Cover Lover

I have always loved making covers

There’s something about experiencing the familiar in a wildly or weirdly new light,

building a new world and story for the music, or song, with instruments and voice. It can give completely different meaning to a story – like Greta’s cover of “…baby one more time” reworked as murder ballad, she takes you away from glossy 90s pop into a black-and-white world of European arthouse cinema.

Hearing Roberto (Santamaria) singing along to “Praise You” with his own lyric of “Corn Bread” having no idea what the original said, lifted another 90s hit in to a different decade and continent, in an Austin Powers meets Buena Vista kind of cover.

Gender of the performer can also fundamentally change the meaning of a song, even when not a single word of the lyric changes. It’s one of the most fundamental changes a cover version can make to an original.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun was written by Robert Hazard. Originally sung by a man observing women who want to have fun, with an attitude that can sound possessive and dismissive.

What changes: The object of the song becomes its subject.

The bottom line with covers is make it different. Make it offensively different if you can.