In 1990, I finally got a CD player. The first CD I ever bought was Danielle Dax's Blast The Human Flower - a trippy synthpop excursion. This was the first single off that album - a cover of a classic Beatles song.
Not all of you will love this one. I hope enough of you do to check out the rest of the Danielle Dax catalog, because she was an artist unlike any other.
This cover actually got a little exposure when it was featured on the NBC series Scrubs. The artist - Colin Hay - is actually the one performing the song.
He also wrote it and performed it when he led a band called Men at Work. This song was a pretty big hit for them - reaching #3 on the Billboard charts.
This acoustic version, to me, sounds a lot more desperate - more longing, more pained. It's a different song - and yet the same.
And yes, we went with the Scrubs visualization. Just go with it.
In 1980, Olivia Newton-John was the biggest star on the planet. So they built a musical around her called Xanadu featuring a lot of roller-skating.
The movie was awful. The musical based on the movie is a bit better.
The soundtrack, a collaboration between Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra and John Farrar, who did ONJ's songwriting, was a delight and spun up a couple of hits. This one, which appears on side two (the ELO side - Olivia's songs were on side one) in its original version, was an ELO song that featured Olivia on lead vocals (and Jeff Lynne on backup).
This is a rerecording of the song in 2000, featuring a Jeff Lynne lead vocal. Different vocalist, different feel, self-cover. And it isn't bad, to be honest.
Today, we are doing something very different than we have ever done before.
We are posting the same song by the same artist on Wicked Guilty Pleasures and Totally Covered.
We're doing this for three reasons. First of all, this is a self-cover, and a dramatic, soulful reinterpretation. It doesn't sound like the same song, and for that reason, it's a cover. We've called it.
Second, we wanted you to know that www.totally-covered.com now exists and gets you to this blog. We are no longer treating this like it's a side project. We've done that for too long, and frankly, we started this blog because we are excited about covers, so we thought this was a great song to use to launch that.
I have been debating whether or not to post this here for many years. I did post it on Wicked Guilty Pleasures many years ago - a few months before this blog even existed. It was one of the catalysts to create this blog, in fact.
I mean, it's completely a self-cover. It's HER song. But it isn't the same song. It's a reinterpretation. In the interest of full disclosure, we did consider adding "Genio Atrapado" to this post, but instead edited the ORIGINAL POST to include it (please go check it out) - because it's the same song. This isn't.
This version of the song is certainly different than the original, in that it's a lot more synth-heavy, but it's also a more mature sound that suits a more mature Xtina.
Well, that was one of a special edition of posts showing how many covers of that song there were. And, of course, the most famous cover of the Tommy James and the Shondells classic - inarguably and in every way eclipsing the original - is the Tiffany version that was literally the first video on that post. And she even revisited the song once - in 2011. Same post. You can go back and see both of them.
Well, there's another chapter to this story that happened since we posted that more than seven years ago.
Holy cow. We've been doing this for more than seven years.
In 2019, Tiffany covered her version. It's a reimagining of the song - with a much harder edge - not metal by any stretch, but certainly a rockin' version. One distinction between the Tommy James version and the original Tiffany version is the audible contrast between the chorus and the verses that Tiffany ignored to give the song a younger feel (she famously originally hated it) - this version is faithful to the latter.
The video for it is less shopping mall and more... family beach day. Let's call it that. There's a lot of callbacks to the original video, though - note that Gumby does make an appearance - but it's still a new song.
Because we respect the classics, here's the first cover she did of the song - where she decisively took ownership of the song.
The Polyphonic Spree are a strange choice of a band to do a mostly faithful cover of a classic song. I mean, of all the bands, why a full chorus featuring a French horn, a pretty complete strings section, and a lot of other instruments found in more orchestras than rock bands.
Except they aren't a strange pick. You see, the vocalist of Tthe Polyphonic Spree used to front a band called Tripping Daisy..... this band was a reaction to THAT band's guitarist suddenly dying. It is there that you can hear the Nirvana influence (although they seem a bit more Green Day-y to me).
What The Polyphonic Spree bring are the excitement and exuberance - they retain the spirit of the party song this truly is.
Plus their harp player looks an awful lot like Dave Grohl.
