As a music listener and fan, one of my favorite types of recordings is the well-executed cover song. A lot of great covers are essentially aural sugar rushes – 3 minutes of pure pleasure that rarely offer the depth of experience available in the original song.
Sometimes, though, the cover actually plays more like an alternate reality version of the original composition or recording, the way it would’ve sounded in a world with purple sky, or where Lou Reed won the first season of American Idol. These covers give listeners access to new dimensions within a familiar song, and you find yourself saying both “I never knew that was there”, and “well of course that’s how the song goes” simultaneously. Here’s a good example:
Hearing the elements in the Radiohead recording that Jack has chosen to emphasize (underscored by the appearance of the appropriate instrument in the video) forces me to disassemble my memory of the song and put it back together in a slightly different way, which is pretty heavy for a Sunday morning but ultimately pretty groovy.
Jack also gives excellent bass face, and is a pretty talented dude, with a passel of excellent original songs that you can check out here.
P.S. The first half of this video is Jack’s Radiohead cover. The second half is an extremely right on political statement which is now sadly outdated, so tune out at about 3:00 if you don’t want to watch that.