For a long time I resisted doing cover songs mainly for two main objections in my mind.
1) I felt it was disrespectful to any previous recording which made me love the song in the first place.
2) I felt like I was snatching some gold fairy dust from another’s work and trying to hijack that for selfish purposes.
So, I went a long time without really trying to enjoy doing covers. If I loved a song of another I always felt it would be more polite and better for me to simply share what they had done with others, especially to the younger generation who otherwise might not ever know the song existed. And by doing this I could feel good about how I didn’t muck it up trying to do it myself, and I might actually help a likely starving artist of yesteryear who probably got raped by his record label and might need the ½ penny of streaming revenue.
But lately I’ve had a change of heart about my doing covers and so I’ve been working on a few. One of the things I’ve grown to love about my doing this is the deconstruction I do in reverse engineering the sounds I love about some old song. For example, I was recently agonizing over “Wildfire” by Michael Martin Murphy and Larry Cansler and I really had to spend some time listening critically to the song with fresh ears. I had not really paid attention to how the drums are in your face immediately after the haunting piano introduction. I mean they just boom are right there and prominent, and I never really heard that before. The piano introduction gives a subtle haunt, but once the guitar starts the song is at full throttle right from the get go and though I’ve heard the song countless times, my attempting a cover of it now has revealed something new to me about it.
There is a place in my webpage where one can listen to some covers for free, and it is my hope that if a song there catches your ear you will find the original and honor its songwriter/performer by purchasing it. Or there is a soundcloud playlist of some of my covers there at CLICK HERE.
