Covers

I have a love-hate relationship with cover songs. They can range from artistic copout to horrible abortion and are often rendered in such excess that their meaning is forgotten. Death by over-saturation. House of the Rising Sun and Stairway to Heaven come to mind. These songs foundered in the familiarity of the bar hall.

Covers often rise out of admiration for the original artists, and prior to the 1970’s (before popular music started to enjoy the smell of its own farts) it was not only common but expected for big name artists to offer their own renditions of classics. Look at Elvis, he covered practically everything. And it’s true that, with careful attention, an artist can capture and synthesize the original emotive idea of a song and rebroadcast it on a different frequency. Elvis was a master at it, Johnny Cash too, just about all the legends. They could take hold of a song’s telescope and refocus it on a part of the galaxy that nobody was aware existed. Is this a dying art?

I hope not. For musicians (and all artists for that matter) the ethics of plagiarism are not cut and dry. We depend on the work of others for the sake of understanding our craft, and so piracy is literacy. An artist’s technique and perspective, together comprising style, grow upward from the body of work they’ve embraced, or rejected.

Woody Guthrie summed it up pretty well.

“If you want to learn something, just steal it. That’s the way I learned from Lead Belly.”

Amen brother. Over the next few months I’ll be looking to “steal” studio technique by examining the production elements of favorite songs. What I’ll be most interested in is the creation of atmosphere, and I’ll hope to develop some working knowledge of the relationship between production values and the songs they help to express.