Encore performances
Taylor Swift, Yusuf release do-over albums
There’s still no getting away from Taylor Swift. In the past 12 months she’s delivered her two best albums, “folklore” and “evermore,” both widely acclaimed even among non-Swifties. Now she’s giving fans just what they always wanted: a chance to buy her old albums again.
No sarcasm meant there, because her devotees have cheered on her efforts to regain control of her back catalog after her former label Big Machine was sold. The first remake album, “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” just arrived, and it’s a real feat how she’s copied every single vocal and instrumental nuance of the originals, down to the country twang she abandoned years ago. The sneering at the other girlfriend on “You Belong to Me”? Still there. The “mm-mmm’s” at the start of “Hey Stephen”? No change.
There’s at least one Youtube video that edits the old and new versions of “Love Story” together, if you close your eyes you can’t tell where the switches are.
There are at least a couple of moments where she can’t help singing better than she did 13 years ago; “The Way I Loved You” benefits from a slightly deeper and less teenage-sounding voice (thankfully, the autotune’s gone too). But the only real news for fans is a half-dozen songs “from the vault” that didn’t make the original cut — the best, “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” introduces the sarcastic streak that would serve her well in future breakup songs. But if you just got on board with “folklore,” deeper cuts like the power-pop gem “Hey Stephen” and the arena-rocker “Change” will show you the artist you were too hip to appreciate first time around.
Swift isn’t the first artist to rerecord her old songs for business reasons. A handful of veteran bands already discovered they could turn a healthier profit on TV and movie licensing if they did soundalike versions of their hits, instead of leaving it all to their former labels. Most impressively, the great UK pop band Squeeze once did a full album’s worth and gave it the cheeky title “Spot the Difference” — something only the most sharp-eared fans could do. They earn special credit for recreating some of these songs 30 years after the fact; it didn’t hurt that frontman Glenn Tilbrook still sang like a naughty choirboy (and another decade later, still does).
But it’s not often that an artist will re-record time-honored songs and intentionally make them sound nothing like the originals. Cat Stevens, the artist currently known as Yusuf, just did that by releasing a new version of his 1970 classic, “Tea for the Tillerman.”
The original was one of the most beloved singer-songwriter albums, but it was also clearly a young man’s songs. There’s no way a 72-year-old could approach them the same way — especially not Yusuf, whose voice has deepened so much that only the phrasing is recognizable.
Unlike Taylor’s album, the new “Tea” is one to listen to alongside, not instead of the original. He changes the sound of the tunes as well as their meanings: “Wild World” was always deep and sensitive, but it was never reggae before (unless you remember Jimmy Cliff’s cover version, and it sounds like Yusuf does). The spiritually themed “On the Road to Find Out” may actually work better here as a grittier travelling blues. And the biggest surprise is on “Father & Son,” where he sings the duet with his 22-year-old self. You may think that’s a cheap trick, but odds are good you’ll get a little teary anyway.