Lauren Hoffman, “Of All The Gin Joints in All The World”
(Originally by Fall Out Boy)
Final Fantasy, “Fantasy”
(Originally by Mariah Carey)
Among the long list of creative projects I’ve dreamt up but never seen through is this one: contact all the people I know who make music and ask them for a home recording of a song written by somebody else. Only preexisting works would qualify; the idea isn’t to commission a bunch of new covers, but to unearth the ones that were never meant to see the light of day. The resulting pool of demos would be burned onto CDRs, outfitted with some modest cover art, and distributed to all the participants.
I still might do that someday, especially now that I’ve stumbled on this gem by Lauren Hoffman. It isn’t just that it’s such a rare oddity to hear a woman singing emo. It’s that, for all the potential humor to be mined from turning a super-produced mall-punk anthem into an acoustic ballad, there isn’t the slightest trace of irony in her delivery. That speaks to her sense of subtlety and restraint—and, dare I say it, to the strength of the source material.
Owen Pallett (a.k.a. Final Fantasy), on the other hand, is clearly having fun with his audience’s expectations when he eases, bit by bit, into this blissed-out interpretation of his namesake. Granted, there’s really no other way he could have done it—the loop-pedal procedure in his live shows necessarily makes a slow build of each song, stacking layer on layer until the arrangement is complete. But just listen to how the crowd reacts as they begin to get the joke, how their shouts of approval mount and swell until, in the chorus, they erupt into ecstatic applause. These people know Pallett is toying with them, and they love him for it.
