Many of you have probably noticed that I don’t play many covers. My repertoire contains very few of them, actually. For a Beatles night at TCAN many years ago I worked up a cover of “She Said, She Said”, which I’m quite taken with, and I do a mean “Time After Time”, and on an old tape I recorded a couple of Todd Rundgren tunes, but that’s pretty much it (well, that’s not exactly true, but we’ll get to that later).
A good cover is a wonder to behold. How many of you are old enough to remember the English Beat’s cover of “Tears of a Clown”? Or Blue Suede’s ridiculous version of “Hooked on a Feeling”? The reason these are great covers has a lot to say about this odd little subgenre I participate in.
There are three roles you can fill in music: composer, performer, or arranger (there may be others, but those are the only ones I care about at the moment). These roles are naturally distinguished or lumped together depending on what genre you’re working in. Classical music generally lumps composing and arranging together, and keeps performance separate. Traditional folk typically lumps performing and arranging together, with composing frequently separate (although someone like Arlo Guthrie might qualify as a traditional folk composer who performs his own material). And jazz is the most varied of them all.
Contemporary folk, however, lumps them all together, by and large. So much so, it seems, that people forget that arranging is a role in itself (e.g., we call ourselves singer-songwriters, not singer-arranger-songwriters). For too many of us, arranging stops at figuring out what our intro riff is. But it’s the arranging part that makes covers great. And arranging is hard.
And I, stubbornly enough, insist on my own arrangements. I can’t bear just to reproduce what’s on the album I’m listening to; and frequently, I can’t anyway, because I lack either the instrumentation or the technical chops or both. In the case of “Time After Time”, I came up with an arrangement that’s profoundly different than the version that Cyndi Lauper does, and I’m really proud of it. But too often, I can’t come up with anything at all.
But arranging is only part of the equation (and sometimes, not part of the equation at all). There are several reasons to do covers: as a tribute; as a musical challenge; or to get gigs where recognizable tunes are preferred. The problem is, of course, that these motivations are frequently in conflict. For instance, all the covers I listed above are covers of well-known songs from well-known artists. But those aren’t all the covers I’ve performed. I also do a cover of Terence Hegarty’s “Voices”; of Jon Waterman’s “The Idea of You”; of Barb Schloff’s “The Happiest”. I’ve been tempted to learn a Richard Shindell song called “Lazy”, but can’t quite play a samba; I’d love to learn JP Jones’ “Moving Train”, but I can’t think of anything interesting to do with it, and you can’t really sing it straight unless you’re JP Jones. I love these songs. But if someone asks me if I know any covers, I can’t really truly answer “yes” because of any of them, because when someone asks you if you know any covers, they mean songs they know.
Truth be told, when most people listen to music, they’re mostly listening to music they already know. Listening to unfamiliar music is hard work, and most people don’t feel like doing it, most of the time. On top of that, in a lot of settings, music is a shared experience, and the shared familiarity of a known song is a big part of the experience. This is why original music has such a relatively small audience, and why playing covers is so much more lucrative. Those of us who compose, and think of ourselves as composers first, find ourselves awfully frustrated by this, and will sometimes find ourselves giving too little credit to the performer and arranger roles, but this is a conceptual error – we might want original music to be as marketable as familiar music, but it just isn’t.
I’v been thinking about these issues lately because, as my faithful readers know, I’m a little frustrated about how relatively little I’m playing. Not playing covers limits my gig opportunities. So why don’t I play more covers? I’ve implied that it’s because of my absurdly high arranging standards, but that’s not really right; the fact is that I’d rather work on my own material than other peoples’, and up to now, I’ve been willing to play fewer gigs for the privilege. Does this tradeoff make sense? So far, it has, but maybe over the next couple months, I’ll figure it out for sure.