Double Dipping: When Older Songs Get a Second Life
Live recordings and cover versions have a shot at nominations, especially if elder voters get their sway
Taylor Swift
announced some months back that she would not be submitting any of her re-recorded material from her hit “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” album for Grammy consideration — first off, presumably, because she wouldn’t want to split off votes from the all-new “Evermore” and secondly, because that would just seem ridiculous, right? And yet the Grammys have a history of liking new versions of older material, even if voters’ tolerance for notefor-note re-creations has yet to be tested.
Affording honors in major categories to live albums peaked during the heyday of MTV Unplugged (see: Tony Bennett and Eric Clapton in the ’s), yet giving nominations to live tracks became a way to fill out the undernourished rock categories, if nothing else, as recently as a few years ago (see the nod for a live cut by Alabama Shakes). It may not be complete coincidence that not one but two live albums from the Steely Dan camp came out in late September on the final Friday of eligibility — with committees out of the way and older voters given freer rein, a lot of them might rather check out “The Nightfly Live” than give the time of day to a Machine Gun Kelly.
The realm of cover versions seems to be where we’re most likely to discover that everything old is new again, come Grammy time. The Metallica project “The Blacklist,” which has artists doing covers of the songs from the -year-old “Black Album,” theoretically could yield candidates in several categories, with versions of the same song: Imagine Phoebe Bridgers being nominated for “Nothing Else Matters” in rock and Darius Rucker getting it for covering the same tune in country.
A tribute album devoted to the Velvet Underground could field a candidate, and it wouldn’t be inconceivable to see a nom for Brandi Carlile’s cover of John Prine’s recent Grammy winner “I Remember Everything,” the Robert Plant/allison Krauss version of the Lucinda Williams classic “Can’t Let Go,” or Lana Del Rey roping in Zella Day and Wyze Blood for Joni Mitchell’s “For Free.” It’s less likely for Foo Fighters’ side-length Bee Gees tribute as the Deegees, a project that rivaled Swift’s in soundalike aspirations.