Cover songs can be many things. They can be lazy album filler. They can be ho-hum recordings that do nothing to advance a band’s catalog. But, once in a while, they can be truly epic. For my next five entries, I’m highlighting five of my favorite cover songs of all time. Each of these tracks, in my opinion, have reinvented and, in many ways, exceeded the original recordings.
During a long, successful reign throughout the 80s, Tears for Fears was one of those few new wave bands that broke through into the mainstream. They conquered alt rock stations, took over MTV and eventually invaded Top 40 stations. They did it with songs that defined a new generation of music — like “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, “Shout”, “Pale Shelter”, “Change”, “Head Over Heels” and “Mad World”. When Michael Andrews and Gary Jules teamed up to create a new apocalyptic version of “Mad World” for the Donnie Darko soundtrack, they reimagined the tempo to become something that crawls under your skin and stays there.
By stripping down the sound and slowing down the RPMs to a near standstill, Andrews crafted a unique film score that put the instrumentation in the background and thrusted TFF’s profound lyrics to the foreground. This deliberately slower pace in Andrews’ vision for “Mad World” gave the words a harder, darker edge. It revealed that, as great as the drum-machine and synth-driven new wave original was, the lyrics and eerie melody behind the song have always been the most powerful things about the song.
“All around me are familiar faces. Worn out places, worn out faces. Bright and early for the daily races. Going nowhere, going nowhere.”