It all comes down, as it almost always does these days, to Taylor Swift.
The re-recording of her old material created a cottage industry of commentary online:
Ranging from the ecstatic:
To unbridled joy:
And every level of nuanced criticism in between:
Yes, I’m cherry-picking and there are plenty lukewarm responses; reality does get in the way of opinion spewing on occasion. But we blowhards soldier on.
So it seems we’ve been living in a golden era of artists recreating past successes…
Mostly in response to corporate malfeasance and bad faith.
Swift’s complaints are similar to Def Leppard’s, who spent time and care over a decade ago recreating some of their biggest hits when UMG stiffed them over digital download royalties.
Squeeze, ever impish, released a greatest hits compilation back in 2010, for which the band reconvened after a studio interregnum of more than a decade to, as precisely as possible, re-record their biggest hits, going as far as bringing back the beloved Paul Carrack for the lead vocal on ‘Tempted.’
They cheekily named the album Spot the Difference.
While reviews were mostly tepid, the album did serve as a nice refresher for fans when the band embarked on a worldwide tour.
This brings us to U2’s Songs of Surrender.
As far as I can tell, the band isn’t engaged in guerrilla warfare with their label over ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ soundtracking a Tide commercial.
This means they actually intend for you to listen to a 63 year-old Bono croon his way through a somnambulant ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,’ originally laid down when he was was in his mid-20s.
After a few spins, I remain unmoved.
My ear prefers the original by a factor of ten million or so.
The band wandering down the Strip in the video doubly etched the song into the folds of my brain.
It captured not only the band at the time (a critical snapshot for fans and old people alike), but an entire atmosphere, era, dare I write it, zeitgeist.
Why taint that legacy? That said:
Why does Songs of Surrender exist?
(Equally important: why call the thing Songs of Surrender in the first place? Are U2 waving the white flag on their career, ready to take up a two-year residence at Sam’s Town Casino in Tunica?)
The Edge, somewhat paradoxically, explains it thusly:
“When a song becomes well known, it’s always associated with a particular voice. I can’t think of “Tangled Up in Blue” without the reedy timbre of Bob Dylan or “All the Time in the World” without the unique voice of Louis Armstrong.
So what happens when a voice develops and experience and maturity give it additional resonance?”
Exactly, Beanie Dude!
‘Tangled Up in Blue’ was perfect back in ‘75, and remains so today. While Dylan may have splattered the landscape with all matter of recorded material over the years, he hasn’t (yet) announced a contemporary version of Blood on the Tracks because he thinks the public is ready to hear him croak a new studio version of ‘Idiot Wind’ or something in his ninth decade.
As to the second part of Dave’s explanation?
Sure.
A developing voice and experience and maturity happen, and the result is often an expansion of the artist’s toolbox.
The question then becomes: should these newfound and continually evolving qualities be used for revisiting previous recordings with the idea of adding ‘resonance?’
I don’t think so.
As a music fan, I’ve also lived across those same timelines and experienced much and matured a little. (The less said about my voice, the better.)
The resonance for me, however, doesn’t come from hearing the artist reinvent something from earlier in their career, but through listening to the original through the lens of my history:
And how it connects to my life.
Of course it’s all about me. I’m the listener, damn it!
And if I want to hear whatever performer ruminate about how the passage of time affects us all?
I want it to be couched in the accoutrements of new material. A more honest way, in my opinion, of sharing these kind of hard-earned meditative abilities.
Look, I didn’t want to kick U2 while they’re in their reflective era.
Bono and compatriots have provided so many moments of joy, it seems petty to slag them for SOS when they’ve graced us with The Unforgettable Fire and Rattle and Hum and Wide Awake in America and Songs of Innocence.
Admittedly: the latter bestowed upon us by ramming it into our music libraries.
They set the bar high, though. That they’re entering their sunset years regurgitating ancient material is beneath them. I eagerly await fresh material from the boys from Baile Átha Cliath.
PS:
Yes, I know. Live.
An ‘ISHFWILF’ performed similarly to the SOS version, the band sitting in a half circle entertaining a crowd in the low hundreds, would be great. I’m sure they’ve done it this way at some point.
My only defense would be that live performances are best experienced in the moment, at the venue, and that the secondhand nature of listening to the song on your new headphones subtracts from the impact.
Or something.
Just never ask me about ‘Bad.’
“Oh – check your iTunes library! There’s a little somethin’ there for ya.”
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I understand your point and more or less agree. (As a non-Swiftie, I don’t care whether there’s one version of most of her compositions let alone multiple.) I have found some exceptions, though. I liked what Bruce Springsteen did in the late ‘80s with the acoustic “Born to Run” although the original is definitely still the go-to. Elton John’s duet take with Mary J. Blige on “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” is a hoot. And, of course, there’s Neil Sedaka’s twice Top 10s with “Breakin’ Up Is Hard to Do.” Some people probably hate both. I love them.
I like “Bad Blood”. Both of them.
In theory, a remake should have as much potential for merit as a cover. In practice, a remix would have been wiser.
When Bono mentioned Louis Armstrong, he should have mentioned Billie Holiday, who recorded some remakes of classics that are all worth having, regardless of what the definitive version might be.
A solid remake album is Os Mutantes Technicolor. It helps that the songs are English translations of older songs, but more importantly they are really dramatic reworkings. Like Billie, they don’t necessarily trump the originals, but they’re just as essential.
Also, David Bowie’s later cover of his lukewarm Neil Young-posturing dud “Shadow Man” is a stunner, one that towers over the original.
But for the most part, albums of re-recorded songs are inessential.
Yes, Songs of Inconsequence, you too…
While I understand Swift’s and Def Leppard’s and Prince’s business reasons for recreating their records, I totally agree that there’s no need to cover a song, whether it’s someone else’s or your own, without doing something new with it. Bowie is the artist was should all aspire to be.
Bowie’s remakes on the whole were mostly just…okay, for me anyway. But he usually did try to imbue them with a new feel or new meaning. And I guess that’s the bare minimum of what should hope for.
His best remakes:
“Shadow Man,” “Liza Jane,” “Panic in Detroit” (really weird), “Sue in a Season of Crime,” “Holy Holy,” “Prettiest Star,” and the Visconti recordings of “Memory of a Free Festival.”
I wished so hard for Aimee Mann to rerecord Everything’s Different Now, a half-asleep, half-awake Natalie Merchant mistook the wish floating in the ether as being directed towards her, and gave us Tigerlily 2.0.
I thought I hated everything from ‘Til Tuesday’s debut album save for “Voices Carry”, but “Sleep” started growing on me. My new wish is that she rerecord her best songs from all three albums(plus “Sign of Love” from the Back to the Beach soundtrack), and call it: Aimee Mann: The ‘Til Tuesday Years.
Pre-TNOCS, a Stereogum OG explained to me that I was reacting strongly to the gated reverb. So that’s my reason. I think the gated reverb is holding “Rip in Heaven” and “Will She Just Fall Down” back from reaching its potential.
Aimee Mann had great eighties hair.
Related to this is the remixing of Bowie’s much-panned Never Let Me Down from 1987.
Bowie was only alive to hear the new mix job of “Time Will Crawl,” and he loved it. He expressed his wish that the whole album could be mixed like that, free from all of the excesses of 80s production.
And in 2018, Bowie’s friends did just that. It sounds a lot better in my opinion! The filler songs will never stop being filler, but the more inspired ones stand out more, and the general listening experience is much more pleasant.
Viva le revisionism!
I bought all the David Bowie reissues. I’m looking forward to hearing the 2018 version. Tonight has “Blue Jean”. Do you like “Blue Jean”? I ask because you’re a major fan. A major fan will have a different top ten than the casual fan, or in my case, a music history fan who likes to archive. And which lead single is better: “Blue Jean” or “Day in Day Out”? I embarrassingly(in all seriousness, I am not proud of this) prefer Gary Numan, but it’s easy for me to admit that there is no unlistenable Bowie album. In Numan’s case, I’d say there are 5-7.
I love Don’t Tell a Soul. I had no idea it was poorly produced.
As a Bowie die hard who even loves Bad Bowie, I say with no hesitation that “Blue Jean” is one of the two songs on Tonight that are actually worth a damn. The other being “Loving the Alien.”
I like “Blue Jean” even more than “Day In Day Out,” though not more than “Time Will Crawl.”
Ever since listening to the live album “Under a Blood Red Sky” and having a profound a-ha moment where the music just took me to a place, U2 is a band that I have connected with on a deeper, spiritual level, which is obviously not a unique experience. That said, I lost interest in new U2 material a couple of decades ago, so I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I will say that based on Spotify numbers, which are a fraction of those of their last studio album of original material, the general public may be on your side on this one, stob.
Rerecording old material as a grievance against whoever owns your old stuff, and making it sound very close to the originals seems like a financial choice more than an artistic one. But as you said, that is not what appears to be happening here. It looks like the inspiration for this came out of Bono’s memoir, and a desire to revisit the songs that are an intregal part of his story and who he is. I get it, and I see your point about why it’s beneath them. Others have mentioned liking individual reworked songs by an artist, which can be kind of cool, but as Phylum said, an entire album is usually non-essential. And this is 40 fricking songs. No one needed this. If Bono took the time to reflect on his life and write a memoir, why not write new music to go along with those insights? Surely he had the inspiration and the time. They started the project during the pandemic. Taylor Swift took that down time and completely reinvented her sound with not one but two albums of new music. Maybe not a fair comparison because she’s at a very different point in her life, but still…
(rb’s comment got trapped by an overzealous spam filter bot. Fixed.)
Thank you. I wondered why it disappeared.
It’s a good thing I was the first on in the office today. “All is quiet, on laundry day” made me GOL (guffaw out loud).
“Are we so helpless against the Tide?”
.
I’ve gotta polish up my Polish pop trivia.
Nicely played, mt.
This may be Bold of me but I think All you’re trying to do is Gain some thumbs up with that kind of Cheer in this Era.
Um… uh… something something Pine-Sol.
I really stink at this.
Oh, don’t be so Downy in the mouth.
Hmm. I’m not so good either.
On point.
Interesting. I’ve wondered what folks reactions were to U2 revisiting their old songs. I get Taylor’s approach, but I would think casual fans of hers could get really confused and still wind up sticking with the original versions, which defeats the whole purpose of “Taylor’s Versions”.
I don’t like people fiddling with their old songs. It’s like George Lucas fiddling with the OG Star Wars trilogy, and how annoying I found most of his tweaks. Now, a complete rework? That’s different. Bring in an orchestra, have a modified arrangement, that I enjoy. It’s a new dimension on the songs. (I keep sending hints to Duran HQ that they need to do some orchestral recording next. I saw DD when they did a concert with the Orlando Symphony back in 2005, and it was ah-may-zing)
I’m grateful George Michael was able to do that as his final Symphonica tour, having a large orchestra behind him every night. His voice had matured, certainly, but so did his arrangements. What’s the point in being as note perfect to the original recording as possible on a rerecording?
Something Robert Plant said years ago always stuck with me. The poor guy has spent the past 40+ years having to explain why he doesn’t sing most of the Led Zep catalog anymore. His explanation basically is – that was me in my 20s . I don’t feel like singing Whole Lotta Love in my 50’s, 70s, that’s not who I am anymore, and certainly no one wants to see an old guy singing songs like that. There was a place a time for those songs. I’ve moved on.
But I can see the other side too. MrDutch can’t stand live performances for the most part, because they differ from the version he’s used to too much. So I guess there’s an audience for every facet.
Thanks for this, stob!
Glad I could spark conversation. For every Plant, though, there’s Jagger doing ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ or Daltrey and Townsend belting out ‘My Generation.’
Me in my 30s:
“Come on – Mick has no business still carrying on like a young guy.”
Me in my 60s:
“Hats off to Mick for still carrying on like a young guy.”
It’s been 23 years since Jimmy Fallon suggested Mick Jagger was too old in Almost Famous.
This is from War Games.
Sheedy: He wasn’t very old.
Broderick: No he was pretty old. He was 41.
Sheedy: Oh, “yeah”? That’s old.
I can’t believe War Games was a summer movie. The opening sequence scares me more than anything in Dr. Strangelove.
I agree with you. I haven’t listened to the whole thing because the songs I have heard have not impressed me. It doesn’t sound so much like, “You know what we really should have done with this song? Why didn’t we think of it at the time? Let’s do it now”, as it sounds like “Is this a cash cow that we can milk? Let’s do it.”
Title-wise, my interpretation of Songs of Surrender is that Bono realizes you can’t save the world through music. The music itself sounds like a wake for their idealism.
You may be right, Cappie. Which is sad for them, and us.
Take heart, cappie. You never know.
Here’s a rarity: an early example of a very-close-to-the-original cover of Pink Floyd by “Pink Floyd.”
IIRC, this was done for legal and contractual obligations.
Except for the sax, David Gilmour is playing all of the instruments. See if you can hear the differences.
https://youtu.be/iIgYG53Cy-g
Didn’t Roger Waters do something similar once he left Pink Floyd, putting out albums of Pink Floyd songs as done by him only?
He did, a year or so ago, to near-universal disdain.
If Alan Parker was still alive, maybe he could have staged an intervention. Get Roger Waters to rewatch Pink Floyd: The Wall with Parker, Bob Geldof, and Eleanor David(Pink’s wife). The three of them could have explained the songs to Waters, songs he wrote, especially “In the Flesh(Part 2)”. The dialogue would have made for an awesome director’s commentary track for a Criterion release that can never happen now because of his politics.
Pink Floyd: The Wall is the CD that came with the second version of the portable Sony CD player that my mother gifted me with on Christmas day. Darn thing would overheat after a half-hour. It damaged Blood and Chocolates before I got through all the songs. The disc would skip at the start of “Crimes of Paris”. I first heard Elvis Costello’s voice in the middle of the chorus. Quite a long time passed before I heard the whole song.
I love Pink Floyd: The Wall, album and film.
It’s confusing. And depressing.
I like pluralism.
Jeff Lynne did the same thing with ELO. The album “Mr. Blue Sky: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra” is all re-recordings.
Ooh … thanks for the alert! I’ll know to avoid that.
I’m staring at the songlist right now, finger hovering over the play button nervously…
Oingo Boingo (sorta) did that as well, with the “Boingo Live” album as they had not yet released a proper Greatest Hits album, and the Live album (recorded live in a studio, not onstage) had the same material.
I am the biggest Boingo Live fan. The rerecorded “No Spill Blood” rules.
I haven’t felt the need to revisit Songs of Surrender since the dispiriting afternoon I spent listening to it the week of release. I can’t even be bothered to listen again to the six songs I picked out that I actualy liked. Wholly superfluous.
I’ve mellowed a bit, if that’s what they want to spend their time doing then fair enough. It’s their career and given where they are it’s unlikely to stop anyone seeing them live or listening to the old stuff. I reserve the right to ignore it though.
It’s disappointing that they’re stuck in the rut of tending to their legacy instead of trying something new. Blur’s new album came out a week ago and it’s great, nothing earth shattering but it builds on and further develops what went before instead of Songs of Surrender approach which is whatever the opposite of the phrase polishing a turd is. Maybe having the freedom to their own thing and come back to the band helps instead of bring all about a band that have run out of steam.
BTW mt, that initial picture of the reworked iTunes drop down options?
Brilliant. 😄
🙏
Hey… the 2000’s poll results are in!