” to learn how to be a better man. Or, perhaps, she simply is telling Tyrone that he “better call.” It’s a fascinating play on words that keeps you guessing the whole time.

My Morning Jacket takes this word play a step further with their edgy, alt-rock cover, released on the compilation Learning in 2004. On the surface, the cover does everything it can to subvert the original. It takes a song by a black woman, presumably singing to a black man, and makes it a song about a white guy, singing to another guy.

Yet, at the same time it doesn’t. Whenever I listen to the cover I can’t help but think they’re actually just paying homage to Badu and not actually changing anything. Maybe they’re just having a little fun. Lead vocalist Jim James emphasizes the fact that his name appears in the song (coincidentally). Early in the track, Badu sings out a series of names–“Jim, James, Paul and Tyrone”–but when James sings it… well, you can’t help but get the self-referential humor. Whether the whole thing was a joke or a tribute or some weird combination of both, Badu was certainly happy to play along when she joined the band for a live performance in 2008.

In the end, similar to the studying of Shakespeare, it’s up to the listener to decide what My Morning Jacket’s true intentions were. Can a group of bearded white bros cover a song by a black woman and not change the meaning at all? Take a listen and decide. The answer might tell you more about yourself than the song.

Mike Tobyn

Both sides have done things that they are not proud of, but they will not back down, or accept fault, perhaps even to themselves. Bad things have been done to them by outside parties, taking sides for good or bad faith reasons. They could be, or were, physically (and initially emotionally) compatible, but now only the acrimony remains. But things force them to deal with each other every day. Each one of those days gives new reasons for the pain. How will it ever end?

Dolores O’Riordan was familiar with personal relationship problems, but when I heard her cover of “Go Your Own Way,” I could only think of one thing. Recorded before the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, after 30 years of the latest phase of the difficult history of the island of Ireland (it is still not even possible to agree on whether they were the “Irish Troubles” or the “British Troubles in Ireland”), O’Riordan brings the voice and sensibility that made “Zombie” a worldwide hit. The personal and political emotion of the version makes it difficult to muse too much on the drug-fueled First World Problems.

Tom McDonald

A while back I watched a video of k.d. lang singing “Help Me” at a Joni Mitchell tribute in 2000. I was caught off guard by the power of it. I mean, I knew the song, but never loved it, and I knew lang, but only in the abstract. I knew she was Canadian, mega-successful, openly queer–and someone I had never listened to.

Maybe it’s the power of suggestion, but with my limited knowledge of lang, I thought I heard in her version of “Help Me” a message to (or about) the queer community.

I felt it most clearly in the way she sings the lines, “We love our lovin’ / Like we love our freedom.” When Joni sings the passage, “we” and “our” refer only to herself and her new lover–the sweet-talking ladies’ man of the first verse. But when k.d. sings those same pronouns, it seems that she sings for a population, that she is making a kind of Queer Lives Matter statement.

Watch as lang comes to the phrase “like we love our freedom,” how she brings her hand to her heart and holds it there. It’s an emotional moment, and not just because she is so in touch with the song’s emotional core–it’s more than that. In the very act of singing so publicly, so openly, about sexual joy and personal autonomy, lang embodies freedom itself. And she queers Joni’s lyrics by singing them straight.

Seuras Og

Upbeat feminist anthem gets a morose re-reading from a male perspective, right? Well, no, actually, if surprisingly. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” as conceived by its writer, Robert Hazard, was conceived from the male viewpoint, a seemingly embittered observer of the ways of the fairer sex. And, if not embittered, certainly chastened. But it wasn’t Hazard who made it a hit, was it, with Cyndi Lauper seeing something a whole lot more between the lines. She set about transforming it into her own. And yes, she did change some of the lyrics, so as to give the femcentric spin.

Luckily we are not discussing the Lauper take on Hazard, as that would fall without the brief, but not so Laswell’s take on Lauper, which, using Lauper’s revision, gifts the song back into the mindset of a maudlin disappointed in love. And it is magnificent, Laswell possessing jut the right lugubriousness of larynx to eke every ounce of poignancy out the lyric. The simple keyboard accompaniment further gilds the wilted lily.

Hope Silverman

Shanice’s 1991 global mega-hit “I Love Your Smile” is effervescent to the millionth power (“La-di-da, twinkely-dee!”). It is one of the most bubbly, googly-eyed pieces of candy to ever grace the pop charts (“You dig?!”). It gushes joy from its every orifice (“Blow Branford blow!”), making it the perfect cover choice for heavy metal shred-monsters Goblin Cock. The band is a side project of Rob Crow, most famous as a founder of beloved indie band Pinback. All the members of GC (let’s just call ’em) use stage names. Rob Crow is, you guessed it, Lord Phallus.

The GC’s 2018 cover album Roses On the Piano is a sludgy, metallic thunderously-drummed love letter all the way through. The song choices are eclectic (Carpenters, Suburban Lawns, The Roches). But “I Love Your Smile” is its biggest crush by a mile.

This cover is delivered with unbridled joy. All the goofy-sweet bits from the original remain, including the giggling, the sighing and the charmingly awkward rap bridge (“my whole world is beautiful”). The cover’s sole lyrical change involves Lord Phallus swapping out Shanice’s name for his in the aforementioned bridge, as in “Lord Phallus is the one for you to be with.”

It is the furthest thing from mockery, right down to its perfectly shrieky guitar solo. GC’s “I Love Your Smile” comes from a place of starry-eyed love.

I adore this cover for a couple of reasons. One is that a grown man singing a song from the lovesick perspective of a teenage girl is hot and, in this case, just plain exhilarating. Lord Phallus is as excited to paint his toenails and buy a new black mini-skirt as Shanice ever was in the original. The other reason I love it has to do with something a bit deeper and more personal.

When it comes to covers, hearing pronouns and points of view left intact never feels like a novelty to me. As a queer person, it feels like being seen. And covers like this, that are so brazenly joyful and unashamed, are life affirming, no matter how seemingly fluffy or silly the song may seem on the surface.

Goblin Cock, I love your smiles.

Ray Padgett

Let’s be honest: A good 50% of Johnny Cash’s American Recordings repertoire could be used to answer this question. The implicit premise of that whole series, especially towards the end, was “Here’s a legend who is in the twilight of his life,” and the songs were chosen accordingly. “Bird on a Wire,” “Rusty Cage,” “Solitary Man,” and—most obvious of all—”Hurt.” These are all songs written by young men that, when sung by an aged Johnny Cash in his final years, sound like epitaphs. But I’ll pick a (slightly) less famous one that’s every bit as powerful.

John Lennon was 24 years old when he wrote “In My Life” but, if you just read the lyrics on paper, you’d assume they were written by a much older person. He later called it his “first real major piece of work” (then, even later, said it was crap, as he did with everything Beatles-related eventually). It fits so perfectly with Cash’s American Recordings project, it’s surprising he and Rick Rubin waited four albums in to record it. One YouTube commenter put it well: “The Beatles version is the one you play at the wedding, the Johnny Cash version is the one you play at the funeral.”

If you have a question you’d like us to answer, leave it in the comments, or e-mail it to covermefeature01(at)gmail(dot)com.

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  5 Responses to “Cover Me Q&A: What’s a cover that hits differently when the covering artist keeps the original lyrics?”

Comments (5)
  1. Dylan wrote it and it’s a beautiful expression of emotion, but Dylan,with his Blonde on Blonde rendition, distanced himself from the beauty and the emotion. Peter Keane does not.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggA3qH4MQzI

    Acoustic guitar rather than organ, slowed down, render its ties to Bach and baroque even more evident:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM1AWXCZhBA

    Completely different arrangement and time signature:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3tABhuXZo

  2. Both the original and this version are rooted in the blues, but each steps away in different direction:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjNEkm8TeqM

    And, yeah, I ‘m aware that my offerings thus far distance themselves from the originals by stripping them down and/or going acoustic. Lest you think I’m a one-trick pony:

    The folks at 3Sirens in East Nashville released “With Love 1 and 2”, both countrified re-imaginings of familiar 80s tunes. There’s is a fun site to noodle around on for covers aficionados (https://www.3sirens.com/music). Talking Heads flirted with country on True Stories, so perhaps this rendition ought not be so surprising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SqrC-98zG8

  3. Thanks for the Johnny Cash cover great feeling to the song

  4. This was one of my favorite articles ever on this site. The depth of the writing was superb as usual and the choice of songs was right on the money. Really enjoyed the songs and have bookmarked this article

  5. Not exactly a big deal but…the line in Freedy Johnston’s “The Lucky One” about “on the handles with my shirt off” is obviously going to land differently if covered by a female vocalist. No doubt why Mary Lou Lord changed the lyrics in her version to “on the handles where the 7s stop”…

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