I heard “Swim” right after Andrew McMahon looked me in the face and told me it was about cancer.
I was with a group of kids from my music school at a backstage meet and greet. I was expecting another celebrity in sunglasses, agitated by the Arizona heat, telling us to follow our dreams and practice everyday. Instead, when we asked him what inspired him to write, he told us that he had an infant daughter and that he had survived acute lymphoblastic leukemia ten years prior to us meeting. He told us that the really good things and the really bad things are fodder for his music.
I chose the live version because you can hear that he feels every word. I can’t imagine playing a song like this on tour, night after night, reliving the times you thought you’d give up on living. He sings it imperfectly, but the shaky notes only give the song more meaning. The crowd joins in sometimes, and it’s clear that this song is beloved by his fans. The lyric that resonates the most with me:
You gotta swim, swim when it hurts
The whole world is watching, you haven't come this far
To fall off the earth
To have a music career is hard enough, but to have one interrupted by a life threatening illness and then proceed to launch a solo project and continue to tour for a living is another thing entirely. I return to this music a lot when I’m feeling nostalgic about my childhood, but also when I need a kick in the ass to write something truthful.
“Shelter Song” is by a Danish band called Iceage. The frontman said that this song is about “looking for that thing that will pull you to some kind of redemption.” The music video is heartwarming, which is a turn for the band that used to make some of the darkest punk music in the whole genre. It begins with slowed down clips of serious looking people in a bar, all shadows and pink strobes. In the second verse these people are transported to a room where the sunlight streams in, and their connections are revealed; these two are a couple, these people have a baby, these folks are friends. The emphasis on relationships and touch is a hallmark of pandemic media, but I think this band plays with those motifs gracefully. Some of their fans are disappointed by the lighter turn Iceage has taken—people are describing it as Blur, The Rolling Stones, Pavement—but I love this song. It makes me feel like I’m gonna make it, and the gospel choir in the last chorus is singing me home.
It’s been a whole decade since the release of Sharon Van Etten’s landmark album epic (2011). She released epic Ten (2021) to commemorate it, with covers and collaborations of every track. My favorite by far is the Fiona Apple version of “Love More.” It’s replete with various Fionas, doing vocal acrobatics behind her emotional lead line. In comparison, the original track has violins doing double stops across the whole first verse, more instrumentation only coming in after.
I love covers. I love the practice of reimagining something that you admire, running it through the sieve of your interpretation, and presenting it to the world as its own piece of art. Covers can become canon (Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” by Dolly Parton and Lorde’s cover of The Replacements’ “Swingin Party” come to mind), overtaking their predecessors in fame and recognition until the cultural consciousness omits the original entirely. The pressure as a musician to create your own music can be paralyzing; covering songs that you love distances you from the elephantine task of writing and gives creativity bounds in which it can flourish.
I was a cover artist long before I started writing my own songs; I think everyone is. I love hearing something and immediately imagining how it would sound stripped down to just a single instrument. I started playing guitar as a child because I wanted to accompany myself singing songs I loved from the radio. I’ve always said I wanted to be just famous enough to release a covers record. If you stick around long enough, maybe one day you’ll hear it.