Riley is a digital marketing trainer and strategist in Toronto. He obsessively writes and talks about music and once had a classic rock radio show in university. His favourite cover of all time is Uncle Tupelo's version of the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog." He's also a movie fan, having seen approximately 4,400 films. You can follow him on Twitter @riley_haas.
The fourth single from R.E.M.’s ninth album Monster, “Strange Currencies,” is a little bit “Everybody Hurts 2.” It’s an atypical ballad driven by an arpeggio guitar part – almost soul – the time signature is the same, and the band almost dropped it from the album because of how similar it was to “Everybody Hurts.” It’s grungy like the rest of the album, but it’s still so similar in vibe. Maybe that’s one reason “Strange Currencies” didn’t do as well on the charts (except in the UK for some reason): it’s just too similar to casual fans.
Louisa Stancioff is a singer-songwriter from Maine who has been releasing songs for a couple of years and who put out her debut album a year ago. Now she’s covered this less-covered R.E.M. tune.Continue reading »
“Clap Hands” is the second track on Tom Waits‘ ninth album, Rain Dogs, the second album that got took him in far weirder directions than his more traditional singer-songwriter-with-a-jazzbo-flair early work. “Clap Hands” is typical of this then new sound, as it is powered mostly by marimbas, with the acoustic guitar buried in the mix, and features an arty guitar solo by Marc Ribot. (Curiously, the song does not feature clapping hands.) Though it is not one of Waits’ most famous songs, it does get its fair share of covers.
Country star Eric Church has a brand new album out. That album departs somewhat from his sound, and country more broadly. One pretty clear indication of that is that he not only covered Tom Waits on it, but he covered a particularly Waitsian song in “Clap Hands.”
Percussion is still a prominent part of Church’s version of the song, only this time it’s programmed drums, some percussive string stabs early on and, appropriately, processed hand claps. Church’s guitar is a little more prominent in the mix, for parts of it, but this is a much denser mix than the original. And that’s because Church has vastly expanded the instrumental palette of what was originally a relatively simple song. In addition to the acoustic guitar, percussion and vocal of the original Church adds a full orchestra and a gospel choir. There are electric guitar solos in both but the electric in Church’s version hangs around after the solo.
The result is something that is still unmistakably the Tom Waits song but filtered through an extremely different lens. Church’s voice remains pure country, and gospel singers and orchestra take the song to places Waits never would. (Well, 1970s Waits might have had the orchestra, but it would have sounded a lot more traditional than this arrangement.) It’s a neat cover that is both fairly faithful and also quite distinct at the same time.
“Trailerization” is a relatively new phenomenon wherein a classic song is given contemporary movie score treatment, usually for a film trailer to hype a new blockbuster movie. Often the song itself isn’t even in the movie but the cover or remix is just commissioned for the trailer. The reason it has become a popular advertising strategy is because of a belief that the familiarity of known lyrics will help the trailer stick in the minds of the audience.
Juliet Lyons is a new age/chillout musician who has been putting out music for nearly 20 years. Her music has routinely been used in soundtracks for both TV and film. Chris Wirsig is a prolific score composer working across media. The two have teamed up to cover George Michael’s/Wham!’s “Careless Whisper.”Continue reading »
Over 50 years after its release, and hundreds of songs later, “Heart of Gold” remains Neil Young’s biggest hit. It is his only #1 and far and away his most streamed song. As a result, it’s far and away his most covered song as well. But it’s not that often that it’s covered by a fellow songwriter of…well, similar repute.
Fiona Apple is, in many ways, the opposite kind of songwriter than Neil Young, at least in the sense that she is either nowhere near as prolific as Young—or at least far more careful as to what songs she will release. In a career spanning nearly 30 years, she has released only five studio albums. Young has released 45 in his nearly 60-year career doesn’t even count the archives releases including multiple other full albums he scrapped. But their careers do have some similarities. They are famous for being artistically uncompromising. As others have noted, early commercial success has helped both of them chart their own courses. And they have both, at times, had reputations for being prickly.
So even though Apple has waited nearly 30 years to record her own cover of a Neil Young song, there’s something fitting about it. Apple is a pianist so she replaces the guitar riff and the harmonica melody with her piano. She mostly sings the melody the same, making only tiny little changes. She’s accompanied by only drums and bass until the second repetition of the instrumental hook, where she’s joined by a string section echoing the pedal steel. She adds additional vocals for the final chorus.
It’s a faithful cover but it’s unmistakably Fiona Apple. She has indeed made the song her own.
A harrowing, dingy, noisy song about the DTs, “Waves of Fear” from Lou Reed‘s eleventh album The Blue Mask is one of his more uncompromising songs (which is saying something). It’s just Reed’s description of what it’s like to detox, with no varnish and no protecting the listener from the misery, with Reed almost spitting the lyrics. It’s combined with an extremely grimy and relatively noisy rhythm guitar part, followed by just a bonkers solo from former Voidoid Robert Quine. It’s a deep cup fora number of reasons.Continue reading »
John Cage‘s “4’33″” is one of the most infamous pieces of “music” of the 20th century. There are air-quotes around “music” because “4’33″” is only music in the broadest definition; Wikipedia even has a footnote defending their use of “composition” to describe it. The piece is infamous for what it requires of the performer: namely, not much of anything. The piece is ostensibly for piano though, in theory, any instrument could be used. The pianist walks out onto a stage, sits at the bench and then proceeds to close and open and close and open the lid of the keyboard at specific times, marking out the “movements.” The key part is that the performer never once plays a single note for the entirety of the four minutes and thirty-three seconds they sit at the piano.Continue reading »
