The Korgis did it right

If you are a subscriber to a music streaming service, you've probably come across songs you are familiar with that have been re-recorded by the original artist. Most of the time this is being done because the artist who made the original recording doesn't have all the publishing rights to the music, and there is some kind of complication in getting that music onto a streaming service like apple music or Spotify or whatever the case may be. so the artist basically gives the publisher the middle finger and says “Fine be that way, I'll just re-record the song.”

While that is great, the problem is that most of the time, the re-recording is just plain awful. The singer is much older and doesn't have the same voice they used to. The musicians and the sound engineer just haven't found the same sound they had when they originally recorded the song. There's always something, or more likely a lot of things, that make the new version of the song a cheap knockoff of the original. That sounds really judgmental, but if there's one thing I learned about music, it's that when we listen to songs we like from earlier in our life again and again, it is like we are reinforcing an imprint of the original memory of the song and its associations in our lives. So if anything is off, it seems like a fraud, an imposter, and it doesn't do anything to reinforce the original memory. It's really a shame that we think like this, and if you can't identify with this feeling, then maybe I'm just being hypercritical.

Enter The Korgis. You may remember them from the 1970s music era. they were a one hit wonder, and their song was everybody's got to learn sometime. It was one of my favorite songs from that era, and at one point I spent decades trying to figure out who it was before I finally was able to make use of the internet to figure out who they were. Their song has been a part of my music library ever since. Here's the problem. At some point I switched from Spotify to Apple Music, and I noticed that the original recording wasn't available, but a re-recorded version was readily available. Rolling my eyes, I thought to myself here we go again. but I took a chance and actually listened to this new version. Much to my amazement and surprise and joy, not only was the new recording faithful to the sound, mood, vocal, and everything else about the original song, the new recording actually sounded better. I don't know how they did it, but I wish more artists were able to pull off that magic. Well done!