#965. Lineage of Song: “Cruel Summer”

 

Bananarama

Ace of Base

Taylor Swift

I was/am a big fan of Ace of Base. “Cruel Summer” was, I think, the last time they had a hit song. I didn’t particularly care that it was a cover. Taylor Swift’s song is unrelated, but it shares the title, so here it is. It’s the song the radio station I listen to on Sunday mornings is most likely to play from her catalog.

#964. Lineage of Song: “Once in a Lifetime”

Talking Heads

Kermit the Frog

Muppets Tonight was a short-lived but fine addition to the Muppets canon. It gave unexpected pleasures like this random complete cover, and it also introduced Pepe the Prawn (okay?), who stands, to date, as the last breakout creation of the crew. If you’ve never seen it, my personal recommendation is the Jason Alexander episode. Alexander will always be best known as George on Seinfeld, but he’s surprisingly versatile when given the opportunity. Among the later sitcoms he tried to launch, my favorite was Listen Up, which ran for a single season in 2004/2005. The last episode feels like you’re watching a stage production. It’s Alexander stripped down to his most relaxed state, the total opposite of George Costanza. In the Muppets Tonight episode, the whole point of every sketch is him trying to avoid the famous histrionics, with the best one being him playing Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective (as recently portrayed by Kenneth Branagh in a rewarding series of films). All the Muppets keep calling him “Hercules.” He keeps setting them straight. They keep calling him Hercules. It ends with him ranting about the end of Superman (1978), the implausibility of the time travel gimmick…

Watching the actual Talking Heads video, listening to the song through that lens, it feels like a later generation’s conception of Buddy Holly (see also: Weezer’s “Buddy Holly,” the video for which features the Fonz). But Buddy Holly was never a geek, to his fans. He was idolized by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. He was a pillar in the birth of rock. It probably doesn’t help that while a good experience for fans, Gary Busey’s portrayal in The Buddy Holly Story leaves the geek impression very much in mind.
 

#963. Lineage of Song: “Heart and Soul”

 

Train, “Play That Song”

From Lost

When I originally tackled this project, Train’s contribution was actually the kind of song I didn’t really want to include. I first heard Train as a gloomy band my college roommate loved. Later in their career they discovered that they could sound pretty cheerful, and I guess that’s also why they later did “Play That Song,” or so I always assumed, because it wasn’t that easy for them to keep the new version of themselves going, especially as radio hitmakers. “Heart and Soul” itself is a classic bit of piano material that a lot of people learning how to play like to pick out on the keys. I loved when Lost had it show up with Jack’s doomed love in the flashbacks, who was played by Julie Bowen, whom I’d fallen in love with previously thanks to Ed, and before she found lasting success in Modern Family.

#962. Lineage of Song: “Thank You”

 

“Stan”

“Thank You”

Back in the day there was the belief that Dido’s “Thank You” was better off being sampled in Eminem’s “Stan” than existing on its own. I tend to wildly disagree. But it’s still interesting, that Eminem took a whole existing, until that point unknown contemporary song and used it as supporting material in his own, which ended up propelling not only the song but the artist into the mainstream. Sometimes rap shenanigans work as a force for good!

#961. Lineage of Song: “Monsters”

 

James Blunt

Iam Tongi

I don’t usually feature reality show singing competitions in this, but I was touring YouTube and just came across Iam Tongi, whose version of James Blunt’s song in his audition is truly one of those perfect moments.

#960. Lineage of Song: “Captain Kidd”

“What Wondrous Love is This”

Johnny Cash, “Sam Hall”

 

Great Big Sea, “Captain Kidd”

“The Ballad of Captain Ashford”

“Captain Kidd” is actually quoted in a Washington Irving story, so its lineage is pretty well established, and its tune ended up showing up in other songs like “What Wondrous Love is This” and “Sam Hall.” It’s of course a song I first heard from Newfoundland fount of traditional songs Great Big Sea (one of its original members left because he thought they didn’t devote sufficient time to preserving them). In more recent days it was adapted by the TV show The Expanse as “The Ballad of Captain Ashford.” It’s a well-travelled sea shanty indeed.

#959. Lineage of Song: “Gallows Pole”

 

Led Zeppelin

Great Big Sea

My brothers took a sharp turn toward classic rock in the ‘90s, thanks in part to a local radio station (The Blimp!), during which they embraced Led Zeppelin as one of the great bands, a sentiment widely shared since their heyday but one I’ve never really gotten around to myself. My Newfoundland boys Great Big Sea (they’ll continue to show up in this, I assure you) covered the most appropriate song in the catalog, and that got me listening, but I would still need slightly more than a stairway to join the bandwagon.

#958. Lineage of Song: “The Long and Winding Road”

 

On a Beatles kick, here’s a song that I’ve been getting into more and more since the Let It Be…Naked version without the added production was released, and the subsequent take from Yesterday following it so faithfully. I hated how critics tried to bury the movie by suggesting younger viewers couldn’t possibly understand it when that was kind of the whole point, that you could discover this music all over again and it would be just as amazing. I was born a decade after the band split, so my whole life has been exploring it after the fact. If you believe it’s impossible it’s because you need it to be true. But it certainly doesn’t have to be.

#957. Lineage of Song: “I’ve Just Seen a Face”

Across the Universe

 

Having just posted the previous Beatles cover song responsible for helping me discover more of their work, I figured I should definitely include this one, too, from what I still consider to be a horribly underrated movie bursting with such material.

(This is yet another post breaking the fourth wall of the humorously disjointed nature of plotting blog posts in advance! Huzzah!)

#956. Lineage of Song: “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”

 

Bob Dylan

Guns ‘n’ Roses

This one’s here because at work it happened to come up, when I was playing Bon Jovi, and I was asked if it was the same band that played “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” No, no it was not.

Back when I created this post (10/26), it seemed like it was a long time to wait to see it finally posted. I’m currently sitting at #1007 now waiting, which is a whole additional year of this project. When I started it I was just trying to find something new for an old blog to be revitalized, since my slowdown at blogging had ended up sacrificing my oldest, least structured blog, and that felt wrong. 

Anyway, since composing this particular post, I picked up a Criterion Collection edition of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which led to hours spent watching three different cuts. I’d never seen it before, so spending so much time with it ended up being a pleasant surprise (I posted a review about a month back on my film blog).

Between this and the release of A Complete Unknown (which I decided was my favorite movie of 2024), I found myself once again in the grip of Bob Dylan. It’s been a comfortable spot for a dozen years or so. I understand I came late to the party, but I figure it’s not really when you arrive but that you found the time to enjoy it.

#955. Lineage of Song: “Johnny B. Goode”

 

Back to the Future

Michael J. Fox & Coldplay

It’s kind of hard to work on a project like this and not acknowledge one of the biggest moments in one of the most beloved movies of the past fifty years. Later, Coldplay helped Michael J. Fox recreate the magic.

#954. Lineage of Song: “Peggy Sue”

 

Pealing back the curtain a bit, because the timing won’t at all bear this out. I’ve been compiling these well in advance of posting them. For me, yesterday was 9/7, which 88 years earlier was when Buddy Holly was born.

And while it was a few months ago for me, setting up “Cecilia,” the posted version was a few weeks ago. That one features two different music acts in collaboration. This one is Buddy Holly writing a sequel to his own song (a few minutes ago I posted “That’s All Right, Mama” vaguely referencing a different “follow up;” sometimes I’m very cavalier in these posts). 

I had a mentor when I was a kid who inadvertently encouraged getting into Buddy Holly, which I took for a lifelong commitment, but “Peggy Sue Got Married” (despite eventually inspiring a whole movie) wasn’t really a part of that experience, since it’s absent from the greatest hits collection I took most of my experience with his music from, so it’s surreal to listen to it, now, to think Holly somehow wrote a coda to a life cut far too short. I can probably do some research, but apart from these examples I’m not aware of a ton of outright sequel songs. 

#953. Lineage of Song “Wellerman”

The Longest Johns

Nathan Evans 

The Albany Shantymen

Wellington Sea Chanty Society

Kind of crazy that it took me this long to include “Wellerman” in the Lineage of Song, since it’s basically the song, as sung by Nathan Evans, that got me into this gear all over again. 

#952. Lineage of Song: “Just the Two of Us”

 

Bill Withers

Will Smith

That Will Smith started out in a hip hop act and was for years best known for that increasingly feels like a historical curiosity. In fact the last time he released new music was twenty years ago and even that felt like an afterthought. How he survived the horrible publicity and the act itself of the Oscars slap, too…

#951. Lineage of Song: “Cecilia”

Simon & Garfunkel 

Ace of Base

Here’s one of my personal favorites, and the first (but not last) time Ace of Base shows up in these posts (these particular Swedes ended up having a pretty deep appreciation for the lineage of song). In this one they literally write a whole song about another song, a sequel song, as it were.

#950. Lineage of Song: “Under Pressure”

 

Queen & David Bowie

Vanilla Ice

One of the more egregious and inexplicable lineages brought us the brief popular career of white rapper Vanilla Ice. He at lasted sampled from greatness.

#949. Lineage of Song: “I Got a Woman”

 

Ray Charles

Kanye West

Jamie Foxx turned his starring role in Ray into a gig for a hot minute, which means his spot in “Gold Digger.”

#948. Lineage of Song: “Killing Me Softly”

Don McLean

Lori Lieberman

Roberta Flack

Fugees

When the Fugees exploded on the scene, it was because they settled into music appreciation like few others. That’s the kind of act I appreciate, in any medium.

#947. Lineage of Song: “99 Problems”

Jay-Z

Hugo 

Here’s one of my favorites, actually, not necessarily the original but the remake, which was featured in the credits for another remake, the 2011 version of Fright Night. 

It’s worth noting Hugo was actually recruited by Jay-Z to his label, and that’s how his cover happened. Also, the most infamous version of “99 Problems” is on The Grey Album, the Danger Mouse mashup of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album. Due to legal issues the whole project is tantamount to urban legend, so I haven’t really pursued it, much less heard any of it until after posting this, when it occurred to me to see if YouTube could help. But it turns out as far as this particular track is concerned, it’s almost exactly the Jay-Z version with minor injections of “Helter Skelter.” Which makes me less interested in experiencing the whole album.

#946. Lineage of Song: “Every Breath You Take”

 

The Police

Sean Combs

I include this one because the famous guitar riff running through it was included in the recently disgraced Combs’ tribute to his late friend Notorious B.I.G. (there’s surprisingly a whole recent history of new songs doing that, borrowing wholesale elements from other songs, like Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby” or Train’s “Play That Song”). 

Actually I once again confess that part of this project is shamelessly only to spur me into to watching the results after posting, and doing so led me to revisiting Diddy’s song for the first time since its original release, which revealed that the backing vocals are themselves a riff on the Police song, so it also operates as a cover.