One of my favorite treats at a show or open mic is a good, heartfelt cover. Ryan Morgan springs immediately to mind, as he tends to cover people we both know, and every time he does it it’s disarming and awesome. When I first met him, Niall Connolly used to do an awesome cover of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know That I’m No Good” that was my favorite thing until I found out about Richard McGraw’s version of Billy Joel’s “My Life.”
Covers are important tools for any live musician. Most of the paying gigs require you to know songs that are familiar to the walk-in crowd, and tips tend to fall faster in the tunnels when something familiar is being floated over the subway’s stench. I’ve seen enough to know that to be true — that they are necessary isn’t what I want to call into question here.
I want to talk about the line we can draw between “performing artist” and “pandering lazybutt,” one that I’ve always felt “Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Drops of Jupiter” resided on the crappy side of.
In my experience, people giving requests for these songs are shooting for the LCD — they consider the game of requesting one of maximizing odds, and start with the most likely candidates. The pastiche of a solo musician in a club is one that is ubiquitous with the strains of millions of James Taylor covers, so they’ll start there, or ask for “B-EG,” or worse, just yell “Free Bird.” Is that what they really want, though, in their heart of hearts? They want to hear the same song they’ve heard from everybody else, just from you instead?
I feel like we can service them and ourselves better by picking more inventive covers, and resonating with them on a deeper level. If an album is multi-platinum, people probably know more than just the hit songs on those albums, right? If an artist sells out stadiums, people must know more than the one song.
Performers: What do you think? How have you gotten around the obvious cover choices? What do you do when the over-trodden requests come? Are people asking for what they want, or what they know, and are they the same thing?
Audience members: When you make these kinds of requests, do you want just those songs, or are you trying to give us an idea of your tastes?
Let’s talk shop.