-
Cover Songs
Hi Mona and Lisa;
This question is motivated by the question from Alan S. After choosing a song to cover have you considered re-arranging the cover to be radically different from the original. One example I remember from years past is “Ticket to Ride” which was covered by the Carpenters and the arrangement was just so different from the original from the Beatles.
I do realize that you do put your own signature on the covers by adding instruments and likely key changes and other changes……still your covers follow kinda close the melody of the original. But, have you considered major arrangement changes in known songs?
Best;
Mike
-
6 Replies
-
Hi Mike. Hope you don’t mind me putting my two bobs worth in here. I understand the Twins cover the songs they do from the sixties because they love them as they are and like to keep true to the originals. I believe they save their creative thing for their originals.
-
Don’t mind at all. That makes sense. I was just wondering if their creativity stretched over to different song arrangements. I know they throw in wrinkles like Mona playing a flute, etc. I was just wondering about tempo and other arrangement changes.
Mike
-
-
Oh yeah, we love doing that! I’d say “Baby Mine” from “MonaLisa Twins play Beatles & more Vol. 3” or our version of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” for example are pretty drastically different to their original arrangement. Or the song we posted today: https://test2.monalisa-twins.com/early-access-little-drummer-boy-audio/ And we had a hell of a lot of fun doing that 🙂
But the thing is that when we cover our absolute favourite songs (like many Beatles songs) they are already so perfect (in our opinion) that we don’t feel that changing them up too much would improve them in any way. So we just add our little touches and try to do them justice as much as we can.
One of my pet peeves is people changing melodies, chords and arrangements of already great songs ONLY for the sake of changing something but in the progress losing the essence of what makes the song great. We see this on YouTube all the time, and I think you can normally tell if someone understands the music well enough to keep its magic in tact (while making it their own) or if someone believes that changing things up a lot somehow makes it more interesting by default. Of course, there aren’t really any “hard rules”, a lot of it comes down to personal taste, and musicians should make music however they want. That’s just my personal opinion and taste when it comes to covering other people’s music.
So yeah, completely reinventing an arrangement can be super interesting if done skillfully 🙂 And it’s something we’ll definitely continue to play around with, depending on the song.
-
Thanks for your answer and I hope you, Mona, Rudi, Michaela, and the team have the best holiday season yet. Congrats on the 50,000 “likes” and may more follow!! Mike.
-
-
I love all of your Christmas songs but this one is at another level!! Fantastic job!!!!
-
Great question Mike and thanks for your in depth response Lisa. Just as I expected, an eminently sensible approach to cover versions. You girls rock! Love your new Xmas song and am looking forward to the video!
The forum ‘MLT-FAQs’ is closed to new discussions and replies.
