Covering your bases

I spent much of this weekend (when I wasn't hiking past 700-year-old Zen temples) catching up on some magazine reading.

In Paste I read a blurb about Fountains of Wayne, a band I really should get to know better, especially considering their love for my mom. The Paste blurb focused mainly on their cover of "… Baby One More Time" and how they pick their covers, in general. Coincidentally, I'd heard the band talk about this very same topic on NPR on Friday night (Friday morning for you Western Hemisphere kids). From the article:

"I'm not a Britney Spears fan, but we covered '… Baby One More Time' because we thought it was a great song," [bassist Adam] Schlesinger says. "Just because she happened to record it first doesn't change that." Adds [singer Chris] Collingwood: "If it's a good song, it doesn't matter if it was originally sung by a tone-deaf monkey."

That's a bold stand, but a valid one. I bet there are lots of gems to be found by looking past the fool's gold of some seemingly icky pop songs and finding that the lyrics, the melody, something has some value underneath. The right artist can polish away all the crap and find a diamond waiting to be mined.

The Fountains of Wayne kids go on to talk about the importance of making a cover your own -- without butchering it too much -- and making it for your own reasons. One perfect example of that leaping to my mind is Lyle Lovett's ass-kickin' cover of "Stand By Your Man." He doesn't change the gender pronouns, which I think is great. And he's not trying to be ironic or even funny with it, I don't think. It's just a great song, which he recognized, and he performs it with his own flavor. I can't imagine he was setting out to outdo Ms. Tammy Wynette (and of course he doesn't), but he simply makes a great song great again. What a great reason to do a cover!

A gravely misguided attempt at making a cover one's own was delivered a couple of years ago by Keb'Mo', with his cover of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" on "Kindred Spirits - A Tribute To Johnny Cash." Apparently Keb'Mo' thought the whole "shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die" lyric was too gory, so he. changed. it. I know. I know! So when he sings it, it's something like "They say I shot a man in Reno/but that was just a lie." Jesus, man – why bother? It's not like Cash didn't have 500 other awesome songs you could have chosen from. Let's just forget for a moment that this was a track for a tribute CD, and it's not terribly respectful to change someone's lyrics to suit your own liking -- let's just let that go for a second. Sigh. I bring this up here because it seems to break one of the biggest rules for choosing a cover, as nimbly outlined by FOW. It's giving a song your own twist, all right, but that's waaaaay too much of a twist. (For a really excellent rant on the Keb'Mo' cover of "Folsom Prison," read this and prepare to giggle.) I would argue that Joss Stone's pronoun-changing on her "Fell in Love with a Boy" (a bastardization of the White Stripes' "Fell in Love with a Girl") is a similar sin, though not quite as slap-to-the-head-worthy as Keb'Mo's.

The final tip from Fountains of Wayne for choosing a cover? Don't cover a Beatles song. "The world definitely doesn't need any more Beatles covers," Schlesinger told Paste. Amen, brother.