Covers and Covering

This is about yacht rock, and so much more!

Everyone in my world is talking about reading this week.

The jibber-jabber has been spurred by a 10,000-word cover story in The Atlantic by Rose Horowich titled “The End of Reading is Here.” The title is provocative, the article somewhat less so, being a rehash of worries about the impact of social media, digital devices in classrooms, AI, a general stupidity creeping across the land, etc…etc…

We gamble more than we read now, which seems objectively objectionable except this is not a comment on reading so much as it is a comment on believing that you’ve got to be super rich to live a secure life in this country (and it is primarily a U.S. story Horowich is telling) and no one ever got super rich reading books.

I dealt with this issue at greater length in last week’s criminally under-read newsletter.

The Pursuit of Happiness

I recognize these concerns about reading. I’ve periodically written about my own concerns when it comes to reading in this space, but my view is largely the same as it has been for years that we should think less about reading and more about readers.

The concluding bit from a May 2023 newsletter captures my enduring belief:

Whatever problem we have with reading, it’s infrastructural, not attitudinal, rooted in a system and culture that sees school as the development of our potential as human capital, rather than as, you know, humans. I don’t think anyone is afraid of reading, and what it means to read is unchanged. The people who are attacking reading cannot be convinced to value reading because that they are attacking reading is immaterial in the larger sense. They are attacking everything.

Reading is every bit as interesting, pleasurable, challenging, and useful as ever. Whatever changes we should make should start from that premise, rather than passively accepting that some ineluctable force is causing reading to end.

But I don’t want to talk about reading this week. I want to talk about the pleasure of musical “covers.”

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Earlier this week I saw a clip of Keith Urban performing a cover of Robbie Dupree’s “Steal Away” on a New York City ferry.

I watched/listened to the video, tapping my toe along to the beat and I saw something interesting, namely that Keith Urban is having a good time.

I mean, on the one hand, why shouldn’t he be having a good time? He’s playing a surprise concert on a ferry for a bunch of people who seem delighted to see him. But Keith Urban, an accomplished musical artist, is not playing one of his many Keith Urban songs, but is instead rocking out - to the extent yacht rock rocks - to a one-hit-wonder single that peaked at #6 on the Billboard charts in April of 1980 when I was ten and Keith Urban was twelve.

“Steal Away” is one of the songs on Urban’s new album, flow state, which consists entirely of yacht rock covers. Urban built himself a new studio, wanted to record a couple songs to put it through its paces and next thing you know, an album of yacht rock.

“Steal Away” itself is almost a cover song, bearing a significant uhh…resemblance to The Doobie Brothers version of the Kenny Loggins/Michael McDonald song. released in 1979, “What a Fool Believes.”

The Doobie Brothers’ version of “What a Fool Believes” is itself a kind of cover since Loggins recorded and released his version of the song a year earlier in 1978.

It’s sort of amazing how “wrong” Loggins’ version sounds given the degree to which the Doobie Brothers version is imprinted in my brain. You almost want to wrestle the sticks out of the drummer’s hands and say, no, like this!

Or maybe that’s just me because I am an amateur drummer who mostly plays covers of rock songs. Lately I’ve been getting together with a couple of other middle-aged fellows, working up our versions of songs like Pink Floyd’s “Breathe,” a couple of Tom Petty tunes (“You Don’t Know How it Feels” and “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”), Van Morrison (“Into the Mystic”), Zeppelin (“Ramble On”), and a bunch of other stuff.

We are only three people (lead guitar, acoustic guitar/vocals, drums) so we cannot cover these songs anything like the originals, and yet anyone who has been steeped in the era would find it all instantly recognizable. This has always been music’s advantage over writing, the immediacy and reach across the culture. Maybe this is why no one is writing cover stories on “the end of listening.”

Another reason our little combo cannot recreate the versions with any kind of fidelity is - while we are all competent amateurs (my compatriots more competent than me) - we are not pros who can do whatever they wish on an instrument.

Keith Urban is a pro, surrounded by Nashville pros and so the songs on flow state, such as “Summer Breeze,” “Magnet and Steel,” and “On and On,” are very very faithful to the original versions, the biggest differences being that Keith Urban is singing them. It’s not quite Keith Urban yacht rock karaoke, but it’s close.

I’ve been enjoying the heck out of it for a couple of days. I’m listening to it as a type. Some of my pleasure is simply appreciating the professionalism of these versions, but there’s also some obvious nostalgia going on here. Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan (who vehemently reject being categorized as yacht rock) aside, most of the yacht rock era bands are not taken seriously, but you can’t tell me that the Little River Band doesn’t kick ass.

Keith Urban knows they kick ass, so he covers “Help Is on Its Way” including some light shredding at the end.

Even as my head sways back and forth to Urban’s cover of “How Much I Feel” (originally by Ambrosia), I know that the clock is ticking down on my listening to flow state. It’s, at best, a nice diversion, which appears to be how Urban intends it.

Mission accomplished.

There is a different cover song I have been more obsessed with lately, a version of Radiohead’s “True Love Waits” performed by Goose with Mikaela Davis guesting on harp.

If you just skipped over that video to keep reading, that’s great, but at some point, seriously, click on it and listen (watching is okay too, but optional). Listen and then compare it to the Radiohead original from their album Moon Shaped Pool.

Goose’s version is more “reinterpretation” than “cover.” Radiohead’s version is like as though years of depression and sadness have been distilled into an essence. The chorus refrain amidst the minor chord piano swirls…

Just don’t leave
Don’t leave

…sounds like an admission of defeat, a forgone conclusion. That person has left.

The Radiohead version is incredibly powerful. Goose is both faithful to the original and seems determined to defy its essential spirit. By increasing the tempo, and expanding the song through instrumental interplay between guitar and harp in a musical dialogue the message is turned from one of defeat into something closer to triumph. Radiohead’s defeat becomes Goose’s defiance.

I don’t know what to say other than I think this stuff is interesting to think about, to appreciate, even as the limits of my musical knowledge and knowhow prevents me from deeply understanding what’s going on here. Maybe Dr. Ethan Hein of Ethan Teaches You Music could help me better understand, just as he helped me really understand what’s going on with The Band’s classic “The Weight” by looking at it through the lens of its many covers.

The Weight

This is where my amateur interest in music dovetails with my professional interest in reading and writing and reassures me that we are not truly going to experience any kind of end of reading.

There’s simply too much of ourselves out there in the world in our music and in our books to turn away from it entirely.

—

What are your favorite musical covers?

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I wrote about Ron Currie’s We Will See You Bleed, which is simultaneously a sequel and a prequel to his earlier book, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne.

At Inside Higher Ed I explored what AI does to an important element of our practices, habits-of-mind, working from a couple of recent pieces by doctors who see AI scribes as undermining their capacity to deploy their expertise.

An interesting perspective on “AI as trust breaker” from Matt Brady.

James M. Lang thinks about “Catcher in the Rye and the classroom moment.”

Mendel Uminer has 10,000 books in his 600-square-foot apartment. His landlord calls him a hoarder, but Uminer calls his library his “manual for life.”

Via my friends McSweeney's “My Critics Are Missing the Nuance of My Membership in the Wealthy People Hunting Poor People for Sport Club” by Mike Drucker.

Recommendations

1. The Wager by David Grann
2. Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday
3. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
4. Anna Kareinina by Leo Tolstoy
5. The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton

Walter A. - Greenville, SC

This is a reader who isn’t afraid of a book that’s going to make them think. I’m going to take advantage and recommend a book by one of my favorite living essayists, Garret Keizer, The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want.

Mrs. Biblioracle and I are heading out on a vacation this week which means you may not hear from me next weekend, though given that three people dropped paid subscriptions that last time I took a non-holiday week off (three years ago), my anxiety may drive me to produce.

Also, I may have something on my mind that I just have to say.

And that special author Q&A will be up next week prior to my departure, so keep on the lookout for that.

Have a good one,

JW
The Biblioracle