Sleepwalkin' — Modest Mouse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT_PwXjCqqs

There's a lot to say about covers, usually because the songs themselves, by virtue of being important enough to have been recorded not once but twice, are generally... well, important somehow.

The original, Sleep Walk, was a guitar-based instrumental from the 50s, recorded by two Italian guys from Brooklyn that, somehow, made it into the popular consciousness: used in movies, covered upwards of thirty times, and generally recognizable, like a folk song — even if no one knows who recorded it. (Santo and Johnny Farina.)

But it made it big. Some part of the song resonates with the aesthetic mind. Maybe its chord structure, maybe its tempo, maybe its specific vintage timbre and tone. It doesn't matter.

But for a band like Modest Mouse — whose typical work is fed through (as Pitchfork puts it) "the umbilical of strip malls, religion, blues, prairies, automobiles, and dysfunction" — the song emerges unscathed. It's a little twangier, a little slower and sadder, and a little more electric. It has drums.

It also has lyrics. Written by Modest Mouse, fit to the music, and layered over. Not as a remix, or a theft. A tasteful reappropriation. Typically, I discovered this backwards. I heard the Modest Mouse version first, and then discovered (maybe by instinct) that it was a cover of an instrumental.

But by that time, the Modest Mouse version was canonized. The lyrics fit, made sense, cemented the song for me. Sleepwalkin' exists as a song about country life and white trash.

But it also exists as Sleep Walk, a song firmly set in 1959 Brooklyn, with Coney Island and Trinity Records, when a record (not a CD) would make gold and give the Farina brothers enough to live on for a lifetime.

What is it about that damn song?