Idioteque — Obadiah Parker (Radiohead cover)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El3ivyKx2oo

This is a cover that comes along to change everything about a song — already a stretch from the usual repertoire, Radiohead's Idioteque is techno, synth-poppy, weird and paranoid and seemingly as unmelodic as a song can get, at least at first. But Obadiah Parker's band here takes the frantic rhythms and absolutely brings them to life, turning whatever Radiohead is into indie pop, orchestral and brilliant and choppy — and, above all, melodic. Despite the normal chord sequences, the normal meter, the standard drumming and piano — it comes together in a syncopated way, like birdsong, repetitive and predictable but always new, just one or two beats ahead of where you think it should be.

Don't You (Forget About Me) — Simple Minds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdqoNKCCt7A

For a song written for and tied irrevocably to a movie, this song actually

How You Remind Me — Nickelback (Motown cover)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KzP4bC1Ypg

I think the fundamental issue with a band like Nickelback is that, on some base level, they're a fine band. The songs, judging lyrically, chord sequences, riffs and structure and presentation and theatricality, it's all fine — or at least sub-par. But nothing about the songs themselves are bad. It's something else — the in-your-face production, or maybe Chad Kroeger's name or face or hair.

But to take the songs themselves and transform them into another genre, to take the fine lyrics and fine chords and fine riffs and dynamics and transplant them into Motown, an incredible kind of music, that's brilliant. That's open-heart surgery. That's incredible. And it works! The lyrics sound more significant, or at least less vapid. The instrumentals are basically the same, but the change in instrumentation and production makes all the difference. Let this be a lesson.

Magic — Ben Folds (UChicago Voices In Your Head cover)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_zLOnDnFpw

The winter between 2011—2012; I am stranded at a train station on the NJT, trying to make my way back to New York City. The sun set a while back; my backpack is high and dry, but the rest of me is soaked in snow. The trains are delayed; my train comes but skips the station. I have enough time to make it home, sure; and enough iPod battery as well. But my phone is dead, and I'm hungry and broke. And when the train comes, it whisks me through industrial towns and over swamp and underground, and there are lights and homes of towns I couldn't name, and this song is playing, and I experience frisson — sustained, continuous awareness, a heightened sense of being, fueled by hormones, hunger, exhaustion, anxiety, and this music, this incredible music, had I really never heard a cappella before this? Had I really never heard this song before? What have I been doing, where have I been? In this spark, this moment of enlightenment, everything else seems dull: going to school the next day and suffering through US History is dull, eating lunch in the lunchroom is dull, and only by listening to the song again can I bring back a small fraction of the butterflies in my stomach.

Thriller — Imogen Heap

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxrIBCwyk80

There is only so much praise I can lavish on an artist, but Imogen deserves all of it — her music is controlled, tasteful, graceful, well-composed and well-arranged, like all good electronica — her vocals are perfect, processed and trying far harder than she needs to. She has an amazing voice and an amazing sense of rhythm and tone without even the computer in between us. And her normal work — she is most famous for Hide and Seek, processed within an inch of its life. But this, an MJ cover, is pure — nearly entirely her real voice and piano, and it's gorgeous and perfect and I cannot get enough of it.

Don't You Evah — Spoon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaqWSGenyE0

I don't know much about Spoon — they're modern, probably, but have a simple, timeless sound that could be 90s, 80s even. They're muddled and obscure lyrics, clear drums and guitars, harmonies and timbre over content. I don't know what motivates the singer, other than the desire to create something appealing. In that sense, this music becomes very hedonistic — and it's about these sorts of things, too. It only wants to dance, but it's not dance music so much as energy music. There's an underlying sense of things happening, constantly, of being a theme of progress and discovery and recanting of stories, of the past, the future, etc — and yet, here I was, thinking that the song was indicative of Spoon, only to find out it's a cover.

So now I don't know what to think.

Listening Wind — Peter Gabriel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2omdkdk2k

An entire album — Scratch My Back — of sublime, beautiful, prolonged and slow covers of songs from the past thirty years or so — some modern, some ancient, from Bon Iver to Bowie, Radiohead to Regina Spektor to Paul Simon. And they're all so, so wonderful, but Listening Wind is the largest jump up from weird, etherial Talking Heads song to something transcendental, updating the timbre and tone for modern listeners, making it slow and dramatic and tense, a horror movie of a song — is the man building a bomb? What is going on? Who's being driven away? And it builds in tension and harmony and beauty, the determination of the man and the strings and the soft horn in the back swelling until you can't break away, you stop what you're doing and stare, thousand-yard-stare, out the window, and it builds and builds and builds, and the song is so quiet and gentle, Peter Gabriel is soothing, but the music is not, like a horror soundtrack, building in swells and sweeps, always harmonic, — and then it breaks out, and you're left hanging over a canyon, only echoes.

Bizarre Love Triangle — New Order (Vitamin String Quartet cover)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnNOkJ6ysBA

Let alone my personal history with this song — played twice a week, three weeks a year, six years — imbued with emotional and adolescent significance far beyond its origins or means — the formative soundtrack of my summers throughout middle and high school — it remains, in its original form, drastically understated; the chords and lyrics could have been so much more than they are; this, the VSQ cover, elevates it, finds the platonic form of the music and brings it into such complexity and gorgeous arrangement; it reflects and references the original, but it works and soars and improves on it by far; I would rather listen to it than the original at the moment. Perhaps I'm just a sucker for string quartets.

Glycerine — Bush

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOllF3TgAsM

The first year I went to summer camp, I saw a TV advert for Buzz Ballads, a 90s rock compilation CD; I was taken aback by music totally unlike what they'd play on the radio, unlike what my parents listened to; unlike what my friends knew. I looked up some of the songs and listened to the 30-second iTunes samples; spent $14.85 on 15 of the 99c tracks. These became my first trigger songs; they would perfectly recall the people and places of that first summer at Mount Holyoke college in Pennsylvania; the layouts of the classrooms and dorms and mess halls; where we'd sit in the dining halls and the styles of furnitures; the low lighting of pre-war college architecture and the smell of old wood; the titanic rainstorm that hit partway through and stranded us in one of the academic buildings for the better part of a day: the feelings of confusion and lovesickness and homesickness that would surface during the dances. The songs weren't about these things at all, but Glycerine came closest.

The Lamp Is Low — Morris Nanton

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFfl_PVXD30

Jazz is an echo chamber. Come here and be alone with your thoughts; get them moving, get them changing, pick up another idea or two. Settle in and listen and ponder; get up and dance; change and change and change.

The Lamp Is Low is from the 1930s; apparently there are lyrics? It came to me ass-backwards; through Nujabes's sample of the Laurindo Almeida rendition, but the above 1967 rendition is the one that tickles me the best. Explore on WhoSampled; do research; trace your own path backwards in time through the history of this Jazz standard. Listen for it in old movies; let it pop into your head during tests; lose yourself in its tone and rhythm. This is what music is for.

No One's Gonna Love You — Cee-Lo Green

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzAof7HjaxU

Band of Horses remains mostly unknown to me. This happens, more than I'd like — I'll tangentially know about a band, but there won't be that little kick of incentive for me to research them; and, with no reason, it'll sit in my blind spot for months, years. I heard Is There A Ghost in Fringe a few months back, and (oh god, the spoilers) it fit perfectly: so perfectly that I went and found that I even had some Band of Horses in my library, and it still wasn't enough to get into them properly.

So there's the original No One's Gonna Love You by Band of Horses, and then there's the cover. And he brings out a strange, dramatic, vindictive twist in the song which — well, listen to it for yourself.

But it also loses some subtlety. But Cee-Lo can't help it. If whiny emotional folk is the undercurrent of Band of Horses, then outright glee and cruelty are the undercurrents of this cover. It takes a note from Fuck You. It'd be hard not to, with context. Still, the song was about being complacent and resigned in a relationship; it becomes something much more intentioned. I like it, but it's very different.

Let's Call The Whole Thing Off — Ella Fitzgerald + Louis Armstrong

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2oEmPP5dTM

Yesterday morning, before my Calc midterm, one of the guys who sits near me piped up: he'd been going through a breakup; he'd been studying for midterms; things were bad, and this song roused his spirits. He said: there's a part near the end (3:16) where Louis Armstrong just shouts 'tomahter' in the silliest way.

So we're in this math classroom at 9am, with my stomach churning and my head pounding and a math midterm before me: and suddenly the entire class including the teacher is doing Louis Armstrong impressions, shouting tomahter at the top of our lungs.

Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime — Beck

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIVh8Mu1a4Q

Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime was originally by The Korgis, but the version I'm familiar with is Beck's cover (above), featured in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. For me, at least, it's inextricably tied to the movie.

It's weird to only know a song from a film, but there's no shame in that. I only know Mad World from Donnie Darko (which I haven't even seen!) I only know Where Is My Mind from Fight Club. I only know Johnny B. Goode from Back to the Future.

Worst of all (or maybe best) I first heard Hallelujah in 2001 (god damn, I was in first grade) — not the Leonard Cohen version, nor the John Cale, nor the Jeff Buckley. It was the Rufus Wainwright version that found me. It was on the soundtrack to Shrek. Even in first grade, I was ashamed that such a good song had reached me through an animated film.

Gimme Shelter — The Rolling Stones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3rnxQBizoU

As ever with a famous band like The Rolling Stones, context — nearly 45 years later — is next to impossible. I understand the Vietnam War-era sentiments; I understand the constant use in Martin Scorsese films; I understand the international U.S./U.K. politics (or, rather, understand that I totally don't). These are not what I want to focus on.

Two things of note about this song: One, it is forever tied to a night last June when I drove back from High School graduation through TriBeCa as the sun set, furious at high school for being done when I wasn't done with it yet, and, Two, that the female vocalist, Merry Clayton, suffered a miscarriage from hitting the high note at 3:01 in the above video.

The Rolling Stones are before my time; they reflect a rebellious proto-punk spirit which I do not embody. They are foreign, literally and metaphorically. But I am an eighteen-year-old, and The Stones have become more-or-less a rite of passage for post-puberty and young adulthood. They are angry and horny and disillusioned; they are sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and best of all, they are free of context.

A Case of You — James Blake

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

A cover by James Blake that completely transforms the original. This is the sort of song, I think, where Joni Mitchell wrote it out because it was too intimate to share any other way. There's a wonderful quotation from Voltaire — I don't much care the context — "Anything too stupid to be said is sung."

We reach the limits of language when somebody is too embarrassed to say something earnestly. It's hard to say something like "I can't do this without you." (It was hard even writing that. Go ahead and try it.) But it's easy to write it into a song and sing it, and it's even easier to give someone that song to try and say it without having to, y'know, say it.

So you get songs like Hey Julie — Fountains of Wayne. Maybe this song, too, was a man trying to express himself properly. But it rose to fame and stayed in the popular consciousness because, I think, it's useful. It's easier to rationalize difficult emotions when there are songs about them. So we trade the ability to communicate and express complex thoughts, ideas, and emotions for references — shared cultural references to media, to books, movies, and music.

Maybe James Blake wanted to say something like what's in the song. Maybe he just thought it was beautiful. But now I know about the song, and now it's useful to me.

This Magic Moment — The Mountain Goats

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtxsS_Jfww4

One of the things I like most about oldies — R+B, soul, motown hits from the 1950s and 60s — is that they're unquantifiable. It's hard to explain why they've stuck with us for so long. Songs from the 1970s are dated as 70s songs, dismissed as disco or free jazz; songs from the 1940s are dated as standards; Sinatra, pre-rock'n'roll, and the end of classic Jazz. But the oldies are still somehow relevant; they influence the timbre, tone, and content of modern music in an unusual way. Maybe it's a sliding scale, and in ten years we'll be influenced by the 1970s, but I doubt it. Something about how music was written and produced in the 1950s and 60s was special; still holds value.

This Magic Moment was originally by Ben E. King and The Drifters; most people know the song and its tune; less know the name; nobody knows who wrote it. But it's somewhere in the popular consciousness, along with A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and perhaps The Canterbury Tales: it's outlived its era and it's hard to say why.

Movement III: Linear Tableau With Intersecting Surprise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxXBp9xlIos

The BQE is a modern classical album about an expressway in New York City, and that's ridiculous, except that it's also very, very good. The Brooklyn-Queens expressway itself is a gorgeous, surreal vista with views from the air of Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. Oddly enough, this isn't the first romanticization of civil engineering/architecture. Public works often capture the public imagination (think Statue of Liberty, Central Park, etc). An expressway is an unconventional one, but... well, it just works.

It's not Sufjan Stevens' usual fare whatsoever. He is a pop musician who dabbles in classical, electronic, folk. This is a full classical album (with accompanying visuals): entirely instrumental.

My strongest memory of The BQE is driving along it at 3 AM, I think — to get back to Illinois after winter break, I had a 4 AM flight out of JFK, and we drove. It was the middle of the night, and foggy, so only the lights of the city were visible, not the content itself. I had burned this album to CD, and we were listening to it, and it just... it sort of matched up. It matched up perfectly. The beginning matched up with East Harlem, and then the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge over Randalls Island, and so forth until Jamaica Bay. And the music swelled and faltered as the road did, breaking into electronics as we went under another, taller expressway; swelling as the AirTrain joined us from the left, and building to a—

And then a postlude. The plane taxied and burst into the sky, through the thick cloud and rain, and the night turned to day — the sun was already up, above the fog cover.

Roll Over Beethoven

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOrMg3pY7hw

Music is a genre that endlessly steals from itself. Music is up-front about it, though. It's easy to identify references and homages in music, because our ears pick them out whether we're looking for them or not. Books and movies can steal plots and characters; sometimes we won't even notice that O Brother Where Art Thou is an homage to the Odyssey.

But musical homages insist upon being recognized. We have the 1956 Chuck Berry original, above; we have The Beatles' cover in 1963, who give the song a little je ne sais qoui; we have Electric Light Orchestra's cover in 1973, which begins with Beethoven's fifth itself. Then something was sparked; Beethoven's fifth became part of popular consciousness again, maybe. Disco artist Walter Murphy went gold with Fifth of Beethoven in 1976. Recently, a Flight Facilities remix of the disco edit.

Whenever one reads about celebrated thinkers and figures of antiquity, there's always this direct, easily traced line of descent; we have Socrates and his student Plato and his student Aristotle. We have Haydn and especially Mozart before Beethoven, and Bach before them.

It's easy to pick a figure and claim them as unparalleled genius; Bach appears to have had no predecessors; nor Socrates, nor Chuck Berry. Einstein had the same figure of genius around him; he was self-taught and self-emergent.

I would wager these chains of popular figures exist in all fields. Is this a product of human progress or simply human memory?

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?