In the months since Apple finally brought the iTunes Music Store to the UK I’ve spent a little while browsing around for a variety of odd tracks that I haven’t heard for years, and usually that I really don’t want to spend out for a whole album for. At 79p I can pick up the tracks that I want without having to pay for all the fillers that compilation albums usually include!
However, what always surprises me is the variety of cover versions of a lot of the tracks that the search on iTunes often produces. I guess it could be caused by the primary iTunes store being in the USA, but some of the versions strike me as a little odd at times, and often I have never come across.
A good example is one I came across tonight, whilst I was waiting for the PDA to syncronise with the Mac. I tapped in “You’re The Voice”, looking for a track which I know as a song from the mid-eighties by John Farnham, an Australian. The song was a number 6 hit in the UK on release, and a number 1 in Australia (apparently a quarter of Australians bought the song). The only other time the song appeared in the UK chart was a number 56 for the cover version by Heart in 1991.
The search brought back six matches, all the right song, but none of them the original John Farnham. The matches were:
Chris Thompson and the SAS Band
Heart (two instances of the same song on two versions of their Greatest Hits)
Of the results, Chris Thompson is one of the co-authors of the song, and the Alan Parsons Project is Chris Thompson again, doing a live version. However the last two are slightly more interesting, in terms of oddities.
The The London Symphony Orchestra version is one of those classical orchestra does pop song type efforts that you tend to be able to pick up in bargain bins (and of which there are quite a few in the iTunes Music Store). The other is interesting because it is classified under Inspirational, and comes off an album called God.
Rebecca St James is a Christian artist, who I know for Breathe, a song that the Youth Group were taught on a youth weekend a couple of years ago. Looking up on some of the US sites it was released as a single (see the video here), and the words of the song are exactly as in the John Farnham original. The lyrics talk about how we can make a difference, and about peace, but not overtly Christian. To some extent it is an example, of how the church, as it has done for two thousand years, borrows and adapts things from the contemporary culture of the day for it’s own message.
Incidentally, as a post-script to my pondering of the slightly strange selection of versions being a USA thing, Beth also knows the song by the John Farnham original, rather than any of the versions that have turned up on iTunes. Oh, and in answer to the question of whether I bought any of the versions, I got the The Alan Parsons Project live version, and also got Sirius from the same album, mainly because it is bugging me on which Childrens TV show I originally heard it. (I think it could have been as part of Record Breakers, but I could be totally wrong – anyone got any other suggestions?)
I hate the Rebecca St James version. Or maybe it’s just the beef I have with some of the Christian music out today in general–it just seems pretty bland. This could end up as a discussion about Christian music you know 🙂 Like, why is there no mainstream Christian radio in this country?! My sister tells me all about these new Christian artists she hears on radio over there and I have no idea what she’s talking about. Anyway, I’ll stop this discussion here for now.
I have to agree, having watched the whole of the video the Rebecca St James version is really dreadful. To me it sounds like shes trying to do an Allanis Morrisette impression… Definitely a cover version that doesn’t work!