Entertainment For Lively Minds
Song that can't be covered
Posted by Dadwardo on 30 December 2011 - 10:43am.
So it's early Friday night and some sort of godawful Island Record tribute programme is making a mockery of all sorts of great tunes. (As I type, they're in the middle of making a horrendous, embarrassing mess of "No Woman, No Cry".)
The question: what classic tunes, as above, should never, ever be covered? It's famously true of a lot of James Brown's repertoire, but what else? Your opinion, as ever, most appreciated.
- More from Dadwardo.
- Login or register to post comments
-
Strawberry Fields Forever.
Of course it has been but it really should be left alone. Wouldn't mind someone having a go at Revolution 9 though...
Check out...
The Shazam's version of Revolution 9. It's great!
Cracking cover,
bonkers to the power of ten - love it, thanks.
Also, check out
What?
What was the point of that? TR should know better.
I think
it was Todd having a bit of fun. Comes from an album titled Faithful with side one being (faithful) covers, and side 2 all original stuff. Works for me but understand your question as you would normally expect the artist to put their own stamp on it.
XTC did a truly faithful cover of Strawberry Fields as well, and here it is.
Dig out...
Dig out Laurence Juber's solo acoustic interpretation of SFF and get back to me. Stunning. Absolutely stunning, old bean.
Wow.
Didn't even know this existed. Just listened and quite knocked out. A class act indeed. Many thanks, Oktapod. Crikey, the stuff I learn here...
Obviously this sounds good
to my ears, you may think differently but you never know
Justin Currie "Strawberry Fields"
Is that the same
Laurence Juber, short term member of Wings?
Please Please Please
Let Me Get What I Want
Actually pretty well anything..
..that is a half decent Pop or Rock recording, suffers from any attempt to re-record it. Why is this the case? because the quality of the original recording, generally lies in its musicianship, production and execution. And its success is completely dependent on these things. Subsequently, its chord structure, rhythm and lyric (its "writing" in other words) are more likely to be misrepresented than improved on any attempt at a repeat. History shows us this repeatedly.
Agreed, Mark
but there are of course exceptions. Quite a number of Dylan's songs are actually improved by being covered - All Along the Watchtower being the most obvious.
Absolutely
Sophie B Hawkins version of "I Want You" is one of my favourite songs ever.
Yup.
Another great Dylan cover is Alan Price's To Ramona.
Yes there are exceptions of course
If you set out with the objective of improving a successful recording by covering it, Dylan would be a great place to start, you'd stand better odds. A good example of this point. Because one of the things that makes Dylan unique, are that his limited abilities as vocalist and musician are overshadowed to such an enormous extent by his best lyrics, that no one seems to care.
I agree with Marky
If I think of what I consider the greatest pop singles what most of them have in common is a unique, special sound that is key to what makes them great - certain sound textures and particular instrumental moments that were arrived at via the recording process rather than via the song-writing process before hand, though that aspect is also vital of course. That is one of the acheivements of pop as it was developed (to a great extent)in the sixties - to put the emphasis on how a record sounds, through interesting 'noises' that are invented and make a record stand out. Those qualities emerge through the process of making a record and can't really be done again convincingly with a copy except through starting from scratch, in most cases. Prior to the mid-sixties it was much more about a song that could be sold to various acts to use. There are exceptions and records that manage both things but I think that was the trend that has lasted.
Yes
I would argue it's really musicianship itself that makes certain records stand out.
The Beatles for example, sometimes quite deliberately, played in a naive way. But they felt while they were playing, and it's this genuine feeling that communicates on the recordings themselves. Expression in other words. This is something that can't be learned, musicians either have it or don't.
Musicianship is in also very much in good or bad Production. And the achieved quality of the overall tone. Very subtle things to do with EQ, volume and texture. The Simon and Garfunkel documentary was interesting recently - you saw how hard they worked on what they referred to as "echo" effects. Overall space in the sound. They experimented with playing in different rooms, playing in different ways to achieve different qualities until they found something that would work. All very subtle stuff.
All great records have this is common. The easy world of Digital post production does us no favours. Unless it's done with taste an subtlety of course. And I talk as someone who works in another field doing exactly that.
Christine Collister attempted a version of Nick Drake's
"Black-Eyed Dog". For me, that song is more or less uncoverable.
Song Ownership
It's funny about cover versions isn't it, it never used to be a problem for different singers to sing the same songs. There were definitive versions but the song was the thing. Then the likes of The Beatles and Dylan come along and there's that shift, where the personality of the writer becomes a part of the song and becomes the dominant part of things.
Although Bacharach/David songs have the writers personalities all over them, and yet still become workable by lots of different singers. Strange.
Never say never
Whilst it's true that the better the original, the more disappointing the cover is likely to be, I prefer to take an optimistic stance: almost by definition we cannot conceive how someone could match (or better) the original, but that just means that it's possible that someone else's imagination could indeed do the inconceivable.
And of course the best covers aren't necessarily "better" than the originals, but go off in a different direction, eg the example I always quote of superlative covers: Laibach's take on the Let It Be album.
But surely
X Factor proves every week that originals can be improved on. Acts regularly 'make that song their own'.
It's alright, coat already on and head bowed in disgrace.