« RUGGED COVERS » New EP of covers

All the songs are “rugged versions” because they are favourites of mine and classic songs stripped down to their very basic elements. Hence the term “rugged covers”. I have taken away the smoothness and tried to reveal the rough insides of the songs by emphasising either a melancholy quality in the lyrics or a hard edge in the rhythmic arrangement.

This is a classic that I heard on first arriving in the UK as a kid, and the strange arrangement of the song has always fascinated me, along with the use of harpsichord.

The time signature is also unusual. So the challenge was to see if I could bring some funk into it without losing the spirit of the original

This is a lyrically haunting song by Prince which describes desire in a very visual way.

I wanted to isolate the heavy emotion of the song lyrics by tying it to an Afrobeat-type rhythm.

The idea of a woman’s love being like water to drink when thirsty is an irresistible image to work with. But this time, I made it almost funereal and turned the meaning inside out. Because if a woman love is like water to drink, wouldn’t thirst be the worst thing ever?

So I slowed it down and made it even truer and sadder.

This has always sounded to me like an old blues song even though it is Fela in his « classic afrobeat” phase. Again the lyrics speak of several examples of everyday people just trying to get along when they are confronted with a situation that takes them to the very limits of their  patience. So it is a blues. A modern one. It is also very operatic or symphonic in the horn arrangements so I sang it in a falsetto, like an opera to make it even more blue.