Cover To Cover

It's been interesting to watch the cover songs of Gordon Lightfoot. One of them was by Billy Joel of Sundown. I hate to say it but the covers of Lightfoot don't do justice to the originals. What might be happening is that the recording itself makes the song. Some people intimately identify with recordings, which is one of the primary reasons that people like to hear cover music as close to the recording as possible. It's the recording that echoes in our heads, not the song itself being performed with just the voice and accompaniment. It's the emotion in the sounds draped around the musical framework of the song. Personally, I like radical re-arrangements and interpretations of music that express the core of the music, but even then, the songwriters might see it as inappropriate because they were there with the muse when they got the idea.

What's interesting about the evolution of ideas into recorded versions is that it is kind of a "confabulation", not unlike the re-telling of a dream, where you have some small fragments that get spun out over time, with one recording becoming its only manifestation--which is the one that gets covered--when in fact, if the artist re-recorded it, it might be something completely different. I like making different versions of new songs to see what they might be capable of and they can be vastly different from the original idea--like 10cc's I'm Not In Love, which originally had a bossa nova feel, then became a huge studio production, and is the one that plays in our heads. The song is good enough to be played with just an acoustic guitar or piano, but it seems odd given that the "big boys don't cry" bit is a sonic artifact that has no real musical equivalent. If you were to arrange that bit for a small ensemble, how would you do it? Does the vocalist, who might be a male, whisper the lyric, or is it "scored" and played by an instrument?

There was another cover (not Lightfoot) that I watched recently, which was Harry Styles' cover of Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi. Musically it seemed off-kilter because her music is so personal based on her unique guitar technique arising from alternate tunings, in combination with unique phrasing which can't be easily covered. But his cover of Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer is even better than Gabriel's because it captures its youth.

What's going to be interesting over the next decade is that guys like Billy Joel are going to be passing away and people will be covering him. It might also be the case where popular covers will be covered as a double-cover, and possibly deep-faked which will be the new kind of "Cover"