All I need is the air that I breathe and to re-love you

I love Radiohead’s “Creep.” It’s my go-to song, not for karaoke, but for loudly singing while walking alone under any highway overpass with tons of natural reverb. My friend Lisa says it’s one of her favorite songs to play on ukelele. There are also some people who don’t love “Creep,” among them the members of Radiohead, who apparently never wanted to record it in the first place and don’t enjoy playing it at their concerts.

Maybe part of the reason for Radiohead’s distaste for “Creep” is that their biggest-ever hit song isn’t entirely their own composition. You probably already knew this, but I just learned yesterday that the song takes its chord progression and melody directly from “The Air That I Breathe,” a huge 1974 hit for The Hollies.^[1]

Both of these songs pack a lot of emotional punch, especially given how simple their shared four-measure chord progression is (or maybe it’s because of that?) Such beauty in simplicity is also why I chose to sing “Creep” while prototyping my weird motion-controlled virtual cello. Surely there’s a research paper out there that traces the song’s lineage back to some seminal Classical composition or Gregorian chant.

Anyway, the writers of “The Air That I Breathe” took legal action against Radiohead to protect their intellectual property, but evidently Thom Yorke and company were quite open about “reusing” that tune and quickly granted the original writers a split of the royalties from “Creep.” Radiohead, in turn, sued Lana Del Rey in 2017 for stealing “their” chord progression and melody for her song “Get Free.” 🙄

Partly this tawdry tale of musical chairs is just another reminder that the music business is often more business than music. That seems to be a trending theme this decade. But I believe there’s also a less cynical insight here.

“In popular myth, great songs are divinely channeled like some kind of creative immaculate conception; in reality it’s just your neurons.”

Nobody writes music in a vacuum. In popular myth, great songs are divinely channeled like some kind of creative immaculate conception; in reality it’s just your neurons. Your brain isn’t fully wired at birth. Neural pathways form as you age, based on everything you experience. Doctors call it “neuroplasticity.” I call it learning. Basically, your brain is a complex, cumulative, 3D map of everything you’ve ever seen, smelled, tasted, felt, and heard. So if you task that brain with cooking up a new dish, what ingredients do you think it’s going put into the recipe? Whatever it has in the cupboard.

Of course, not all memories are equally accessible, and most of the time our neurons trace memories in super unobvious ways. And harnessing those unobvious signals to make something new is called creativity. But to some degree—whether it’s as blatant as Danny Partridge stealing Keith’s songs in his sleep or as sublime as Hans Zimmer channeling Tibetan chants while composing the Dune soundtrack—I believe that every song we write is partly a cover song.

I feel like musicians are often reluctant to get concrete about this. We tend to speak very broadly about musical influences. I get it: no one wants their creativity to be seen as too derivative (and no one wants to get sued). But that’s too bad, because like all art, music is derivative, and that’s a big part of what makes it so beautiful and fascinating. To me, music is this massive multi-player cultural conversation taking place across decades and generations, one song at a time. Whenever a song really hits me emotionally, I love being able to trace its cultural genealogy.

“It’s like playing a hundred-years-long game of telephone, but as a Rorshach test ... and instead of inkblots, using songs.”

It fascinates me how an artist can filter a total stranger’s emotional expression through their own subconsciousness, and then “remix” it into a reworked form, drawing on their own memories and emotions. It’s like playing a hundred-years-long game of telephone, but as a Rorshach test ... and instead of inkblots, we make songs. It’s not simply reusing, because we transform and add to it as we play. It’s more like re-loving.

This is why I love cover songs so much. But only when they feel like true reinterpretations, not just re-recordings. A few favorites come to mind:

• Lucinda Williams performing Nick Drake’s “Which Will”
• Madeleine Peyroux playing Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars”
• Tori Amos covering Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
• Cat Power doing Rihanna’s hit “Stay” by Mikky Ekko and Justin Parker
• Peter Gabriel imitating a muppet singing The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields”

(Okay, that last one was just for fun. 🐸 But I do love that track.)

I haven’t released any cover songs yet, but you can bet I will in the future. Feel free to post suggestions in the comments.

For today, my small contribution to our cultural game of telephone is actually a music video. I remixed some vintage experimental film footage to make a lyric video for “Let It Fall,” the third track on The Ellis Court’s debut release What More. (You can also see the original film on The Ellis Court’s YouTube channel.)

The footage is from the Dickson Experimental Sound Film, shot at Thomas Edison’s “Black Maria” film studio in New Jersey in the early 1890s. It was the first experiment in recording sound and moving image at the same time. The 17-second long clip famously captures two men waltzing together, a fact that sometimes seems to steal the spotlight away from its historical significance. Victorian-era same-sex dancing!!? Inevitably in online forums you get commenters (usually men) making urgent, unsolicited disclaimers like: “It doesn’t mean they were gay!”

“Just by adding in this small unlikely potentiality, a few blurry frames of old film blossom into something far more poignant and beautiful.”

Which I find super interesting. I mean ... we can’t know. But what if they were gay? What if they were in love? Just by adding in this small unlikely potentiality, a few blurry frames of old film from a failed scientific experiment suddenly blossom into something far more poignant and beautiful, at least to me. And that’s why I decided to re-love it as the music video for “Let It Fall.”

As for the music itself, here’s a playlist of some of the sonic neural pathways I imagine that by brain was retracing as I wrote “Let It Fall.” I doubt if any of these songwriters will sue me, but who knows...

• Jeff Buckley: “Lilac Wine”
• Billie Eilish: “No Time To Die”
• Peter Gabriel: “Here Comes The Flood”
• U2: “October”
• Spink: “This Boy” (It’s a trick! That’s also me. 😸)

Footnotes

1. If you want to go down the rabbit hole on this, listen to songwriter Albert Hammond's original 1973 recording of “The Air That I Breathe.” It’s a gorgeous acoustic guitar ballad with strings ... until the drop. At 2:35, a dramatic Phil Collins-style drum fill and distorted electric guitars kick in totally out of nowhere. Sound familiar?