Ren
The Verve
The convoluted saga of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” is another you can read about elsewhere, but it’s worth talking about in a more general sense. Like a lot of listeners, it was a clear highlight of late Nineties radio for me, one of those contradictions you can’t help but laugh about when people say rock was a wasteland by that point (always greatly exaggerated). I didn’t know anything about the legal battles that tanked the Verve in its wake. It seems the band borrowed some notes from an orchestral version of a Rolling Stones song in order to achieve its signature sound.
Anyway, it’s a great song, still one of my favorite ever. More recently British indie hip hop star Ren offered his version, which carries the same string arrangement but all-new lyrics (no one does it quite like him), once more emphasizing just how far the Verve reached, very much like how the Animals completely reinvented the sound of “House of the Rising Sun,” making the song its own, though “Bitter Sweet Symphony” literally is its own song. I just don’t get how petty people can be.
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