Tag: cover versions

The Twelve Steps of Discovering a Song is a Cover

~ James Viscosi ~ 10 Comments

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.

My Pastime

~ James Viscosi ~ 12 Comments

So sometimes, either before or after we watch our “regular” show (currently Resident Alien, if it has a new episode out, or Mr. & Mrs. Smith, if it doesn’t), while my wife is finding her glasses or finishing up some business related to a dog-training class, I’ll wander off to YouTube on the Apple TV to entertain myself for a few minutes while she’s getting ready. At the moment, most of my YouTube recommendations consist of some combination of the following:

Now, the astute reader may recall that my wife is not, in general, a fan of cover versions, whereas I am always interested in hearing one, because sometimes I like them better than the original**. Anyhow, the other day, YouTube served up a cover version of “In The Air Tonight”:

My wife pretty quickly twigged to the fact that this was a cover.

Wife: “Is this your hobby, looking for cover versions that will offend me?”
Me: “I don’t look for them, they just show up.”

I let this one play for a while. My wife was let’s say not impressed.

Wife: “Is this song ever going to get going?”
Me: “Well to be fair, the original takes like three minutes to get going, too. That’s why those two kids got so much mileage out of listening to it.”
Wife: “Well skip ahead to where it should get going and see if it does.”

So as per request I skipped ahead to where it should get going, and it didn’t.

Next, YouTube offered a cover version of “The Scientist” by Coldplay***:

Me: “I don’t know who these people are but they have really fancy instruments for people who are performing in what looks like an old stone barn.”
Wife (not really paying attention): “Uh-huh.”
Me: “I take it this cover version doesn’t offend you?”
Wife: “I don’t recognize the song so no, it doesn’t offend me.”

So of course then I had to find the original and play it for her.

Wife: “Oh, yeah, that song. I don’t care about it so the cover still doesn’t offend me.”

Now, lest you should think these cover versions are always either (a) disasters or (b) meh, every once in a while YouTube comes up with one that my wife likes. Case in point:

Wife: “What is this? That isn’t Madonna, is it?”
Me: “No, this is a cover. That must be San Pedro. It’s really pretty, I can see why Madonna would write a song about it.”
Wife (listening): “I like that violinist. Can you put this in my Spotify?”

The violinist, Petar Markoski, seems to have as his schtick that he covers pop songs with a guest singer and plays part of the vocals on the violin. This can work surprisingly well, as those who saw the cello version of “Space Song” may recall, and it also worked very well with “La Isla Bonita”. It worked a little less well when he tackled “I Will Survive”, though.

Me: “She hasn’t got the pipes to pull this one off.”
Wife: “No, not quite.”

By the way, in case it should seem like YouTube only shows me cover versions with which to offend my wife, it does also show me originals sometimes. For instance, for a while now it has been trying to get me to watch “A Sorta Fairytale”, by Tori Amos, off her 9/11 album Scarlet’s Walk, and I finally did. The video was, uh, different from how I thought it would be.

In case you decided not to watch it, the premise of the video is that Tori Amos’s head is on top of a leg and Adrien Brody’s head is on top of an arm, and together they hop around some city sidewalk. No one bats an eye at this, so I figure it must be New York City.

Wife: “What is this?”
Me: “This is the video for ‘A Sorta Fairytale’.”
Wife: “This must have been made by a fan, right?”
Me: “Well that’s Tori Amos’s head, and I’m pretty sure that’s Adrien Brody’s head, so … I think it has to be the real video. But it’s not what I would’ve expected the video of this song to look like.”

Partway through the video, Leg!Tori falls off the curb and loses her shoe. Whoops. Fortunately Arm!Adrien is there to pull her out of the gutter. By her hair. WITH HIS TEETH.

Me: “Welp, I guess now Tori is technically naked.”

Hopping around is not a very effective means of locomotion, so eventually, Leg!Tori finds a better conveyance:

Me: “That’s pretty good. I couldn’t balance on of those and I have two feet.”

Anyway, Leg!Tori and Arm!Adrien eventually somehow end up at the beach:

Me: “Don’t go in the water! You can’t swim! You’re just a leg!”

Where they finally kiss, at which point they start sprouting new, um, appendages.

Me: “Whoa Nelly, hey, now, Adrien, what are you growing there?”

But it’s okay, minds out of the gutter everyone, he was just growing arms and legs and whatnot, so they could become full people.

Me: “I bet those cover version videos don’t seem so bad now do they?”
Wife: “I swear to God this is the weirdest video I have ever seen.”

BTW, before I get angry comments from all the Tori Amos fans****, I feel like I should point out that I actually love this song; in fact, it would probably be my favorite song off of Scarlet’s Walk, if Scarlet’s Walk didn’t also contain “I Can’t See New York”. I just really, really wasn’t expecting something like Leg!Tori and Arm!Adrien when I started playing the video.

Now I’m a little bit afraid to see what the official music video for her song “Strange” might look like, if there is one …

* Not an anatomical euphemism.
** Looking at you, “Across the Universe” by Fiona Apple and “Every Breath You Take” by Juliana Hatfield.
*** I know, I know, everybody hates Coldplay now, blah blah blah.
**** Not that I ever get angry comments about anything.

“Hate That Tune”

~ James Viscosi ~ 6 Comments

So the other day my wife and I had to head out to pick up our cat Chaplin from the specialty vet (Chaplin has this thing where he periodically decides he doesn’t want to eat his food anymore, which is not something a young cat should be doing; we are still trying to figure out if there’s some physical cause for this or if he just wants to find out if we’re willing to spend as much money on cat vet bills as we are on dog vet bills*), and because it was low on gas, we took her car instead of mine so that we could fill the tank**. And that meant we got to listen to Spotify on her phone via CarPlay, as opposed to what we (used to) do when we (used to) go places in my car, which is listen to the music I have on my phone***. At first I had her play a few songs by a few artists I had recently discovered, but then I told her to just play whatever she wanted; and thus I discovered how my wife listens to Spotify:

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