Danny Heggen

Question #6: Why Cover Someone Else’s Song?

Good question.

I know. That’s why I asked it.

This might sound strange…

That’s a terrible way to begin a response.

Well…

Yep, still not winning me over.

{sigh}

When I learn a song that someone else wrote, I experience a new way of arranging chords and words.

While arranging the music, what you may want to hear and what I may want to hear are quite different. Which is totally fine. Because this is what makes your music yours and my music mine.

And my favorite part is to sing words that someone else has written. It makes me think about things differently than when I’m just listening. When I have to digest the words and figure out how I’m going to sing them, I just love that.

It makes a song I’ve listened to a hundred times sound and feel new.

Can you give me an example?

I knew you’d ask.

You can’t expect to get off that easy.

In the song “Bath Our Babies” by the band Theodore (who, sadly, broke up earlier this year), there’s this amazing line: “To sleep untroubled/By the things we need.”

I’d sung along with this line a hundred times. After I got married last August, however, this line really stood out. I felt it in a whole new way.

This idea of laying side by side untroubled. Not worrying about anything regardless of how chaotic the world can become - bills, family, friends, etc. That’s the greatest feeling. There are so many nights where we go to bed carrying on about something. And then this quiet will settle over us.

She or I will ask, “What are you thinking about?” And the other will simply say, “That time we went to Michigan.” Or “When we were driving through New Zealand.” Or “When we first started dating and we’d just lay in bed during the afternoon and listen to the rain.”

To me, that’s being untroubled. And this one line brings all this up in me.

That probably sounded terribly sappy.

What’s new?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Still sappy as ever.

(By the way, that song is linked to a cover of the song I did on ukulele.)