what she said - On Cover Songs

Cover songs are a seriously difficult undertaking. The goal is to make the song unique to the cover artist, while invoking and possibly improving on the original. Personally, I love cover songs. When done well they open up a new interpretation of the song. Snow Patrol's cover of Beyonce's Crazy in Love really ramps up the creepy obsessiveness sanitized by the bubblegum pop of the original arrangement. Johnette Napolitano's is bitterly impassioned on Concrete Blonde's cover of Leonard Cohen's pessimistic but accepting Everybody Knows. And Taken by Trees's haunting cover of the awesome Guns N' Roses ballad Sweet Child O' Mine is one of my faves ever. They all kinda do different things, some things better than the original (Darren Criss's amazingly heartfelt performance of Cough Syrup trumps Young the Giant) and some things just so different that you love it all on its own and for other reasons than the original (Dynamite Hack's preppy, surprisingly cracktastic cover of Eazy E's Boyz in da Hood).

I recently listened to two limp covers of Rhianna's We Found Love. One was sung by Bat for Lashes and the other was by Jessie J. Loads of people like the those covers, and that's fine. I adore Bat for Lashes's song, Laura, but there was really something missing from both renditions. Where they went wrong? Both covers reduced the song to a kind of soulful ballady love song. I suppose if you're just looking at the lyrics We Found Love is a soulful, treacly ballad. But it's in the arrangement that we realize that We Found Love really is not that song. There is a lot of anger and desperation captured in the frenetic and insistent synth that gets excised from the two cover songs.

Jessie J over sings the song, embellishing the song with lots of vocal runs and flourishes that serve no other purpose than to show off her voice. The arrangement does nothing to flatter the very simple lyrics. Now, don't get me wrong because I love my embellished singing (Hello, Christina Aguilera), I just don't think it works well with this particular song. On the opposite side, Bat for Lashes oversimplification highlights how little there really *is* to the song. Although I like it better than the Jessie J, its almost haunting but, in the end, too spare. Basically, by the time we get to the chorus, I've fallen asleep. So far the best cover I've heard was by two Irish Boys with a guitar. The young singer's tone and the stripped down instrumentation invest the song with more sorrow than the angry original and more heartbreak than the bland covers. I am fine by that.