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Cyndi Lauper- Carey
Joni Mitchell gets covered alllllllllll the time, but usually it’s a bit of a mess. Artists are either too faithful to the original version and suffer in comparison (pretty much every performance of River or The Circle Game, k.d. lang’s covers, etc.) or go too far in the other direction and lose what made the song great. (Sufjan Stevens, I love you, but that Free Man in Paris was an abomination!) Cyndi Lauper’s version of Carey, first performed at the 2000 Tribute to Joni Mitchell, is a notable exception. This downtempo jazzy rendition changes the song’s tone and draws out the sadness about leaving behind an entire lifestyle that’s only implicit in the original. It’s a surprisingly effective reworking, and its delivered perfectly by Cyndi, who shows off a side of her musical talent most people never got to see and gives a beautiful emotional reading.
You have to love the little shots of Joni throughout and the odd celebrity cameos by Ashley Judd, Rebecca Romaijn (-Stamos), and John Stamos too.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Sufjan Stevens- The Owl and the Tanager
How I was wrong, tingling from the kill
Tickle me until, you devil bird you evil still
Slept on my arms, I was sleeping in the sill
I was sleeping in the room with you
You little boy, you little boy
How could you run from me now?
The loneliest chime in the house
The loneliest chime in the house
You let it out, you let it out
Come to me Calvary still
I’m weeding and raking until
I’m bleeding in spite of my love for you
It bruised and bruised my will
This song has been haunting me for the last week, and I haven’t been able to figure out a full interpretation for it, which is going to slowly drive me insane. I can see it being about a relationship where the narrator cares much more than the other person and is abandoned, with anger and violence leading to sex that still ends with the narrator being ultimately alone. But I can also see it being about a sexual relationship between two male friends that both are conflicted over and that gets derailed after one reveals what’s going on to others, leading the narrator to be unable to deal with his feelings and leave the other person alone and waiting forever. (I’m hoping I’m not just projecting that and that other people see it in the text too) It’s the most raw and sadly beautiful moment on an EP filled with ennui, angst, crises of faith, and neediness. Sufjan utilizes just the piano here, and his playing is largely delicate and sparse with fuller more classical moments occuring later and keeping the music from becoming repetitive. The focus is on Sufjan’s lonely and pain-soaked vocal, which has a much more mature tone to it than on Illinois and less of the affected shakiness that characterized his higher vocals on that record, resulting in a song that’s memorable and devastating.
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Sufjan Stevens- The Mistress Witch from McClure (solo live)
Sufjan, please come back, I miss you. If you don’t pay attention to the lyrics, this is a very pretty and soothing song. Once you realize it’s about Sufjan and his siblings discovering their father having an affair and Sufjan feeling abandoned afterward, it becomes a bit more intense. The song has a childlike pettiness to it at points (it’s titled The Mistress Witch for starters) and there’s a lot of anger covered up by Sufjan’s calmness and lovely falsetto. That quiver is his voice on “He left us now for dead” is just gut-wrenching though, and reveals more pain and emotion in 3 seconds than most artists do in an album’s worth of material.
