I discovered by accident yesterday that Johnette Napolitano (formerly of Concrete Blonde) has a new album out. This is exciting, for reasons that I trust are obvious.
So I was listening to it while driving around today. So far I’m finding it hit-or-miss, but that’s probably just my own expectations leading me astray; it’s rather a different sound than the CB I’m more familiar with, stripped down pretty far. But there’s one song I was listening to that seemed somehow… familiar? I hadn’t heard the song before, but I knew I’d heard something like it.
Turns out that it’s a Coldplay song.
Which seems exactly right.
Listen to it, and I dare you not to hear Chris Martin singing along with it. It’s not that Napolitano’s deliberately emulating his voice; indeed, her voice is pretty much unmistakable for anything but her own. It’s the melody that carries the Coldplay-ness along with it, sliding around the same way that Martin’s voice does. And that’s interesting to me, since I’d sort of assumed that all Coldplay sounded alike because of the performance of the songs. It hadn’t occured to me that the songs themselves might really be all the same.
I don’t think this is typical, is why I’m harping on this. If you recognize someone covering Tom Waits or Elvis Costello, without knowing the original song, it’s probably because you’re picking up on lyrical tics rather than musical ones. I can’t think of another songwriter I’d expect to recognize melodically like this.