SOUNDTRACK: TRACY THORN & JENS LEKMAN-“Yeah! Oh Yeah! from Score! 20 Years of Merge Records: The Covers (2009).
Th
is cover makes me think that I like The Magnetic Fields for their songs, but not really for their singing or arrangements. This song is pretty hilarious (every yeah oh yeah is in response to something awful (Do you want to break my heart? Yeah, yeah, Oh yeah!). The cover by the wonderful Tracy Thorn & Jens Lekman is much more understated than the original, with simple instrumentation.
The original is a chiming, kind of noisy track. While the cover has Thorns beautiful voice languorously singing the lines while Lekman chimes in. The backing music is delicate and almost sweet (a nice contrast to the lyrics). I think the song is fantastic, but once again, I like the cover more than the original. This is especially surprising as the cover is actually slower than the original. But, really, it’s hard to pass on Jens Lekman.
[READ: April 30, 2012] “Borges on Pleasure Island”
When I browsed for Rivka Galchen articles the other day, I found a few published works that were not in Harper’s or The New Yorker. So, yes, I’m going to write about them here. And since I’m caught up with the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, these short non-fictions were a nice balm.
I have been encountering a lot about Borges lately. Roberto Bolaño loves him, there was a recent article in Harper’s about him (a review of some new translations called “The purloined Borges: Translation and traduction” by Edgardo Krebs) and now I get this article. This article is a strange one–and I’m not entirely sure where it would have appeared in the Times. It’s strange because it’s kind of a review of a new collection of Borges’ work (this one called On Writing, the first of three Borges’ related works published that month). Although really she only talks about one essay, “Literary Pleasure.” (more…)
I Just Read About That... 