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NAME THAT TUNE
Jul. 3rd, 2008 10:42 pmI love it when musicians take a familar song and completely reinvent, recast, reimagine it, so that it changes from something familiar enough to be essentially background music into something brand new and exciting and revelatory.
Tonight I was at a free concert featuring a Buffalo-based Americana/rock musician named Alan Whitney -- great set all around, with strong songwriting and well-chosen covers. (I particularly like his song "Frankie Speed," about a man who takes great professional, personal and familial pride in his chosen occupation. His job? Stealing Cadillacs.) Then, toward the end, he said, "See if you can guess this song" -- and his band launched into a dense, heavy blues-rocker that sounded like something from Cream or the Allman Brothers. I kept trying to figure out what it was -- it had a vaguely familiar lilt to it, and I was certain I'd heard it on classic-rock radio before, though I didn't quite recognize the lyrics at first. I was mentally running through the catalog of all those seminal blues-rock bands and not hitting anything ...
... until I heard the phrase "shiny and new." And then he launched into the refrain. That was the Holy Flaming Manicotti moment, when I realized what it was:
LIKE. A. VIRGIN.
But a soulful, blue-drenched, Cocker-Skynyd-Clapton-LeslieWest "Like A Virgin." It made it an entirely new song. One that I kinda liked.
Any surrealistically reimagined cover versions you've heard lately?
Tonight I was at a free concert featuring a Buffalo-based Americana/rock musician named Alan Whitney -- great set all around, with strong songwriting and well-chosen covers. (I particularly like his song "Frankie Speed," about a man who takes great professional, personal and familial pride in his chosen occupation. His job? Stealing Cadillacs.) Then, toward the end, he said, "See if you can guess this song" -- and his band launched into a dense, heavy blues-rocker that sounded like something from Cream or the Allman Brothers. I kept trying to figure out what it was -- it had a vaguely familiar lilt to it, and I was certain I'd heard it on classic-rock radio before, though I didn't quite recognize the lyrics at first. I was mentally running through the catalog of all those seminal blues-rock bands and not hitting anything ...
... until I heard the phrase "shiny and new." And then he launched into the refrain. That was the Holy Flaming Manicotti moment, when I realized what it was:
LIKE. A. VIRGIN.
But a soulful, blue-drenched, Cocker-Skynyd-Clapton-LeslieWest "Like A Virgin." It made it an entirely new song. One that I kinda liked.
Any surrealistically reimagined cover versions you've heard lately?
