This reader, Victoria Duda, sends a dreamy acoustic version of the Oasis classic:
Not sure if this counts as “transformative,” but I’m throwing Ryan Adams’s cover of “Wonderwall” into the ring? This haunting cover seeps into my soul every listen and life stands still ... until I hit the “Repeat” button.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
Earlier this week, my colleague David featured the premiere of “Chicago” by David Nagler—a track from an album based on the poems of Carl Sandburg. To me, turning a poem into a song seemed like the ultimate cross-genre cover—a jump not just to a new musical style, but to an entirely different art form. So I put out a call in our daily newsletter for more songs based on works of literature or visual art. Keith Wells delivers:
In the mid-’70s, Ambrosia had a minor hit with “Nice, Nice, Very Nice,” with lyrics adapted from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle (he, of course, shared a writing credit for the song). In high school, I was a huge Vonnegut fan and thought it was crazy when I heard the song for the first time. It helped that I immediately liked the song on its own merits.
Apparently, Vonnegut did too. Keith quotes a letter Vonnegut wrote to the band in January 1976:
I was at my daughter’s house last night, and the radio was on. By God if the DJ didn’t play our song, and say it was number ten in New York, and say how good you guys are in general. You can imagine the pleasure that gave me. Luck has played an enormous part in my life. Those who know pop music keep telling me how lucky I am to be tied in with you. And I myself am crazy about our song, of course, but what do I know and why wouldn’t I be? This much I have always known, anyway: Music is the only art that’s really worth a damn. I envy you guys.
Do you know a piece of music that transforms, or emulates, or sheds new light on a different work of art? Please send it our way: [email protected].
(Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
The champion long-running compositions for working, for me, are the J.S. Bach Cello Suites, performed by Mstislav Rostropovich. (These do require a quiet environment or headphones that limit competing noise). The notes push onward inevitably, flowing and cascading, for a couple of hours if I play all six suites.
It’s like going into a large, high-ceilinged room that has minimal furniture, but very rich textures—bookcases with leather-bound volumes, silk oriental rugs, deep-cushioned velvet upholstery, satin pillows, a lacquered chest, taffeta draperies, window seats with brocade cushions, and glazed plaster walls, all in aquamarine, emerald, sapphire, ruby, pearl, and silver tones, with one or two cloisonne tchotchkes, an arrangement of tulips or apple blossom or pussy willows, and a marble fireplace with an enormous mirror above it.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
Poetry, like music, lends itself to epiphanies—those moments where a piece of art that might have previously seemed inert suddenly seems to connect. For David Nagler, it was the music of Randy Newman that helped him appreciate Carl Sandburg’s poetry.
Both Newman and Sandburg might be seen as bards of American cities—Sandburg with his famous poems about Chicago, Newman with his barbed paeans to Los Angeles, Baltimore, Cleveland. But it was the characters that did it. Reading Sandburg’s “Mag” in Evanston, Illinois, where Nagler went to college, the “down on his luck, at the end of his rope” narrator reminded Nagler of the characters on Newman’s Good Old Boys.
That was two decades ago. Now, Nagler is releasing an album called Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems, inspired by Sandburg’s book by that title and featuring guests including Jeff Tweedy and Robbie Fulks. This is the premier of “Chicago,” based on one of Sandburg’s best-known poems (you can read the text here):
It’s easy to see the allure of Sandburg’s poems for an artist—they are full of powerful images and lyrical passages. It’s equally easy to see the challenge, too: They don’t rhyme and seldom stick to regular structures that would make them easily adaptable.
“For most of the stuff I’ve written, it was sort of pop-rock songs,” said Nagler, who has worked with singer-songwriter Wesley Stace (aka John Wesley Harding), the Mekons, and other artists, as well as in his own group Nova Social. “I didn’t do much in terms of thru-composed music, where the song evolves where you write it, and it doesn’t necessarily adhere to a verse-chorus-verse structure.”
In approaching “Chicago,” he skipped over the famous opening lines and started midway through the poem—nearly three minutes into the final recording. Over an almost martial beat, Nagler half-sings, half-speaks: “They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.” A few lines later, the song suddenly opens out into a lush, inviting section: “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” The martial beat returns; then comes a quiet new motif. “Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth”: A soft melody wafts up, almost like sun breaking through dust.
It was only later that Nagler returned to figure out the opening section:
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders
“I think I was intimidated by how anthemic that beginning part had to be,” he told me. To reach the challenge, he took inspiration from classical composers, two near-contemporaries of Sandburg: Aaron Copland and his “Fanfare for the Common Man,” and Charles Ives and his “The Unanswered Question.”
Reading Sandburg’s poems today, it’s easy to read them as elegiac, romantic invocations. Even the smoke of railroads and blood of the Chicago slaughterhouses recede in horror from our vantage point a century later; to a U.S. population that is confident the country is on the wrong track, they seem not like avatars of dark, Satanic mills but like the trappings of an America that was going somewhere and building things. Sandburg might not have been as dyspeptic as Newman, but his poems are not without a barb. (Another track on Chicago Poems, “Killers,” faces the horror of World War I head-on.)
The poet loved the city even as he could see its flaws clearly, and Nagler felt it was important to capture that.
“It’s a very earnest piece of writing in a way that I haven’t done that often, but I felt that this text really deserved it. If I was going to do something like this, I wouldn’t want to shortchange it. I wanted to make something that felt meaningful, even at the risk of it being cliché,” he said. “That song in particular, there had to be a sincerity to that in order for it to work. There’s a lot of sarcasm and bite to his words, but the earnestness of his sentiment in the poetry is evident.”
Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems is due out in October.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
I really liked the music that was used, but the credit was remarkably unhelpful: “Podington Bear.” No track name or album name. Some exploring did not identify the track, but it did inform me that Podington is Chad Crouch, who has a lot of ambient music available online. I listened to the album Springtime more than once—I like the cheerful aspect, and sometimes I work best with a little bounciness to goose me to more productivity. The tracks are short, but “Sidecar” and “Transmogrify” are fun, and “Golden Hour” [embedded above] is lush and relaxing. Several albums are on the Free Music Archive, which was also a new discovery for me.
I listened to “Golden Hour” a few times this morning, and can confirm both bounciness and relaxation. Back to Barbara’s list:
Going back to the first post for music to work by, I’d like to note that the piece by Fauré is one of my all-time favorites. I class it in a category of classical music I refer to as serenades, even though the pieces aren’t all titled serenade. Among my favorites are Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings (for the best lush sound, the Philadelphia Orchestra), Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Vaughn Williams’s Fantasia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture by Mendelssohn, “Für Elise” by Beethoven [previously featured on Track of the Day here], Finlandia by Sibelius and his Serenades No. 1 and No. 2, The Moldau by Smetana, and Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings. I have the impression that the Dvorak is a less well-known piece compared to the Tchaikovksy or Barber's Adagio, but it is one I find particularly satisfying. It’s also long enough to allow me to work, read, or listen for a while before coping with a transition to something else.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
Reader Cole Paffett recommends one of his favorites:
The song is “Think” by Kaleida, as heard in John Wick, starring Keanu Reeves. The scene is the beginning of the Red Circle pool club scene, where Keanu’s character is quietly eliminating the bodyguards of his target (Game of Thrones’s Alfie Allen):
The song has a quiet efficiency to it, echoing hitman John Wick’s merciless efficiency in dispatching Yosef’s bodyguards. “Think” also has a “chill-out” vibe, meshing perfectly with the chill atmosphere of the pool club. There’s an undercurrent of intense emotion in the scene by John Wick as we see him professionally and ruthlessly kill anybody who comes between him and Yosef. “Think” matches that intensity, making for a memorable scene. As we learn earlier in the film, John Wick isn’t the Baba Yaga (bogeyman); he’s the man you send to kill the f****** bogeyman.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
I just read in your newsletter about your chosen song of the day—one turning an indie song into pop. If you’re looking to do the reverse, check out Calum Scott’s cover of Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.” A fun dance song turns into a discarded lover’s lament.
Update from a second reader, who flags a different version:
Hi—massive fan of Track of the Day. So disappointed Calum Scott’s cover of “Dancing On My Own” got on versus the Kings of Leon version though! See below:
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
I’m really excited about these transformative cover songs—as an a cappella alumna, I love it when people rework songs and fit them to their own styles. My latest favorite cover is Joseph's cover of Britney Spears’s “Toxic” from a few years ago. They’ve nixed the sliding, sleazy electronicized strings that were stuck in my head for all of the sixth grade and highlighted their harmonies and moody tendencies. Complete with folksy oh-oh-whoas and layered pleas to “intoxicate me, I think I’m ready now” that is somehow less sexualized than the original lyrics, these sisters from Oregon take this song in a different direction that still has a lady-power vibe but in a totally different way.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
Wilco’s “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” is a noisy, distressing indie-rock classic, but in the hands of fellow Chicagoans JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, it transforms into an exuberant Motown-style pop song. It’s a full-bodied conversion, made even weirder when, two minutes in, the band momentarily switches gears to include a snippet of lyrics taken from “Theologians,” a mid-tempo Wilco song that’s closer to Emily Dickinson than American soul. And yet that embroidery feels seamless, mostly because it extends Wilco’s persistent sense of play, but also because it gets at how so much of rock, soul, and poetry have common roots in gospel music.
Update from the reader, Eric Beltmann, who adds:
Jeff Tweedy, Wilco’s frontman, has endorsed the cover and once surprised the Uptown Sound by joining them onstage at the 2011 Solid Sound Festival.
James Blake is the type of artist that thrives in the elusive gray areas, the dark, moody subtleties of lingering pianos and trailing vocal harmonies. His style is a unique blend of somnambulic soul and thumping British post-dubstep. This music is not only notoriously difficult to cover, but also tough to make even moodier. Unless you’re BADBADNOTGOOD.
The Toronto-based jazz trio, who just released their fourth album, IV, have been quietly making some tidal waves under the surface of the indie music world. They’ve collaborated on an album with Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah, jammed with Tyler, The Creator, and worked with Future Islands’ Sam Herring (of David Letterman fame).
On this cover from 2012’s excellent BBNG 2 (which also included versions of Kanye West and Flying Lotus tunes), BABADNOTGOOD take Blake’s choppy, hypnotic piece and add heavy, languid flourishes to it. The bass disappears on a spacey free-jazz ramble, the piano rings like a wild bell on the upper register, thick synth sounds roll in and out, and the drums—it’s hard to even describe. The snare is constantly twirling and rumbling with purpose, as drummer Alex Sowinski frantically alternates between playing his cymbals and toms with a loose, laid-back aesthetic and at break-neck speed. “CMYK” is old-school jazz run through the sieve of digital thinking, hip-hop production, and glitchy, internet-age rapidity. BBNG take one of Blake’s early masterpieces and transform it into something even stranger, groovier, and equally atmospheric.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
I’ll admit to being one of those people who—despite a good tolerance for nonlinear stories, plotlessness, unlikable characters, and general melancholy—is very much not a fan of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. I enjoyed the performances of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, but the whole “alienated American in a foreign country” premise had absolutely no resonance for me.
That said, the soundtrack is undeniably wonderful. When the film deploys My Bloody Valentine’s “Sometimes” after Charlotte and Bob spend an exciting night out, the song both lifts and transforms the scene. The handheld camerawork, the mottled city lights, and the quick glimpses of nighttime crowds all take on an extra beauty, thanks to the track’s heavy distortion and wistful, otherworldly vocals.
I may not have loved Lost in Translation, but I’d rewatch this scene any day.
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
Here’s a fun movie! And by “fun movie” I mean, “one of the most transformative cinematic experiences I’ve ever had.”
Gummo, the first film Harmony Korine directed (he had previously written Larry Clark’s Kids), is bleak and weird, so it only makes sense that its opening sequence would foreshadow that. The use of the folk singer Almeda Riddle’s “My Little Rooster” is as jarring as the visuals it accompanies: a starved-looking, shirtless boy wearing pink bunny ears smoking a cigarette on a dirty overpass.
There’s almost nothing sentimental about the film that follows, and yet and yet the homey strains of “My Little Rooster” hint that there’s a very real humanity underlying the twisted narrative to come. (Side note: I almost wrote about how a later Korine film, Spring Breakers, used Britney Spears’ “Everytime,” but I’ll let someone else take that up another time.)
(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)
