When I was growing up, cover songs were usually by contemporary artists doing remakes of songs that were 15 or 20 years old: Phil Collins singing the Supremes, Club Nouveau singing Bill Withers, Joan Jett singing Tommy James and the Shondells. But back in the 50s and 60s, it wasn’t that unusual for multiple versions of the same song to compete for the same sales and airplay. This was especially true in the 50s when record labels would rush out “white” versions of R&B singles, like Pat Boone singing Fats Domino, or when any number of popular crooners would rush out singles of the latest Broadway hits. In 1955 alone, three different versions of “Unchained Melody” hit the top 10 and a fourth made it to #29.
Ingrid Michaelson’s ”Parachute”But even in the 60s when singles were still the dominant force in pop music, you could hear multiple versions of the same song becoming hits right on top of each other. Less than a year after Gladys Knight and the Pips scored what was then their biggest pop hit “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” – it went all the way to #2 – Marvin Gaye took his own very different version of the same song all the way to #1.
Cheryl Cole’s ”Parachute”But as albums and singer-songwriters became more popular in the late 60s and early 70s, it became a mark of artistic legitimacy to record original songs, to steer clear of covers. Now that singles are back, thanks to digital downloads; and now that anybody – regardless of talent level – can reach a huge internet audience via YouTube – “instant covers” are becoming more popular. So, with apologies to Joan Rivers and her Fashion Police, I’m introducing a new series here called “Bitch Stole My Look – Song Edition”, where two new versions of the same new song take each other on in a blogospheric cage match.
First up is a song called “Parachute”. The song was written and demoed by quirky indie-pop songstress Ingrid Michaelson during sessions for her excellent 2009 album Everybody, but for whatever reason, it was determined that the song didn’t really fit on the album. Then late last year, the British pop starlet Cheryl Cole, formerly of the girl group Girls Aloud, got her hands on it and included a cover of it on her will.i.am-produced debut solo album 3 Words. In March of this year, it was released as a single and went Top 10 in the UK. Here’s Cheryl’s take on it:
Cheryl Cole “Parachute”
Last month, Ingrid Michaelson released a downloadable single of her own version of the song, and put out a pretty awesome video to go with it. Here’s Ingrid:
Ingrid Michaelson “Parachute”
Frankly, I love both versions of this song almost equally. Cheryl Cole’s is obviously the slicker version, but I love its sensuality and heightened sense of romance and drama. The vocal arrangements on Michaelson’s are a lot more interesting though and especially coming after her more mainstream sounding album Everybody, it’s a sweet and much more upbeat (to both Cole’s version of “Parachute” and the rest of Michaelson’s album) reminder of the quirky adorability of her first hit “The Way I Am”. I’m split on this one. Ingrid Michaelson v. Cheryl Cole goes into overtime.
Here’s Jason Derulo, re-purposing both the chord progression as well as the unabashedly cheesy inspirational vibe of Irene Cara’s “Flashdance… What a Feeling” for “The Sky’s the Limit”, the great fifth single from his self-titled debut album. Track-by-track, Jason Derulo is one of the most likeable pop records of the year. As its promotional sticker states “9 songs. 9 hits.” Here’s further proof. Although the album’s fourth single – the hypothetical love-(and marriage)-at-first-sight ballad “What If” – has so far missed the charts here in the U.S., “The Sky Is the Limit” is already taking off in Europe.
If, like me, you happened to be working for Shopko in the late 1990s, you would have, by default, spent a lot of time with the satellite radio station they have piped into their stores. Lucky for me, the station was, in fact, a lot more interesting than we normally think piped-in retail music would be. It was while auditing the signage for the weekly ads on Sunday mornings that I was first introduced to Beth Orton and songs from Air’s Moon Safari album. And this radio station was just as repetitive as any normal Top 40 station, so, for awhile there, songs like World Party’s “She’s the One” and Del Amitri’s “Not Where It’s At” were as familiar to me as TLC and Britney Spears would have been. The sad thing was that there was no one announcing the songs and no ready way to know really what they were or who was singing them.
Hubert Kah’s 1996 single ”C’est La Vie” Sometimes, I was already familiar with the song – I had that World Party album, for instance – but I was just stunned to be hearing it broadcast in a public place. Sometimes, I would find out what songs were by accident. Like, I’d been admiring Collective Soul’s song “Run” for months without knowing what it was – and then it turned up at the end of Varsity Blues! Huzzah! Other times, I had a guess – that “Oh, How the Days Go By” song certainly sounded like Vanessa Williams – that I could confirm on cdnow. (Remember cdnow?) In some extreme cases, I would try to memorize a few distinctive couplets – for instance “so gather around, see what the day brings, see what makes you laugh, see what makes you sing” – and plug it into whatever pre-Google search engine I happened to be using to discover that, hey, that’s the band Brad, the song’s called “The Day Brings”, and it’s on the album Interiors, which, holy wow, Shopko carries!
But there was one song that got away. I never figured it out. And I loved it. Urrrrgh. The problem was that it sounded nothing like anybody I knew. Which was not to say that it sounded especially distinctive – in fact, it sounded like it could have been just about anybody. Challenging me further, the verses, at least from the sales floor of a discount retail store during business hours, were indecipherable to me, sung as they were in an accented croon that sounded a little like Bryan Ferry. Moreover, the chorus was mostly sung in French, and the only words I recognized were “C’est la Vie”. Approaching that pre-Google search engine with only a potential title and the sure knowledge that I was not looking for a Robbie Nevil song, I came back empty-handed.
I stopped by Shopko recently while killing a little time over a lunch hour only to hear the song still being piped in over their speakers. The frustration came crashing back to me. How could it be that I’ve still not figured this song out? I probably looked a little silly as I tried to isolate myself in one of the less trafficked areas of the store to try to listen closely to what was being sung. I did catch the second line of the chorus – something like “rely on the heart” – but I wasn’t sure if was just mis-hearing a French lyric and “translating” it phonetically. But it was something. And as it turns out, it was enough. Typing it into Google, I came back with dozens of results identifying the lyric as an excerpt from the song “C’est la Vie” by the German synth-pop group Hubert Kah. Switching over to YouTube, I found a video for it too! And watching it, it was like meeting a long-time internet buddy in person for the first time: an old friend whose name I was just now learning.
Hubert Kah “C’est La Vie” (1996)
Digging a little further, I found that Hubert Kah actually scored their biggest successes with an edgy new wave, New Romantic sound in the early 80s with songs like “Rosemarie” and “Sternenhimmel”. Later in the decade, the group started releasing English language singles and even managed to chart four of them on the U.S. dance charts between 1987 and 1990. Meanwhile, lead singer Hubert Kemmler developed songwriting and producing associations with the likes of Michael Cretu, Camouflage and Peter Schilling before he was sidelined by a struggle with depression. “C’est la Vie”, featuring the vocals of Susanne Kemmler, was the group’s comeback single following a five year hiatus. How the hell the song ever found its way into the aisles of the Monroe, Wisconsin Shopko store remains a sweet, sweet mystery.
