Day 15: a song you like that’s a cover by another artist.
As the great philosopher Jon Bon Jovi once said, “Whoa, we’re halfway there.”
I like me some covers. Whether they’re stripped down acoustic versions of hiphop tunes I would usually ignore, plain gorgeous takes on songs I didn’t know in the first place, translations, just done for the heck of it, or left-field versions of songs I know pretty well. And then you have artists/interpreters like Dusty Springfield and Aretha Franklin, songwriters like Carole King who ‘cover’ their own work after they’ve given it to someone else first, or Jim Steinman, who isn’t above cannibalizing his songs and/or giving them another go.
But according to my Last.fm stats, the cover I have listened to most is Wende’s cover of Jacques Brel’s “Au suivant”. The live version embedded above is the most powerful one I’ve seen, but while looking that one up, I also found the version that made me fall for her in the first place. My French isn’t what it used to be, but when I heard that, I believed every word.