Over: Don’t Dream It’s Over

Crowded House: Don’t Dream It’s Over
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When this theme was announced, I decided to write about the X song, “Once Over Twice,” but before I even started that piece, I heard Crowded House’s great ballad, “Don’t Dream it’s Over” twice on different Sirius XM stations while driving around in my car. So, it seemed like the universe, or at least the satellite radio folks, were telling me something. 

This song was discussed on this blog back in 2011, before I started writing here, by “boyhowdy,” who was one of the fine writers who attracted me to the blog as a reader first, and then as a writer. Unfortunately, he doesn’t write very often here anymore (and not at all since 2018), but still writes quite well and somewhat irregularly at Cover Lay Down. As it is my oft-stated policy not to try to write something if someone has said it better already, and because boyhowdy is a really good writer, let me quote briefly from his short post: 

this well-known EnZed pop ballad is clearly intended to be romantic in nature. But strip away the pop production . . .and it, too, transforms effectively as an anthem for our times, a call for change in a world where the vitriolic stream of talk radio madness overwhelms any attempt at rational discourse, where the news stations dumb down our world daily in their attempt to demonstrate that every idea has two equal and equivalent sides, where my inner city students struggle to find safe haven in a culture which seems to have forgotten them. 

And remember that passage was written in 2011, when the idea of Donald Trump as president still seemed like a joke. (Damn. Can’t stop inserting politics into music posts. Bad Jordan.) 

“Don’t Dream It’s Over,” was written by Neil Finn, who I still have trouble distinguishing from his older and also very talented brother Tim, for his band Crowded House, and was released on their 1986 self-titled album. It was a massive international hit, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. Since I’m stealing stuff from better writers, here’s a description of the song two Australian writers, Andrew Ford and Anni Heino, from their book, The Song Remains the Same: 800 Years of Love Songs, Laments and Lullabies, as excerpted in The Guardian: 

It was the song you danced to at the end of the night, pressed close to the intriguing person you’d just met while wondering what might happen next. The palpable sincerity in Neil Finn’s voice and the expansive melodic line of the song’s chorus encouraged hope. The song was also fast becoming an anthem for Antipodeans overseas, the slightly maudlin counterpart to Men at Work’s novelty song Down Under. 

If you read the Guardian piece, there’s a lot more about the musical attributes of the song that I have no ability to write myself. 

According to Finn, despite the fact that he knew the song was good, it almost didn’t come together. He told Uncut (I can’t find a link to the whole interview): 

The day I did it, I knew I had something quite special. Then the next day we played it with the band and it sounded like a bag of s--t. It was only when Mitchell (Froom) suggested the bassline, which Nick (Seymour) elaborated on, that it really found its groove. I was wavering away doing demos, and Mitchell made some quite profound suggestions. Like an R&B bassline might be better than a rock or pop approach, or a Hammond organ could sound nice. These were not textures I was used to. He filled in quite a few areas that we weren't covering, but maybe it made our individual sound less distinctive. It took a while, but then 'Don't Dream It's Over' started to work in the US and whole record went on to have a pretty big life. 

Somehow, Neil Finn ended up in the most recent touring version of Fleetwood Mac (replacing Lindsey Buckingham), and the band performed the song as a duet by Finn and Stevie Nicks. Check out this version from a show in Auckland, New Zealand, not that far from where Finn was born, and where he probably never dreamed he’d be singing on stage with Stevie Nicks.

Hey now!

Four: Four Seasons in One Day

Crowded House: Four Seasons in One Day

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New Buffalo (Sally Seltmann): Four Seasons in One Day

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Paul Kelly and Angus Stone: Four Seasons in One Day

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The songs of Neil and Tim Finn have be come so familiar that I sometimes forget that they are from Australia. Their songs have been covered by artists worldwide, and I am more accustomed to that treatment for American, English, or Canadian artists. Four Seasons in One Day makes no specific reference to Melbourne, but the song was inspired by the changeable weather there. For the singer, the uncertain weather is a mirror of the uncertainties in his own life. The video expands brilliantly on this idea, by regarding the seasons in the title as the seasons of a man’s life.

Does it matter that the songs of the Finn brothers are written and sung by men, or are they more universal? In 2005, the label EMI decided to find out. They recruited a roster of female artists from Australia and New Zealand to record their versions of Finn songs. They called the resulting album She Will Have Her Way. For the occasion, Sally Seltmann recorded Four Seasons in One Day under her stage name of the time, New Buffalo. She has recorded her more recent material under her own name. Her take on Four Seasons in One Day sounds like Laurie Anderson may have been is much of an inspiration as the Finns. Reviewers of the album on Amazon seem to either love it or hate it, and this song will probably get similar reactions.

In any case, the album was enough of a success that EMI decided to release a companion album in 2010. He Will Have His Way features all male artists this time, but still from Australia and New Zealand. You might have expected similar results, but reviewers on Amazon who loved the previous album seem to hate this one, and vice versa. Paul Kelly and Angus Stone deliver a Four Seasons in One Day that is certainly truer to the original than Seltmann’s version, but they still make some artistic choices of their own. The brass section is an especially nice touch.

In summary, I leave this post as a case study in the art of the cover song. The artists on both tribute albums offer a wealth of quality original material from their own catalogues as well; I invite you to seek that out and enjoy.

Songwriting: Persuasion

Tim Finn: Persuasion

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Richard and Teddy Thompson: Persuasion

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In my first entry for this week's theme, I looked at an example of song creation in which found poetry was adapted into song, both through minor textual change and, more significantly, through setting that material to original music. Today's song is the reverse: an adaptation of a borrowed instrumental into a narrative song through the addition of original lyrics.

Songwriting credit is usually a pretty straightforward phenomenon; it has to be, in a world where attribution is economically relevant. When multiple authors are listed on the record label (or, more recently, in the metadata that appears in the iTunes "composer" field), those little slashes that separate their names are generally understood as a signifier that the song was written through one of two methods of collaboration:

• two or more people collaborate on the song during the creation process (cf. Lennon/McCartney)
  
• lyrics and composition are written separately and combined afterwards (cf. Elton John and Bernie Taupin)

In both of those cases, the collaboration is generally considered part of the creation of the song - that is, the song is not considered finished until the partnership has produced a product. And, though historical synchronicity is implied in such collaboration, there is nothing inherent about this. The Grammy-winning Wilco and Billy Bragg sessions which brought forth Mermaid Avenue Vol. I and II are generally accepted as collaborative works despite posthumous contribution: Woody Guthrie wrote a bunch of lyrics, but until they were set to music by Bragg and his alt-country co-horts, the works were not considered finished song.

The case of Persuasion, then, is somewhat of an anomaly.

Originally, Persuasion was a Richard Thompson/Peter Filleul instrumental written for the movie Sweet Talker. Collaborating with composer Filleul was not new for Thompson -- previously, the two had worked together on soundtracks for some TV shows you've never heard of either -- but constantly rewriting the music to fit the movie as it evolved in editing was a painful process for Thompson, an artist known for careful attention to his song craft, and he swore he would never do another soundtrack.

Persuasion was released with little fanfare in 1991 on a soundtrack album which, like the movie itself, is generally considered to be a dud. The song is pretty cheesy, with typical late-eighties soundtrack production -- too cheesy, really, to be worth including here, though you're welcome to sample it. But New Zealander pop/New Wave musician and singer-songwriter Tim Finn (Crowded House, Split Enz) heard it somewhere, and thought the song could be salvaged. He added lyrics, and began playing the song in concert; eventually, it was recorded and released on Together in Concert, a live 2000 trio album with fellow Enzed artists Bic Runga and Dave Dobbyn. The following year, Richard and Teddy Thompson cut their own version of the now fully-realized song, releasing it as one of two new songs on his excellent Capitol Records retrospective album Action Packed, credited to Finn/Thompson/Filleul.

For a study in songwriting, then, the differences between posthumous collaboration and the case of Persuasion are subtle, but significant.

First, this is not a case of taking raw materials and turning them into song -- where Bragg and co. truly finished what Guthrie had started, what Finn did was to take something which had already been released as a finished product and used it to make a song which is quite literally about something, in ways which an instrumental cannot be. This, itself, would make the case of Persuasion notable enough to merit inclusion in any discussion of pastiche songwriting.

And second, the existence of two versions of the "finished" song -- one by the original author of those lyrics, and one, much later, by the original composer of what he thought at the time was an instrumental -- begs a whole series of questions, from "what is a song?" to "which is the original version of this song?"

No philosopher, I; I'd never deign to tackle the fundamental question of what a song is. But as a cover blogger, it is that last question which keeps me up at night. Technically, because he wrote the "song", Richard Thompson's recording of his own original theme with Tim Finn's lyric cannot qualify as a cover of someone else's music. But just as certainly, Tim Finn's version is not "the" original, either, because Thompson wrote and performed the music a decade earlier.

I think Finn's product is easier to explain -- it is, I suppose, a lyrical adaptation of an instrumental. But I have struggled with nomenclature to describe Thompson's 2001 recording, because I think his original work as composer makes his later recording more than just a performance of Finn's adaptation. Rather, I think it qualifies as something new and namable.

Because Thompson clearly appreciates Finn's lyrics enough to record his own take on them, I think it qualifies as a "re/cover". It's a bit postmodern, but that mid-word slash also recalls the mark which signifies co-writing credit on those record labels; as such, it seems especially fitting. If anyone can think of ANY other examples of a Re/cover, I'd love to hear them. And if someone wants to write the wikipedia entry for re/cover, you can start here. Just make sure to cite me on it.

PS: Just to complicate matters further, here's a Youtube version of the two songwriters performing the song together in 1993, years before Thompson recorded himself singing lead on the song. Notably, each plays his own piece of the song, and supports the other as well: Finn sings the lyrics he wrote, and strums the basic chords, while Thompson plays the melodic theme he originally penned as an instrumental on his signature electric guitar, and does back-up vocals. I have no idea what to call this one, either. But call it what you will: it's a great song in all incarnations.