My world on the web
Tom Breihan from stereogum.comThe American recordings are a slightly misleading legacy. Johnny Cash wasn’t the mythic poet of darkness that those Rick Rubin records made him out to be — or, rather, he wasn’t just that. Cash was an entertainer. He could be funny and pious and corny. For decades, Cash thrived within the Nashville studio system; he was never an outsider artist. But those American records, American IV in particular, tapped into something powerful and primal about Johnny Cash’s voice and presence. They gave him a different kind of life. And that dark-specter version of Cash might be the one that people remember best today. Maybe that’s not fair to Johnny Cash, but Johnny Cash doesn’t care. He’s dead, and his legacy was secure long before American IV. In some of his last months on earth, Cash gave the world a profound meditation on loss and mortality, and even if the album only captures one side of Cash, that one side is heavier than heaven.
On the other side of such covers is how the original artists appreciated the covers. I find Trent Reznor’s response pretty funny:
When Reznor first heard Cash’s version, he still wasn’t sure what to think: “It felt like I was watching my girlfriend fuck somebody else.” (Trent Reznor isn’t always articulate.) But when Reznor saw Mark Romanek’s video for Cash’s “Hurt,” he immediately understood that “Hurt” now belonged to someone else.
Mark from prettymuchpop.comIs re-playing or re-recording a song written and performed by someone else an act of love or predation?
Mark is joined by Too Much Joy’s Tim Quirk, the Gig Gab Podcast’s Dave Hamilton, and the author of A Philosophy of Cover Songs Prof. P.D. Magnus to talk about different types of and purposes for covers, look a little at the history, share favorites, and more.
For more, visit prettymuchpop.com. Hear bonus content at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by subscribing via Apple Podcasts to the Mark Lintertainment Channel.
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Music from your past, present and future
Music is different from all other artforms because it alone is an expression of itself rather than something else. Notes and melodies, unlike phrases and colors, do not try to represent anything but can instead be appreciated simply for what they are. Rather than representing the Will through indirect means as depictions of its real-world manifestations, Schopenhauer believed music was a direct manifestation of the Will itself.
11 track album
5 track album
Pondering how Tom Waits seemingly created the perfect tune for other people to sing. Major rock stars were fighting with one another to cover “Downtown Train.”
“‘Downtown Train’ bought Tom Waits a swimming pool,” Stewart told Ultimate Classic Rock in 2013 as he was about to release a new album. “And ‘Picture in a Frame’ will pay for a new roof on his house. Really, I can’t say enough about Tom—he has such great imagery, which is an area in which I could do a bit better.”
A close cousin of sampling, interpolation is less of a direct copy-paste of a song and more the borrowing of melodies and lyrics to create a new tune that sounds… wow, just so familiar.
Appearing on Radio.com’s New Arrivals show (via Uproxx), St. Vincent explained that she was “dead set” on creating a “heavy record” as the follow-up to 2017’s ‘Masseduction’. “Like just heavy the whole time – like, ‘Hey kids, you like Tool? Well, you’ll love the St. Vincent record’, you know?” she said.
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I also am intrigued if Jack Antonoff had an part to play in this recording or if St. Vincent simply self-produced it?
Mailbag time! We’ve got listener questions about Madonna earworms, National piano parts, Breath of the Wild music, online vocal teachers, the French horn, The L…
This reminds me of a conversation between Annie Clark and the late Andy Gill about structured music and free-form music. I am also reminded of my experience of seeing Aphex Twin and the misconstrued expectation that there would be any semblance of the familiar. I guess if you want a particular sound, go listen to the historical record, whereas if you would like a conversation, see the performance?
Everyone who’s had to dress up as a historical figure for a school project knows that history is just a bit more understandable through reenactment, whether it’s through a biopic, a famous site where people in period costumes walk visitors through the past, or a battlefield reenactment. It also …
Fearless (Taylor’s Version) is the first re-recorded album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on April 9, 2021, through Republic Records. It is a re-recording of Swift’s second studio album, Fearless (2008), and the first of six re-recorded albums Swift plans to release, following the dispute regarding ownership of the masters to her first six studio albums.
In some respects the new tracks, produced by Antonoff and Dessner, feel like a continuation of the work done on Folklore and Evermore.
Dessner and Antonoff’s production believably reframes these Fearless outtakes as folklore deep cuts. It’s proof of how thin the line between a twilit country radio ballad and shimmery indie-tinged folk-rock can be.
Ben Thompson compares the exercise with what Dave Chappelle did when he asked them to not wqtch his show. Thompson wonders if she will or even needs to remake any more of her albums.
It’s easy to see how this plays out going forward: Swift probably doesn’t even have to remake another album; she has demonstrated the willingness and capability to remake her old records, and her fans will do the rest. It will behoove Shamrock Capital, the current owner of Swift’s masters, to buy-out Braun’s share of future upside and make a deal with Swift, because Swift, granted the power to go direct to fans and make her case, can in fact “change history, facts, and re-frame any story [she] want[s] to fit with any narrative [she] wish[es].”
While this popularity may expose classical music fans to the sometimes overwhelming, occasionally terrorizing music of Aphex Twin, the exchange also flows the other way. “It’s a gateway to Debussy, or some of the other amazing piano pieces that are out there,” said Reitzell, the music supervisor. “If you like that piece, man, I’ve got 30 more for you. That is the most beautiful thing about music. That song will probably outlive Richard’s entire catalog in a way.”
But Moran hears an even more fundamental reason modern listeners have turned a haunting piano piece with minimalist influences into a digital era phenomenon. Before our interview, she transcribed “Avril 14th” again to refamiliarize herself with it. Holding up the piece of paper, she noted its chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure. “Honestly,” she said, “this is like a pop song to me.”
ᔥ in Of portals and pansies ()
I grew up with The Living End’s cover:
I wonder if it is one of those great songs where every generation has its own translation or cover?
The history of the great works of art tells us about their antecedents, their realization in the age of the artist, their potentially eternal afterlife in succeeding generations. Where this last manifests itself, it is called fame. [71] Translations that are more than transmissions of subject matter come into being when in the course of its survival a work has reached the age of its fame. Contrary, therefore, to the claims of bad translators, such translations do not so much serve the work as owe their existence to it. The life of the originals attains eh~ to its ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering.
The re-recording, which has already topped the U.S. iTunes chart, certainly marks another instance of pop culture’s obsession with nostalgia paying off. Many similar industry efforts—TV reboots, extensions of film franchises, covers of childhood favorites—service fans through cameos and casual references without meaningfully considering the original work’s impact. But Swift, through her stronger vocals, engages with her younger self, scrutinizing her lyrics. She joins in on the act of being a Taylor Swift fan.
For many music producers, a loop is often the starting point of a new composition. But how can you give a loop-based composition structure, add tension and release, and turn it into a performance? In this Ableton artist documentary we meet Binkbeats, a music-maker whose whole approach has grown out of answering these questions.
I came upon this video (and artist) while looking for different covers of Aphex Twin. His unravelling of Windowlicker is amazing in the way he jumps from one instrument to another like an orchestra of one.
This music reminds me of Kawehi.
From Bandcamp Fridays to Verzuz battles, these were our silver linings from a strange, stuck year in music.
The last studio album that the late Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell completed was No One Sings Like You Anymore, a collection of covers that he recorded in 2016. Although he died in 2017, before it could be released, his family and his estate have decided to release it now as a special holiday gift to his fans.
In addition to Cornell’s cover of Guns N’ Roses “Patience,” which was released on what would’ve been his 56th birthday earlier this year, No One Sings Like You Anymore includes renditions of songs by John Lennon, Harry Nilsson, ELO, Prince, Janis Joplin, and more. All instruments on the record were played by Cornell and Brendan O’Brien, who produced and mixed the whole thing.
The result is a performance that exists in a strange hinterland, an album that’s unnervingly intimate yet flickers with the strange unreality of a dream. Idiot Prayer is as up-close and personal an encounter with Cave as there’s ever been. But a little mystery remains, always.
In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object’s resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object. The concept suggests that humanoid objects which imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.
I was wondering about this recently in regards to music and covers. A song produced for a record is going to sound different in a live performance space, even if it is a remix. I wonder if there is a similar ‘uncanny valley’ experience where a song gets too close to replicating the original that it becomes a little lost?
