I love both of these songs—really I do. Which is a strange thing, because often times if you like the original you hate the cover, and vice versa. It’s not that weird though, once you get into it. Think about it this way: There was once an original cupcake, the very first one ever made, and now there are hundreds of types. You don’t hate the other versions, do you? No. In fact you probably like some of them the same, you might hate a few types, and you have one favorite. In this essay I’ll compare the original, the yardstick to which all covers must be compared to, and my favorite cover of the song, the new cupcake.
Enough about cupcakes, though if I continued with the analogy, I’d say that these songs have the same basic “cake recipe” though one has a little more sugar and one has a bit more flour. Regardless, the lyrics and song structure are the same for each song giving them the same base to really work off of. What they do from this base is quite different.
The cover has completely different ay of presenting its vocals. Unlike the original which does not use vocals to play with height or width, the cover does due to the fact that it has a male and female singer. And these are singers, they just lover to croon in the background and belt out the notes of the chorus instead of pleasantly and simply singing them as Tracy Chapmen does. There is something to be said for simplicity, but there is also something to be said about kickass harmonizing.
The grooves, while highly similar, do differ in one big way. In the cover the groove seems split almost at times between being a love story and once man’s personal journey. I don’t really like this, I don’t think this song is intended to be sort of a high school musical duet, but I understand that by having a male and a female vocalists this is nearly unavoidable. The original is the tale of a single man and what he wants with his life, not just his love life—which I really respect because sometimes current music aimed at my age and overall demographic capitalizes too much on raging hormones and our preoccupation with our love life and not just our life in general.
In closing, I do like both works and I can appreciate them for different things. For sort of a more serious time or if I’m trying to avoid a fight with a music enthusiast I’ll revert to the original, for a nice summer night outside with my friends it’s the cover all the way.
