Triumph of cover songs

When a singer covers another one's song, does it mean they are running out of ideas of their own? I think not. Is it an insult to the original version if someone makes a re-imagined cover? Again, I think not – as long as the original artist is credited alongside the new one.

In my opinion, a song has to be great in some respect to begin with, in order to inspire a good cover version. Very often, another artist's take on a song highlights some great quality that you never really paid attention to while listening to the original. So in this way, covers can definitely be regarded as a nod of respect to the original version, rather than a slander.

I've listed here seven cover songs that, in my opinion, are better than their originals. Some of them have become so iconic that they are often associated with the cover artist rather than the original, but others  just show my personal preferences. A couple of these songs are popular enough to have been covered by several artists, but I have only listed my favourite ones. Have fun listening and comparing!

Crazy In Love – originally by Beyoncé, covered by Emeli Sandé

I always thought this song was restless to the point that I swear it makes my blood pressure climb up, so the re-imagined background on the Emeli Sandé cover is a very welcome change. Unlike with the other songs on my list, I don't think the cover version really unearthed any hidden qualities about the original song, but it sure is much more listenable.

Make You Feel My Love – originally by Bob Dylan, covered by Adele

Now, this melody was great already when Bob Dylan wrote it. I'm just not at all a fan of his voice, and his version sounds very monotonous to me. It takes Adele to make this song a real emotion-booster that it has the capacity to be. Just listen to that heart-breaking tone that she puts into each and every syllable.

Unchained Melody – originally by Todd Duncan, covered by The Righteous Brothers

Unchained Melody was originally composed for a prison film called, you guessed it, Unchained. The famous Righteous Brothers cover was also used in a film, Ghost. The original Todd Duncan version is quite beautiful in its simplicity, but I happen to be head over heels in love with Bobby Hatfield's voice – how he manages to use his voice like that is subject of constant awe for me. (This song is actually a Bobby Hatfield solo although it's usually credited to The Righteous Brothers duo.) I also love the way the cover version starts off very quiet and mellow, and then soars higher and higher as it goes on.

Yesterday – originally by The Beatles, covered by Ray Charles

Right, supposedly nobody is allowed to say that someone did a Paul McCartney song better than Paul McCartney – but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't mean to say I dislike the Beatles original, but only Ray Charles can really make me feel for this song. This is a most definite case of "a great song making great covers happen".

Run – originally by Snow Patrol, covered by Leona Lewis

I found Leona Lewis' cover before the original and was quite surprised when I discovered where this great, emotional ballad had its roots. Somehow, the Snow Patrol lyrics gain a whole new level of meaning when they have the benefit of Lewis' powerful voice.

Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) – originally by Cher, covered by Nancy Sinatra

I'm sorry, but I think the whole point of this song is lost under the distracting arrangement of the Cher version. Therefore, it baffles me to no end how Nancy Sinatra managed to turn it into such a captivating melody, with its beautiful, toned-down backgrounds. In this case, less is definitely more.

I Will Always Love You – originally by Dolly Parton, covered by Whitney Houston

Last on my list, the epitome of epic covers. I mean, is there anybody out there who doesn't immediately think Whitney Houston when this song is mentioned? Thank you Dolly Parton for writing such a powerful song, and thank you Whitney Houston for making it immortal with her sensational vocal chords. Isn't it intriguing how a country song is transformed into a power ballad by just tweaking the instrumentals a bit and adding some soulful saxophone?

What do you think about my list – do you prefer the originals or the covers? Would you like to mention some other successful cover songs? How do you feel about singers covering each others' songs in general?

My favourite fictional LGBT couples

I was planning this as a celebration post, but as the cause of celebration has been significantly delayed and is facing yet another obstacle, and it happens to be the end of Pride Week, I thought I might as well post this now.

Background for non-Finns: Finland is the only Nordic country that hasn't legalized same-sex marriage and adoption. In 2013, more than 166 000 Finns signed a citizens' initiative for a new marriage law. The bill went on to the Parliament and then to the Legal Affairs Committee. Three days ago, the majority of the Committee voted against the bill, but the final decision will be made by the Parliament, hopefully this Autumn.

While the Legal Affairs Committee's decision does not yet mean a definite "no" to same-sex marriage in Finland, it is still incredibly frustrating for people like me who would love to see our country getting a move on and taking this important step towards equal rights, like so many other European countries have already done. I understand that altering the marriage law is a big enough issue that it has to be seriously discussed, and that people have very strong opinions on these matters, but I can't understand how allowing same-sex couples to get married would ruin anybody's life.

So, finally getting to the point, as this was not meant to be just a political rant post – I would like to celebrate some couples who, though fictional, are beautiful examples of the fact that love between people of the same gender is just as authentic and right as love between a man and a woman.

One last thing before I get on to my list. Like I said, I know that many people feel very strongly for and against gay rights, but I will not have a political war of words on my blog. Civilized conversation is always appreciated at Music & My Mind, but hateful comments will not be tolerated (not that I believe any of those who have regularly make comments here would do such a thing, you all seem such an intellectual bunch). My motivations behind this post are the important values of love and acceptance, and I sincerely hope that anyone who visits here will respect that.

Now let's finally give the spotlight to... my personal favourite LGBT couples from the world of fiction!


Kurt Hummel and Blaine Anderson (Glee)

Since Glee's fourth season the show isn't quite what it used to be, but they still get the credit for creating one of my favourite TV couples ever: Kurt and Blaine. They are both such funny and touching characters by themselves, and when they are together there's a genuine sense that they both give something to each other in their relationship. At least, before the fourth season and the weird writing (in my opinion) came along. Also, they sound great when they sing together, and are always admirably well-dressed. Especially Kurt.



Hiram and LeRoy Berry (Glee)

Hiram: LeRoy! We agreed to sing it straight! No vocal runs – that's how Jennifer Hudson got kicked off American Idol!
LeRoy: I would love to hear you sing something straight.

Misters Berry made their first appearance in the 13th episode of the third season of Glee, finally giving us the chance to meet the parents who raised (and spoiled) Rachel Berry, running their family by the principles of "honesty, respect and dance". It was worth the wait, because their introduction was one of the most entertaining scenes I have ever witnessed on TV. Jeff Goldblum and Brian Stokes Mitchell work together brilliantly, delivering a lovely, quirky version of the "old married couple" relation. (Though it's never mentioned if Hiram and LeRoy are officially married, but that's not really the point.)


Gary and Billy (Sherlock)

Billy: What with the monster and the ruddy prisoner, I don't know how we sleep nights. Do you, Gary?
Gary: Like a baby.
Billy: That's not true. He's a snorer.

These guys don't get a lot of screen time on The Hounds of Baskerville, but they're still a lot of fun to watch. And you have to give them credit for running a vegetarian restaurant in a sleepy Dartmoor village. (Why can't I find a picture of them together anywhere in the whole wide world of the Internet??)



Angel Dumott Schunard and Tom Collins (RENT)

RENT is one of my Top Ten favourite musicals, and these two are the most beautiful thing in it. Angel and Collins know how to appreciate each other, and they set an inspiring example to their friends. I'll Cover You (video above) always makes me smile and believe that there are good things in the world – until it's time for the I'll Cover You Reprise, aka tears and heart ache.



Maureen Johnson and Joanne Jefferson (RENT)

These two get into a lot of petty arguments which really is quite irritating at times. They have to see horrible things happen to their closest friends before they can look past each others' differences. But at least they do get there in the end – and when they have an argument, they do it by singing one of the most awesome female duets in the history of music. If people have to have a row, it's always better if they can sound fabulous while doing that.


Callie Torres and Erica Hahn (Grey's Anatomy)

Something odd happened with this TV romance. Apparently, some high-chair bosses didn't approve of having a lesbian couple on their show, so Erica Hahn was quickly written off the show just as she was getting happy with Callie. But then, a couple of episodes later, Callie ended up in a relationship with Arizona Robbins, who is quite clearly a woman too. Anyway, I liked Callie and Erica a lot more than Callie and Arizona. That's probably because I was a tremendous fan of Dr Hahn to begin with!



Patricia Mollison and Melly (The Casual Vacancy)

'Melly's fine, thanks for asking,' said Patricia.
'Oh, good,' said Shirley.
'I liked the invitation,' said Patricia. 'Pat and guest.'
'I'm sorry, darling, but that's just what you put, you know, when people aren't married -'
'Ah, that's what it says in Debrett's, does it? Well, Melly didn't want to come if she wasn't even named on the invitation, so we had a massive row, and here I am, alone. Result, eh?'
(from The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling)

Listing Patricia and Melly's relationship might be a bit unconventional, as only one half of this couple actually appears in the book. However, I love it how pointedly offended Patricia feels on Melly's behalf about the wording on their invitation. Besides, I wanted to include at least one couple from a literary work, and it turns out there are not an awful lot to choose from!

++ Edited on 28th Nov 2014 to mark the occasion of the Finnish Parliament voting about the legalization of gay marriage and adoption, an addition to the list:

Freddie Thornhill and Stuart Bixby (Vicious)

There isn't much that could go wrong if you cast Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi on the same TV show. Having them play a long-time couple that has fallen into the habit of displaying their mutual affection by insulting each other in the most British manner is absolute comedy gold. No matter how much Stuart pokes fun at Freddie's acting career while Freddie insists he's the "looks" in the relationship, the fact that these two have loved each other for almost 50 years is very believable and touching. It's really delightful to see an older couple with such an extensive history on TV! I'm writing this up on a train on my phone so I can't add videos, but you should all go to YouTube right now and look for the "This is Ke$ha" clip on Vicious. It's priceless. Sirs Ian and Derek just rock.

What do you think about my list? Do you know of any other inspiring, well-written LGBT couples that I haven't listed?

Some Midsummer discoveries

So, Midsummer celebrations came and went again – the day when most of Finland typically locates to their countryside mökkis or some other retreat to celebrate the longest day of the year. Most years, the weather does not favour outdoor celebrations, but people do that anyway. Midsummer formally ends the day after, when the newspapers have informed us how many people drowned amidst this year's festivities – unfortunately, for many people Midsummer is just another convenient occasion to get seriously drunk, go boating on the lakes and forget everything about safety on boats.

Well, the getting drunk part of Midsummer was never my thing, but this year, my celebrations were even more against Finnish traditions than usual. I stayed in town and watched movies all day – and had a wonderful day! One of my friends, code named A, has a very impressive hoard of DVDs, and she brought a couple of them over with her. In the end we took the "animated films" route all the way, and I was introduced to two films I had never seen before: Brave and Hoodwinked!

I had heard such conflicting reviews about Brave, ranging from "awesome" to "nothing special", that I was really interested to see how I reacted to it. Conclusion: it's absolutely amazing in every way I can think of! Ten times better than Frozen! All the characters are extremely entertaining, the story is refreshingly unpredictable in all its tosses and turns, I love the way they used Scotland as a setting (with  a touch of fantasy of course), and the animation is exceptionally beautiful – my favourite things to look at were the sunlight, the horse Angus' shiny black coat, and, obviously, Merida's hair! I was also extremely surprised that this film actually managed to make me tear up! Twice! The genuineness with which Elinor and Merida's mother-daughter conflict is handled is really something to admire. I did not expect this when the film started off with the we've-all-seen-this-done-before "rebel princess who wants to escape from the responsibilities of royalty" setting. However, in the end I was both thoroughly moved and wildly entertained. The humour in Brave was also something I didn't quite expect from a Disney film, and I mean it in a positive way. Brave also happens to feature some of my favourite actors: Billy Connolly, Emma Thompson, Julie Walters and Kevin McKidd – though I have to admit that I was so utterly fooled by the last three's Scottish accents that I didn't realize it was them till I saw the end credits!

Young Macintosh, my new Disney crush...

Angus is the most beautiful Disney horse ever. I want an Angus of my own!

Next up was Hoodwinked!, and this is where our indoors Midsummer celebrations reached a whole new level of uncontrollable hysteria. This movie is incredibly hard to describe, but I think I come pretty close when I say "brilliantly random". It's kind of a re-telling of "The Little Red Riding Hood", with an ample dose of psychedelic-level creativity. Nothing makes sense in the warped fairy-tale realm of Hoodwinked!, and it's not supposed to. You just go with the flow when you meet Wolf the investigative reporter, Red's Granny who secretly indulges in extreme sports, and Japeth the Goat who has a set of horns for every occasion and has to put everything he says into song. I am just literally quite lost for words when it comes to this film, just... just go and see it if you want to know what it is!

Got to love the singing goat, just got to.

By the way, I'm finishing this blog post at 2:20 in the morning, and that is just part of my Midsummer "tradition". This time of the year in the northern regions means that the sun doesn't really set properly (hence the "midnight sun" phenomenon), and my light-sensitive brain is absolutely convinced that it's daytime around the clock. I have gone with absolutely minimal sleep for the last two or three weeks, and not feeling remotely tired! It's so good to have a blog to keep me from getting bored on these kinds of days... nights, I mean.

I hope everyone had a fun Midsummer, and that there weren't too many sad boating incidents this year – it was a rather cold day, so it well may be.

Replies to Ask Me Anything

It's been quite a long while since I announced the "Ask Me Anything" event, so let's give you some answers! Apparently only two of my readers were curious enough to Ask Me Anything, but their questions were very interesting and numerous enough to make this post, so thank you very much for that!

Siiri L asked me about my best, worst and most baffling theatrical experiences ever. 

My best theatrical experience could be pretty much everything I've seen in London – there's the glorious West End musicals and Shakespeare's Globe, both of which are, in my opinion, the very best offerings of the world of theatre. However, I want to be more specific than that, so I'll name Richard III which I saw at Shakespeare's Globe on September 2nd, 2012. It was my second Globe experience and I was rapidly succumbing to the charm of this very special theatre. This performance was made to look as much as possible like it might have been in Shakespeare's times, with period costumes and an all-male cast. The iconic title role was played by Mark Rylance, and of course it was an absolute treat to see one of the most famous current Shakespearean actors doing his thing.

The worst piece of theatre in my life was no doubt that time when I was 14 or 15 and went to see a new Finnish play called Kohti kylmempää (literal translation would be "Towards colder" which sounds bizarre). It was supposed to be a play about some people trying to establish the world's northernmost community, but there was such a lack of plot and such an abundance of pointless characters that I ran out of the theatre as soon as the intermission came.

"Most baffling" would be another Shakespeare experience. The Bard wrote, among other things, a play  about King John, which is very rarely performed. Well, having seen it once in Stratford-upon-Avon's Swan Theatre, I can completely understand why. That script is definitely not Shakespeare at the height of his genius – but then again, that might have been the very thing that enabled the director and creative team of the Stratford production to go a little wild with it. There was an abundance of creative choices that perfectly correspond to the word "baffling". For example, try to imagine King John's death-by-poisoning scene as a psychedelic drug high that drives the dying king into a blurry '70s dance routine. Not joking one bit.

Hannah asked:

What is your favourite Sherlock episode from each series?

Hannah was worried that a question like this might be too cruel, but actually I do have very strong favourites from each series – Sherlock is brilliant through and through, but there are some episodes that I re-watch more often than others. These would be A Study in Pink, The Hounds of Baskerville and The Sign of Three. 

In A Study in Pink, I love how brilliantly the two main characters are introduced and how they gradually drop into their co-habitating life. The Hounds of Baskerville I can especially respect as a great, inventive modern update of the original novel – also, Sherlock's rant about the rabbit in the beginning has me laughing my head off no matter how many times I watch it. I have to admit though, it was a tiny bit hard choosing a Series Two favourite between this and A Scandal in Belgravia, which is also awesome in indefinitely many ways. My Series Three favourite has to be The Sign of Three, mostly because it's so damn hilarious!

I just realized that my three favourite episodes have one thing in common, something which I like to call "John Watson's awesome-military-badassery moments". I bet it's not a coincidence. Dr. John Watson just doesn't get any better than this.

Is there any book that you would love to see adapted into a film?

While I agree wholeheartedly with Hannah that someone should really get a move on with a film adaptation of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, I'm going to drop in a new idea. You know Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, right? Yes, that bone-chillingly haunting murder mystery where ten people are shut off on an island and they start dying one by one, resulting in mounting paranoia and claustrophobia for both the characters and the reader. Now the question is, why are all the (surprisingly few) film adaptations of this tale either not faithful to the original plot, or at least 20 years old? So there's a brilliant idea for some team of movie-makers, here you go.

What is your favourite place in Finland?

Not that I want to boast or anything, but I think the best place in Finland is my family's summer cottage by Lake Näsijärvi. (A piece of cultural tidbit to non-Finns: many Finns like to have a little cottage getaway, or mökki, where we can escape from the noise and everyday life of the actually rather small and quiet towns where we normally live in.) The most hardcore mökki owners swear by a complete no-electricity, no-running-water, no-modern-comforts-whatsoever policy, while a small minority build their summer places so modern that it kind of loses the countryside feel. I think our family's mökki is quite nicely in the middle. It's nice and cosy during all seasons, but also very close to nature (a colony of shrews living under the patio and lynx paw prints appearing now and then in the winter months) and it's really just a beautiful piece of land all over. 

What is/are the film(s) that you are most looking forward to seeing in 2014?

I actually had to take a look at the list of films coming up in 2014 and came to the conclusion that last year was much better movie-wise. 2012 was even better, with Les Misérables and the first Hobbit. This year, though... Well, it's nice to have another musical film on Christmas Day, but Into The Woods has never really been on my top list of musicals and while some of the casting choices are great (Meryl Streep! Christine Baranski! Daniel Huttlestone!!!), some are rather... interesting. I didn't even know these people could sing on a musical performer level... or can they?

I would love to be more excited about the conclusion to the Hobbit trilogy, but I just can't. The first film was good, the second went into way too many subplots and turned most of my favourite Bilbo moments from the book into overlong fight scenes, and now the third one will probably be a three-hour-account of the Battle of the Five Armies, which only takes a couple of chapters in the book.

What would you like your superpower to be?

It would be awesome to be able to fly. Transportation would be such a breeze (literally), and things would look gorgeous from a bird's perspective.

If you could travel to any point in time where would you go?

I would time-travel to Victorian London, there's no doubt about that. If I had to be precise (the Victorian era was quite long after all), I would probably land somewhere in the 1880s. That period contains some of my favourite "old stuff" along the lines of ball rooms, horse-drawn carriages and ridiculously-impractical-but-still-oh-so-gorgeous women's fashion, but then there is also the definite atmosphere of innovation and moving forwards. For example, the gramophone was invented in 1887 – how cool is that? Also, I have a fixated curiosity for British Imperialism, which was still going pretty strong at this point.

Beautiful 1880s dresses...

British Empire in red

What is next on your to-read list?

I really should think about this question, because I'll soon be finished with my current read which is Zadie Smith's White Teeth. I seriously need to broaden my appallingly narrow knowledge of French literature and have pretty much settled on trying Émile Zola next. I would gladly take suggestions as to which one of Zola's works I should start with.

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I had tons of fun answering these questions, and I hope my readers found something interesting there as well. The idea for this event came pretty much from Miss Laurie's lovely period drama blog Old-Fashioned Charm, go and check it out. Who knows, maybe there will be more of these as Music & My Mind hopefully celebrates future anniversaries...