The Twelve Steps of Discovering a Song is a Cover

1. While waiting for your wife to sit down so you can watch an episode of Shrinking, noodle around on YouTube and have it suggest “Breathless” by The Corrs. This is an entirely reasonable suggestion since you already like The Corrs (you have their greatest hits album, which incudes “Breathless”), so you play the video:

2. Have your wife wander in while the video is playing and tell her that you’re not sure why an Irish band is hanging around an old air strip in the California desert, but you’re just going with it. She will say something to the effect of she doesn’t hear their Irish accents while they’re singing (sometimes you can hear an accent when somebody sings, sometimes not) and will speculate on what they sound like when they talk.

3. Find an interview with the Corrs so your wife can hear them talking, and discover that even though they do have a little bit of an Irish lilt to their voices, it’s not nearly as pronounced as, say, a former Irish coworker’s:

4. In order to convince your wife that The Corrs are a legit Irish band, pull up a video of their playing the traditional Irish reel “Toss the Feathers“:

5. Now that you’ve clicked on several Corrs videos in quick succession, have YouTube show you one of them singing “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime”, which as far as you know is a Dream Academy song*. You find it plausible that a member of The Corrs would cover a Dream Academy song, even though The Corrs have sold millions more records than The Dream Academy, because, hey, it’s The Dream Academy. You decide to give their version a listen:

6. Decide that much as you like the Corrs, this version of the song isn’t for you, and search for “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” on YouTube, expecting to find The Dream Academy. Instead, find a few dozen versions by other people, including Beck, whose version was used in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:

7. Say to yourself, “Self, what are the odds that Beck covered a Dream Academy song?”, and decide that the odds are approximately zero.

8. Go to Wikipedia to find out whose song it actually is, and discover that it’s by some band you never heard of called The Korgis.

9. Find the Korgis version and listen to it:

10. Say to your wife (who has long since lost interest in this entire investigation**), “Well, that version isn’t bad, but I like The Dream Academy’s version better. It has an oboe in it.”

11. So now you know that a song that for the past 40 years you thought was a Dream Academy original is, in fact, a cover, but that just goes to show you that what they say is true.

12. Everybody’s gotta learn sometime.

* Spoiler alert: It’s not.
** Not that she was very interested in the first place.