‘Technically superior’ song covers (or, ‘the banality of perfection’)
Perfect pitch and technical brilliance robs music of its purpose.
I’m going to begin this article on song covers not only by talking about an original song but also by picking on Ella Langley yet again.
Ms Langley’s 2024 breakout hit ‘You Look Like You Love Met’, was delivered in conjunction — or rather, dis junction — with fellow Alabaman Riley Green (who is not to be confused with the Detroit Tiger’s star second baseman).
The music video for the song sees the pair (and a number of tattooed, obese, or clearly out-of-place twenty somethings) take up the role of patrons of a 19th-century saloon — though everyone in the video is acting as if they are cosplaying in a pop-up bar in Bushwick in 2026, naturally.
Setting aside the utterly banal lyrics — which see Langley and Green’s characters essentially take up the exact same role, creating a dialogue as non-sexual as it is vaguely queer — the song certainly did its job in temporarily entertaining white-collar types who wanted to larp as country fans with big sparkly pink hats during the summer of 24' (before they found something else to do with their time).
The other day I found myself shopping when the song came on. I had never even noticed Green’s part before but I was temporarily transfixed on what was, at least for a second, very easy listening (before the ear-piercing chorus kicked back in). I was sure it was a song from the sixties.
Green’s voice and tone takes on, intentionally, an almost Chris LeDoux (Cowboy’s Hat) quality that plays on a huge number of nearly seventy-year-old country western ‘talk-singing’ songs (see also Johnny Paycheck’s ‘Colorado Kool-Aid’).
The cause and impact of the 21st century’s lack of musical innovation is well covered — see Mark Fisher’s ‘Ghosts of my Life’ — but, suffice it to say, on closer inspection Green’s lines evoke very little apart from a gross caricature of Langley as an easy, beer-loving girl with little else going for her (“any cowboy’s dream” he says as she leads him straight to bed … I thought this was music for feminist girlbosses?).
The song falls far, far short of LeDoux’s characteristically 60s tale of the forces of old and new, white vs Indian, free spirit vs Vietnam vet, Cowboy vs junkie biker, etc. not only for its lack of lyrical ingenuity but also for its briefness and relative timidity (it doesn’t experiment with style at all).
Nonetheless, for a split-second, the clear recording, deeper voice, and lack of any authentic regional accent such as that of LeDoux did, genuinely, make Green temporarily easy listening!
That, combined with the clearly derivative nature of the song, written of course by a Nashville machine of temps and backroom staff, makes it fair to call this song a cover … a ‘technically superior’ cover at that.
Technically superior covers, and easy-listening-but-derivative music more generally, is what I want to discuss here.
Why covers ruined everything
There is such a huge amount of cover songs, and such a history of them, that I want to clearly demarcate which ones are being discussed here.
I’m not interested in the way the traditional pop and swing stars like Sinatra shared songs with each other, nor the way the American country singers like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings shared songs like venerial disease; I’m not interested, apart from to say that the differences in, say, Arlo Guthrie and Willie Nelson’s covers of ‘The City of New Orleans’ are so minimal, and their performances usually just thought-and-soul-provoking enough, to consider those covers as … fine (if not good, even).
Nay, I want to talk about covers that focus solely on doing away with the ‘fat of the original’ to produce something that is crisper and more technically well-recorded, more perfect in pitch, smoother, and, usually, quicker (for the purposes of streaming listeners).
To my mind a, non-exhaustive, list of examples that I will discuss below for illustrative purposes include: Jeff Buckley’s cover of ‘Hallelujah’, Amy Whinehouse’s of ‘Valerie’, Darius Rucker’s of ‘Wagon Wheel’, Cash’s of ‘Hurt’, Beyonce’s of ‘Jolene’, Disturbed’s of ‘Sound of Silence’, Susan Boyle’s of ‘Wild Horses’, and Adele’s of ‘Lovesong’.
Buckley, even with his perfect voice, takes Leonard Cohen from a slow (though, ironically, Cohen’s version is shorter), mature meditation on the joy of God’s broken world and the fleeting nature of intimate relationships to something that sounds like a 22-year-old arts graduate who’s been spurned by a girl because he listens to too much my bloody valentine (‘a sad fucker’, as Cobb from Christopher Nolan’s ‘Following’ said). It does away with the real yearning and straining quality of the original to create something reliant almost wholly on Buckley’s voice (of course, the man could’ve made anything ‘sound good’ with that voice).
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Whinehouse and Mark Ronson made the Zutons’ fun but otherwise generic 2000s Indie hit ‘Valerie’ an uncanny, completely out of its time, anachronistic hit job on the iconic black jazz singers of the 1940s and 50s.
While Old Crow Medicine Slow released ‘Wagon Wheel’ in 2003, and the band of course plays on anachronisms to an extent, the release marked the completion of a Bob Dylan tune that originated in 1973. Like Dylan, the band has multiple points of crackling and imperfect singing, and uses the fiddle in a way that imbues a real character that convincingly makes the song sound like a satisfying completion of Dylan’s image. Hootie and the Blowfish try hard Darius Rucker, on the other hand, with his drawn out ‘hey’s’, speeding up of the song, and background clappings, made something almost custom-made for 2010s Ford Ranger ads and College Gameday previews — people predictably ate it up so much that its forgotten that the song was ever a cover. At the risk of alienating myself to readers, I also think it worthy of charging Rucker with the awful crime of leaning too much into his being African American in a way that he doesn’t in any of his other songs! (the effect being that the ‘Mama’ part of the chorus takes on an almost stereotypical quality, which is not ideal).
It really pains me to bring up Johnny Cash under these circumstances — I mean, the man was the master of the type of country covers that I dismissed as legitimate earlier in this article. That said, his cover of Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’ is far, far too contrived. I mean, here was a crackle-filled, frenetic, angry song about the inherent pain of the world (it’s no wonder the music video contains footage of decaying animal corpses), with that distinctive B-Minor piano key that comes in in the chorus, that was simplified, shortened, and dumbed down to produce a simple, worn out narrative about how sad it is to grow old. I’m glad it got memed by Mr Chow in the Hangover.
With Joelene, and the COWBOY CARTER album in general (also released during the great girlboss cowboy larp of 2024), Beyonce took a song about a woman in a tender, isolated place who speaks with great grace (“don’t take him just because you can”) and made something expressly aggressive, simplistic, and, frankly, stupid. “Your peace depends on how you move” didn’t, and still doesn’t, make any fucking sense —ever since ‘Lemonade’ the joke’s been on “B” and no one else. Its her who stayed with Jay-z through everything, not her imagined Joelene! A disingenuous cover, but still more technically well produced than Dolly, to be fair, which suffers from an ‘annoying Parton syndrome’ that I won’t press here out of respect for the recently deceased.
Disturbed ruined Sound of Silence for a lot of people. It’s no wonder in the post-cover era the aura of the song came to turn solely on the opening line, which reflects a kind of simplistic, base sadness (the same phenomenon happened via the aforementioned cover of Hurt). Disturbed had nothing to add. In reality, the intensely-layered, discreet Simon and Garfunkel original — from a discreet, intensely-layered movie (‘The Graduate’) — has a lot to say. It’s ironic one of the lines speaks of people hearing without listening. The song is about failure to communicate, post-war consumerism, budding white-collar work, and the loss of meaning in a world then increasingly governed by the rules and language of codes and commodities … its not about being a bit sad. Yet, people do genuinely think of David Draiman’s delivery of that opening line when they think of the song — his straight-forward delivery of the song, escalating in intensity to the point of overshadowing the crucial final verse, was technically a much more put-together chorus that the original, but it loses all the real meaning in the process.
With her cover of Wild Horses, Susan Boyle is almost (almost) the worst offender of this list. In the hands of the Rolling Stones, that song is a guitar-heavy, crackly picture of an unveiling culture of popular youth music and voicing of emotion that defied the silence of the Silent Generation. ‘Wild Horses’, in the Boyle context, is a piano-forward, pitch perfect, Simon Cowell-funded, simplicity of a piece— a ‘song-thing’ merely designed to be consumed as part of a CD filled to the brim with covers and then disposed of just in time for the next year’s release. Rod Stewart (particularly with ‘Downtown Train’), Michael Buble, Boyle, Shannon Noll, and about 15 other singers like them deserve to face the wall for their utterly uninspiring cash grabs that relied solely on their ability to voice other people’s lyrics. Thank God that trend is mostly over.
And then we get to Adele.
Mark Fisher, to mention the great man once again, said it best when he described Adele as being entirely de-rooted from any place, culture, or moment in time (unless you consider Walmart, Coles, or Sainsburys and their in-store radio to be deeply-felt places).
The Cure’s Lovesong, loaded with the band’s characteristic synth and lead singer Robert Smith’s usual lyrics about lost love and hopelessness, formed an integral part of quite possibly the greatest album of all time, Disintegration.
In the hands of Adele, though, the song became just another one of the piano-forward, vaguely-reminiscent-of-50s-jazz-but-ultimately-lacking-in-meaning-tunes that characterized her career. Undeniably, though, it doesn’t challenge listeners in the way the original did (I.e. with the jutting instruments and Smith’s shrieking delivery of lines (his style)) and her voice was, as usual, perfect. With that, the cover received the same warm welcome of the rest of her ‘21' album by an unquestioning and slave-ish British 2010s public.
Adele’s other songs: ‘Someone Like You’ (a song about love), ‘Easy on Me’ (a song about love), ‘When We Were Young’ (a song about love), ‘Rolling in the Deep’ (a song about love), ‘Set Fire to the Rain’ (a song about love), ‘All I ask’ (a song about love) — need I go on — were always so interchangeable and similar to each other, and Lovesong, that its shocking she ever became so popular in the first place!
But at least she ‘sounds good’.
What to draw from this
The conclusion to what I’ve wanted to point out here is three-fold.
Firstly, in all of the covers previously mentioned, we see an overwhelming trend of pieces defined on their ‘stripping back’ of the original. The creation of an ‘easy listening’ version of an older song, something that omits the original’s perfect imperfections; any qualities that identified the original with a time, genre, or style of music were omitted and in their place was put perfect tone, technically-perfect recordings, and an over-identification with the original song’s most Base emotion (I.e. “Hello darkness my old friend” defines Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence, while “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls…” defined S+G’s).
I posit that the popular career of Adele and Ed Sheeran types more generally, with their dumbed-down over-identification with love or breakups, were quite possibly legitimised by covers that were made in the style above.
Therefore, the explosion of popular covers and the simultaneous re-ification and dumbing down of earlier styles means that, subsequently, a lot of seemingly-original music like ‘You Look Like You Love Me’ are covers.
.
.
“Fools” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence.
