Cover Week
I think, as a general rule of thumb, if one is planning on recording a cover of a song, they should stay away from artists they revere. Otherwise they will be hesitant to make it their own, and end up with something as uninspired as Pearl Jam’s cover of the Beatle song ‘You’ve got to hide your love away’. Its not that Pearl jam isn’t creative or talented, they simply respect the Beatles vision too much to produce anything other than a carbon copy. And at that point, why bother.
However, I think it’s a mistake to swing the other way. If I personally believe a song doesn’t have enough, or any, redeeming qualities, I’m probably not going to really put much of myself into a cover of it, and it will come out uninspired as well (unless, like Ben Folds and Alanis Morissette before me, I’m going for irony).
So this leaves us with what? Only cover mediocre songs? That seems like sort of a cop-out. I suppose it’s worth revising, or elaborating, my first point. It’s a mistake to cover a song one worships, but worship and love are two different things. There are artists I listen to because I like the music, and artists I listen to because the music takes me to a deep, emotional place. I wouldn’t want to alter (or spoil) my relationship with the latter, but I’m happy to tinker around with the former.
For some reason this disjointed thought process led me to Prince, an artist whose music I enjoy, even admire, greatly, but for the most part have no deep connection to. I started messing around with “When Doves Cry” on my acoustic and I thought ‘this could work’. At this point I made myself promise that I would stick with it unless it turned into a complete disaster. This way I would save myself from the maybe-there’s-a-better-song-to-cover second-guessing that exists anyway, but is ignored.
Now I ask myself, ‘what do I want to change about this song for my cover’. Well, the arrangement, by simple necessity. Take out the plodding drum machines, wailing electric guitars, catchy synths, multitracked vocals, and add in a dude with an acoustic. Already its sounding pretty different. Now to think about the chord scheme. Something that’s cool about this track is that it is pretty harmonically sparse; most of the chord changes are implied by the melody. This leaves room for a little experimentation. I decided to throw in a couple extra chords that I felt fit with the melody. Prince’s version of the song relies on layering to give the song complexity and movement, but since my only layering came from how hard I was strumming my guitar, I thought these extra chords helped keep my version from getting too boring. I left the melody mostly unchanged, though I took a few minor liberties with it, and I modulate a bit during the last chorus to keep things interesting. Not feeling any need to change the lyrics, I kept them the same, though I repeat the first two lines of the chorus at the end.
After all this, I still had one hurdle to overcome. I needed to come up with a way to emulate the synth hook that is so key to the song, but I wasn’t having much luck. I couldn’t come up with a way to make it sound pretty, so I decided to take it in a different direction by making it sound unsettling. Given the last chord I choose for the chorus, the pattern is actually somewhat dissonant, and I use sudden dynamic changes to do my best to keep the listener on their toes.
For those unfamiliar with the original:
I will upload my version when I am cold-free.
