They’ve got it covered
I’ve already admitted that until recently I wasn’t much of a fan of cover songs. Probably because the ones I usually heard sounded a lot like what happens when pop artists perform their songs live (and I mean perform, not lip sync). The melody sounds almost exactly like the original, but the vocals aren’t at all right. Granted, for the pop star it’s because they can’t sing without the aid of NASA computers, but I think you get the idea. You have to do more than toss in a new singer to get me interested.
So it should come as no surprise that Iron & Wine’s covers were among the first that I really loved. They are the masters of stripping a song down and making it simple, beautiful, and theirs. I was away on vacation last week and forgot my iPod at home, so every once in a while I’d have to sneak off and power up my computer just to listen to their version of “Love Vigilantes”. My laptop is one of the largest personal music players in history—behind only the first generation Discman I had growing up, which houses the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, Atlantis, and my seventh grade math teacher, Mr. Lipka—but I’d gladly tote it around if only to hear my music. And, as a bonus, it matches my mom’s Soviet era cell phone.