Covers, Collabs, and Theft (Music)

For this music episode, the first that’s not focused on a specific band (or bands), we talk about covers, collabs, and theft. There’s a popular trend now of sampling not just a riff from a song, but the whole melody or chorus (think: JAY-Z scooping most of the song “Forever Young” by Alphaville). Then, there are standard covers, which I think we can all agree are a lot of fun—when they’re done well (think: Johnny Cash covering NIN’s “Hurt” and k.d. lang covering Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. I also talk about collaborations, from supergroups to single albums or songs (think: Queen and David Bowie writing “Under Pressure”) which segues nicely into a discussion on theft (think: Vanilla Ice stealing the iconic riff from the aforementioned “Under Pressure” for his song “Ice Ice Baby”, and also Led Zeppelin in general).

The song recommendation for this week is The Book of Love by The Magnetic Fields. The Airborne Toxic Event does an absolutely amazing cover of this song that you will feel to your core. As with all Music episodes, I try to do a passable a cappella cover of it. Please note that while I do practice, these performances are done in one take, with no re-recordings or overdubs. You get what you get. I also want to apologise to Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields. I had an interaction with them on Bluesky and got completely confused, putting my foot in my mouth over a case of mistaken identity. It was thoroughly embarrassing for me. Tops of my list of embarrassing moments—and that list is EXTENSIVE. I wanted to delete my Bluesky account. I didn’t, though, and hopefully this will make up for it somewhat. This is such a beautiful song that I could listen to on repeat. I hope I did it justice. My a cappella version of it.