Thursday, January 7, 2010

Volume 3, Number 25: Song Covers I'd Like to Hear

(Note: I originally posted this entry on August 30, 2008, to my Yahoo! GeoCities blog.)

I've come up with ideas where I wish that certain artists would cover certain songs by certain other artists. These ideas didn't all come up at once; they pretty much came to me over the last eight years or so.
Donald Duck - Break Stuff (originally performed by Limp Bizkit)
You've seen Donald Duck get frustrated and lose his temper. You may have even come across clips of Donald Duck swearing. Can't you just imagine him breaking the fourth wall and saying, "It's just one of those days"? I can imagine Donald Duck doing some other Limp Bizkit songs (like "Full Nelson" off the "Chocolate Starfish" CD: "You'll get knocked the f*** out/Cause your mouth's writing checks that your @$$ can't cash").

Bjork - White Rabbit (Jefferson Airplane)
Hearing this song, Jefferson Airplane's lead singer (Grace Slick) used inflections in the opening lines that reminded me of Bjork (who uses similar inflections in songs such as "Human Behavior"). It got me thinking, the instrumentation could use updating, too--something more orchestral.

Fiona Apple - A Day In The Life (The Beatles)
Fiona's already covered one Beatles song, "Across The Universe" (for the 1998 film Pleasantville). I think her voice would go well with this song, the last track from the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album; there would be one lyric change, though. Not the English army, but "The U.S. Army had just won the war," partly because Apple's American, not English; and partly because the altered lyric could be taken as a cynical stance towards the war in Iraq.

Crash Test Dummies - Between The Wars (Billy Bragg)
I haven't heard from this Canadian band, who are best known by far for "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm," in about nine years. I've heard two different versions of Between The Wars--the original by Bragg, and the other by a virtually unknown gothic band called Illegal Teenage Bikini. Now, if the song were performed on a piano instead of a guitar, I think the voice of Brad Roberts (lead singer) would lend itself well to such a piano accompaniment (seeing as "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" had a piano in it, too). (Update 1-7-2010: Now that I think about it, British gothic rock vocalist Peter Murphy is another candidate to cover this song.)

Living Colour - Destination Unknown (Missing Persons)
This one bears some explaining. Living Colour (a great rock band from the late '80s and early '90s) reunited in 2003, and one of the tracks on the CD they released that year, Collideoscope, is Great Expectations, a song about a man who has become lazy and shiftless. I thought it sounded like a song that Missing Persons, a Los Angeles-based band from the New Wave era (early '80s) might have performed had the song been written way back then. It made me wonder if Living Colour could do any Missing Persons tracks, and Destination Unknown sprung to mind. You know how Living Colour likes to insert audio samples into their songs (e.g. Cult of Personality from Vivid, A ? of When from Collideoscope)? That would serve them well in a cover of Destination Unknown, too.

Iggy Pop - What's Good (Lou Reed)
First time I heard this song, I thought it was Iggy Pop who performed it. So now I wonder what it would have sounded like if Iggy really had performed it. I think it would have a harder edge than the original.

Sean Connery - One (Creed)
I was trying to imitate Creed's lead singer while hearing this song in my car, and long story short, when I got to "I feel angry, I feel helpless," the "helpless" sounded more like "helplesh" (like Sean Connery's well-documented speech impediment). So now whenever I sing along to any Creed song, I imitate Mr. Connery. He could do justice to a few other Creed songs, too (Higher, My Sacrifice, Arms Wide Open). I wonder if Darrell Hammond agrees.

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