The expectations and conventions governing cover versions vary from genre to genre. Jazz and easy listening are built upon the feeling of representing already-known textile and have therefore developed an interpretive language of their own, one based around the thought of "standards". Folk music has a long account of interpreting centuries-old song fragments and offer them in new or not-so-new forms.
Hip-hop and other sample-based music has radically redefined our apprehension of such borrowing and recycling. Rock musicians, meanwhile, have tended to measure self-penned material, and singer-songwriters are outlined by their attachment to original work.
Like generic boundaries themselves, such observations are easily problematized. It does not look at all surprising, then, when a folkie-singer-songwriter such as Northeast England-based Kathryn Williams releases an album of screen versions that draws heavily on the "songbooks" of post-1960s rock and pop composers. Such songs, by the likes of Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, and the Brothers Gibb are, after all, as enmeshed in the repertory of contemporary standards as run by earlier writers such as Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, or Rodgers & Hart. Yet if this loss was not altogether unexpected, it does still take the same challenge that any covers collection demands: how to accounting for these versions of those songs.
It is a common practice, when discussing cover versions, to address in price of faithfulness or fidelity, but it is not always realize what people mean by such terms By "faithful", do we expect the new variant to be as near to the master as possible, or is it somehow truer to express one`s appreciation by radically reconfiguring the original, perhaps even making it unrecognizable? To what extent does an artist adhere to or start from the master or most familiar translation of a song? Certain much-covered artists-Bob Dylan, for example-like to select office in the game themselves, constantly reinventing their act so that the real conception of an "original version" is shattered.
The philosopher Jacques Derrida, with whose form it is always interesting to compare Dylan`s, once described this return of faithfulness in price of the wedding vow. In place to show one`s commitment to a relationship, Derrida argued, the vow must always be restated and reinvented, the "I do" of today being necessarily different to the "I do" of yesterday. "Necessarily" because, between those moments, so often has intervened: the historical dimension of the relationship must be accounted for and never taken for granted.
Kathryn Williams chose to visit her cover album Relations, thus highlighting the grandness of her kinship to the material. The album was originally released in the UK in 2004 as the singer`s fourth solo release and is being granted a North American release by Williams`s new label, One Little Indian, on the game of her latest album, The Quickening. Reportedly, Williams was not conversant with all the songs she elected to cover, with some being suggested to her by members of her band. Others came by way of previous cover versions, such as Nico`s take on Jackson Browne`s "These Days".
Such cases remind us that the kinship between an original version and a cover, or series of covers, is one ultimately mediated by listeners, whose opinions regarding the faithfulness of interpretation will be guided by a list of factors. Williams`s "Easy Rider" brings less of a memory, for this listener, of the Byrds` original than it does of Sandy Denny`s version, a connection enhanced by Williams`s status as a female folk-influenced singer with a Denny-like tendency to create intimate, quietly devastating songs. Here, though, the comparison does not favor Williams; her version drifts by rather too swiftly, where Denny`s had flowed with the melancholy ache its lyric demanded.
Did we actually need another "Hallelujah", even backwards in 2004? Probably not, but Leonard Cohen`s song has constituted itself so powerfully as a measure that we are undoubtedly destined to many more versions. This one is lovely but it doesn`t really add to other easily available attempts, not least those by the song`s composer. Sacrilege as it may be to Jeff Buckley fans (and even to Alexandra Burke fans), Cohen`s recent magisterial return to be performance has proved that no one else delivers this gem of a call with quite the same uncut charisma as its originator.
Perhaps the concealment of Neil Young`s "Birds" works not because Williams changes it (she doesn`t), but rather due to the comparative deficiency of exposure the call has experienced. Williams nails its avian fragility perfectly, simultaneously showcasing her vocal prowess and Young`s evocative, subtle songwriting. This is just what covers should deliver. There`s a similar look to her reading of Lou Reed`s "Candy Says", another delicate number from the like period, also to her takes on the Bee Gees` mellow "I Started A Laugh" and Big Star`s beautiful "Thirteen". Lest we think that Williams`s reference points are all late `60s/early `70s, there are solid renditions of Pavement`s "Spit on a Stranger" and Nirvana`s "All Apologies", both drenched in the deceptively placid resonance that distinguishes Williams`s own contemporary material.
Indeed, listening to these songs, it seems that Williams has been worn to build relationships with male composers who were, for the about part, unburdened by either teleological or groove-based structures, a kind of anti-cock-rock. Unlike Tori Amos, who deliberately set out to show another side to the misogynistic material she covered on her Strange Little Girls album, Williams presents material that was ever more sexually ambiguous. Interestingly, the raunchiest song on offer here is "A Guy What Takes His Time", a number indelibly associated with Mae West even if it, like the early songs on Relations, was scripted by a man.
Amos and Williams play the extremes of fidelity, one a radical reconfigurer of others` work, the other seemingly content to offer whispered "I dos" that are obvious echoes of yesterday`s promises and regrets. This should not, however, be interpreted as a critique of Williams`s project. There is something sustained and still slightly strange about her attachment to a sonic world of the past. Like the recent album by Midlake, a radical with whom Williams has no other obvious connection, there exists a haunting quality to Relations which seems to emerge precisely from that murky sonic world, partly recognized, partly elusive, offering an irresistible invitation to research it further.
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