Songwriting: Thunder Road (revisited)

Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Tortoise: Thunder Road

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(On writing as a process of adaptation, part three: the extreme cover.)

One of the reasons I coverblog is that I love folk music, and many local artists need some sort of boost to be heard. Which is to say: in my experience, cover songs are an especially important vehicle for introducing audiences to new artists -- by using familiar songs, a comfort zone is created which helps us be more willing to try something new; from there, if we like what we hear, we may be more willing to try the original works of the artist. The flip side of this, of course, is that covers confront the singer-songwriter model that typifies most new music today: by changing the way a song is performed, covers generally split original performance -- as modern, post Tin Pan Alley culture experiences it -- from song-as-written, making it easier for an astute listener to consider as discrete product both the song itself and the artistic choices that went into each performance.

But every once in a while, an artistic reimagining of song is so different from the original, rather than creating comfort, it confronts our sense of the original song, calling attention to the vast difference as we strain to hear the original in the cover. I'm not just talking here about acoustic renderings of Ozzy Osborne songs, either -- what I mean to point to is more like the "recasting" Matt traces through the work of The Replacements, or something akin to the "open source" adaptation of melody, lyric, and arrangement which Dean spoke of earlier this week, though in this case, we're taking about cases where at least one of those components stays similar enough that the original is still both attributable and, further, is named by the artist performing the song -- that is the performer believes he is creating a coversong, regardless of what we might read into it. Such extreme covers transcend our usual understanding what it means to cover something, and begin to move -- ever so slightly -- in the direction of rewriting.

One great example of this is the Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Tortoise "cover" of Thunder Road, a song we've already heard evolve in the hands of its author, thanks to Paul's great analysis. (note: unless you grew up in a thrash-metal-only zone or something, you've surely heard Springsteen's original before this week, too). The cover is startlingly different, and much of this is "mere" arrangement: rock drums, pulsing, anthemic keyboards and electric guitar; seventies-era rock breaks and solos; beautiful, haunting harmonies. But there's something else happening here, too. By keeping the lyrics intact, but completely rewriting the composition -- switching it into a minor key, and displacing the melodic line entirely, though it appears again faintly in the harmony part of the chorus -- other than a faint recognition that this is a Springsteen song we know, the way we hear the song has almost no relationship to the way we have always heard the original. If chords matter -- and Brendan made that case convincingly, I think -- this isn't a new setting of a song, it's a total deconstruction of one.

Maybe my coverblogger's ears are oversensitive to such change. But I think what Tortoise and Bonnie "Prince" Billy have done here is to coversong what Jackson Pollock once was to art: by presenting us with something almost but not quite unrecognizable, it confronts our sense of what is and what is not true writing, asking us to consider more fluid the usual lines between the art of performance and song creation and the craft of arranging and interpretation. It may not be true "writing", but it's closer to it than most covers.