A Young View on Cover Versions

Hi there,

Well, if you all are detectives you would instantly find out that I have not updated this blog for a very long time. Don't worry, I won't waste your time by apologizing, and I will say I have been busy as of late. I am helping out in the church kindergarten (not garden) part time, taking photos during the weekend (and processing + uploading them) and settling other admin stuff.

This was some random thought I had since young, and I'd like to share it here. It has been ringing in my head recently.

A Thought on Music

(about lower primary school I think)

Last time when I was young, I didn't know much about music. Jazz, pop, rock and classical were perhaps the only genres I could think of and I wondered why Singapore needed so many radio stations.

Since there are so many people making music, there is only a finite number of notes you can put in one piece. In the future, there's a good chance everybody would have made music that used most of the ways you can put the notes together to make a catchy tune.

Thing is, I also theorized that music writers cannot use music that sounds similar to others. So I posed a big question to myself:

What happens if there is no more music to write?

I immediately began thinking of Michael Jackson (one of the few artistes I knew of due to my exposure to my aunt's LDs), and thought of a song I knew: 'Mary had a Little Lamb'.

Since there might be no new music in the future, why not sing the old ones in a different way? People might find an old song 'new'.

So ta-da! I imagined Michael Jackson singing 'Mary had a Little Lamb' with his screeching voice without any instruments! Just his voice...and I thought they might just do that in the future.

Picture from allposters.com

In Retrospect

Little did I know that musicians have been doing cover versions of other hits. My dad listened to James Taylor's 'You've Got a Friend', and that was actually first performed by Carol King. Before hearing of Carol King, I always thought James Taylor was the original writer of the hit.

That also brought me to realising something: When we listen to music since young, we take it as the original version. When we hear the original, it sounds 'funny' to us and we might have the impulse to reject it as the copy!

I guess it is good to know the history behind music we all listen and hum to. Sometimes, the story behind the track is as fascinating as the lyrics themselves. The rights for ABBA's "Chiquitita" is owned by UNICEF.

www.songfacts.com is a good place to start, and Destiny's Child has the Bee Gees to thank for 'Emotion'.

Musically Untalented
Joshua