Continue reading “The heart of a lion and the wings of a bat”Limozeen’s so-called cover of “We Don’t Really Even Care About You” takes disaffected, lo-fi ‘90s indie rock and belts it out in the style of an ‘80s hair metal band—as if Poison were to cover Pavement.
at Aesthetics for Birds
Tag: covers
Why I love my publisher
My book, A Philosophy of Cover Songs, was published by Open Book Publishers. They are, as their website says, “a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by academics who are committed to making high-quality and prize-winning research available to all, and… the hub of choice for a rapidly increasing international network of scholars who believe that it is time for academic publishing to become fairer, faster and more accessible.” They were my first-choice publisher for the book, and my experience with them has been great.
Continue reading “Why I love my publisher”Appreciating out now
Appreciating Covers, co-authored with Cristyn Magnus, Christy Mag Uidhir, and Ron McClamrock, is out now in the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics.
Continue reading “Appreciating out now”The cover song beat
I was invited to appear on a podcast about covers songs, and we recorded it today. It was great fun.1
I intend to post here when the episode is released, but I had similar intentions about some other things I forgot to mention when they happened.2
Continue reading “The cover song beat”A post about a post at another blog that I wrote about a thing I wrote
My publisher asked for a short post to accompany the release of my book. It covers similar ground to one or two posts I’ve made here, but with a few twists.
The following was originally posted at the Open Book Publishers blog.
Continue reading “A post about a post at another blog that I wrote about a thing I wrote”Now…
My book, A Philosophy of Cover Songs, is out now!
Continue reading “Now…”Soon…
My book, A Philosophy of Cover Songs, is in the last throes of preproduction and will be released by the end of May.
A thing I’ll be doing in June
This is going to be a thing.
The Ethics of Cover Songs
Friday, June 10, 3:00-5:00 EDT via Zoom
A cover song, on a typical definition, is a recording of a song that had earlier been recorded by someone else. Philosophers of music considering cover songs have debated the adequacy of this definition, argued about the aesthetic evaluation of covers, and worried about their metaphysical status. This panel asks instead about ethical issues that arise from recorded music. Are there obligations which artists have when recording covers? If there are, do they arise from general ethical considerations or from norms within musical communities?
Continue reading “A thing I’ll be doing in June”Doggerel by chapter
Last week I was assembling the index for A Philosophy of Cover Songs. No release date yet, but soon.
I’ve previously posted a bit of the introduction and the epilogue. Last month, in a moment of perversity, I also wrote a summary of each chapter in haiku. I had entirely forgotten doing that until I saw the file yesterday. It’s in a directory of things written for the blog, so clearly it should be posted here.
Continue reading “Doggerel by chapter”What it says at the end
The final draft of my book A Philosophy of Cover Songs has been sent off to the publisher, so I’m waiting on feedback from the proofreader. Over on Twitter, Pete Vickers asks for the take-home message of the book in one sentence. The one-sentence version would be a grammatically dubious monstrosity, so here instead is the epilogue in which I try to sum it all up:
Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken
Willie Nelson, covering Paul Simon’s ‘American Tune’ (1993)
And many times confused.
So where does this wide-ranging discussion of covers leave us?
Continue reading “What it says at the end”