I have had two successive discussions about doing cover songs recently. The first was with my songwriter’s circle and the second was with myself as I listened to Roseanne Cash talk about her new CD “The List” on NPR’s Fresh Air. Each time I have been confronted with how difficult it is to do a cover song right. There are a lot of bands/performers that cover a song just to have it in their songbook as filler for their second set and then there are artists that cover songs because they want to perform a great song.
The discussion I had with my Songwriter’s Circle was centered around how we can take a cover and transform it. The song that we were tossing about was AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long”. That hard rockin’ song is difficult to do on acoustic guitar and have it sound like AC/DC. Well then, that’s the point: don’t allow it to sound like AC/DC. So we played it slower and with a bluegrass edge to it and man did it sound great! All of a sudden I started to really hear the lyrics and feel the intent of the song.
The discussion I had with myself as I listened to Roseanne Cash involved honesty and soul. If you’re going to sing classic country songs that everyone knows, then you had better understand your reason for singing it. How are you, the singer, going to make an audience hear this song differently from the way we are used to hearing it? Do you really understand the lyrics and can you convey the meaning to an audience that may understand them a totally different way.
I have a few covers in my working songbook that I take out every once in a while. The latest song I’ve added is “One” by U2 and I am struggling with it. First of all how do I make it mine? How do I change it up with out ruining a beautiful melody and lyric? And how do I make it travel from the first line to the last line like Bono does? And – how do I create atmosphere with my acoustic guitar the way The Edge does with his electric and a lot of delay?
In my head I had a picture of Tom Waits doing this song. What would he do? Slow it down? Be more accusatory in his tone? Speak some of the lines? I tried to approach it from this angle. I also have a lower voice than Bono does so I couldn’t do the vocal calisthenics that he does and that gave me another indication that I should think of Waits.
The more times I sung the lyrics the more I felt the real anger that was hidden between the lines. Even though Bono sings this in a ballad style, I felt that there needed to be some punch to a few of the lines so that the person being sung to (and about) really gets hit in the face with the words.
I’m still working on this One, but check out the video of me and let me know what you think. I take the covers I do very seriously and I try to find a balance between original interpretation and keeping true to the writer’s intent.
Just to prove that I haven’t been slacking off totally this summer, here is a video from a house concert that I did in early August in Tallmadge, Ohio. What a great way to connect with people – in their own back yards! Everybody was listening (except the kids) and it was a beautiful day to play outside. I hope to come back!
After I saw how easy it was to make the Cupcake Blues video, I decided to try to tackle making a video/slide-show for Waitin’ On My Revolution from week 1. I like that song for some reason – granted it’s a bit cliché, but I think it rocks and it pokes the right people in the eye, so Mission Accomplished.
The thing that I did differently from the Cupcake Blues video was to download the video and then import it into my iMovie application. For some reason the Animoto site kept cutting off the end of the song and no matter what I did I could not get the site to recognize that I had more photos to render and a couple more seconds of audio to go. So I put a version I liked into iMovie and added a better quality audio track and then did some editing to the clip I had downloaded. I got rid of Animoto’s advertising (not nice on my part, but — hey) and added some MTV-like titles to the front and back.
Frustration sets in when I have to deal with technical problems. This has always been a bone of contention with me and my collaborative partner Sasha. We would do all of this creative stuff: improvising, writing music, arranging the parts – and then wham – we get hit with a technical issue that just bogs us down – my technical issue for this post was trying to get the video on my blog. I finally just uploaded it to YouTube (which I didn’t want to do) and embedded the file in the blog. But it took me about and hour and a half of technical hoo-ha to come to that conclusion. Anyway – it’s up.
By the way, I must warn you that the images are all stolen from the web, so if you are pure at heart, then you must turn your head so as not to view unlicensed material. If anyone were to ask me about the verity of this video, I would quickly take it down and cease and desist. But for now it’s my visual expression of the music and lyrics. I am not a filmmaker. ‘nuf said. Oh, also the Cheney picture is a shocker, but then looking at him always sent chills down my spine.
I was able to find a way to make a dynamic slide show from the shots I had taken of my son eating his cupcake. As I said in the post about the Cupcake Blues song, it was these shots that inspired me to write the song and not the other way around. Animoto.com is the site where I did this “video” and it seems like the presentation a matter of chance. I assume the software they use also analyzes the transients in the song’s wave file so that the images change with hit points.
It’s an interesting thought about adding images to song. Does it detract from the song? Is the viewer intent upon the images and not paying attention to the song?
Whatever the case – enjoy the video, you can never go wrong when you have such a cute subject.
