Yo La Tengo - "Before We Stopped To Think".

I guess that covering a song is like waving a flag. I guess it is. Temporarily, for two or three or four minutes, you are stepping inside the lines that another artist painted on the ground; you are stepping inside their circle, hoisting and waving their flag. It is a little like dating the same person. It is a little like moving into the same apartment. Maybe sometimes you are waving the flag ironically, dating the person ironically, ironically living in a high-rise with a pool. But it is difficult to pull off these ironical things. Mostly I think you are just kinda trying to wave that flag you love, to watch its colours change in the day's different bands of sunlight.

"Before We Stopped To Think" was originally recorded by a band called Great Plains. Their version is winsome and jangly, with a thin line of synthesizer. Yo La Tengo, on the other hand, make the song sound drowsy and sincere, the kind of drowsy and sincere that happens at the very end of a night, in the early morning, when the stars are at their loudest, your voice is worn out. Perhaps it is a strange way to cover someone: to sing their song but to sing it all worn out.

But then my favourite covers aren't purely about celebrating another song. To interpret a song is to engage with it on a deeper level than mere advocacy. It is the same with writing or talking about music: on your best days, strive to be more than a champion. You must commit to what you are doing; you must give it stakes; it must be possible to fail. Maybe you fail because you lack the ability, perhaps because you do not manage to express yourself in this particular instant, perhaps because you run out of strength or patience or the means to continue.

Yo La Tengo's performance of "Before We Stopped To Think" is like waving a flag. It is like stepping inside the lines that Great Plains painted on the ground, hoisting and waving their flag. But before Yo La Tengo raised that flag they lived for thirty years in the circle that Great Plains had painted. They listened to this song, listened and listened, tried to understand this ring in the dirt. Maybe they stared at Great Plains' high flag and felt a flicker of recognition in their hearts. Maybe immediately, maybe after some time. But eventually the moment came that Ira or Georgia or James or Dave decided that they could play their own version with sufficient clarity of intention that it would be possible to fail. In the singing, the brushes on drums, the low bass, Dave's searching electric guitar: they could raise this same flag in a way that's honest and true, vulnerable, valiant. You can hear it in the recording, the way this is so. A flag in the air, an old flag, star-spangled like it's new.

[buy / thanks Charles]