There's a certain amount of hubris inherent in every covers record. Surely many if not most begin quite innocently, like a fan letter to a favorite act. But the implication is still that the singer or band thinks that they can bring something new to someone else's song or performance. Perhaps they feel that they can even make the song better. The fact that this rarely happens apparently deters no one. "Playing covers... is not the same as, say, recording your favorite songs of all time," elaborated Norwegian singer Susanna Wallumrod when an interviewer from The Guardian asked about her propensity toward re-imagining the songs of others. "That wouldn't be interesting. It is about trying to make good music of your own."
Truth be told, Susanna's strategy to date has largely been about making someone else's good music her own. Susanna and the Magical Orchestra's first album, 2004's List of Lights and Buoys, featured a couple of covers, including a morphine-slow take on Dolly Parton's "Jolene". But 2006's Melody Mountain was comprised of nothing but covers, including such ringers as "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and the umpteenth recording of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah". These less adventurous selections were offered along with more eclectic stabs at the likes of AC/DC, Prince, and, um, KISS. And 1980s KISS, no less (though if you want to pick a song to make better, you couldn't do much better-- which is to say worse-- than "Crazy, Crazy Nights").
In 2007, Wallumrod-- sans former Jaga Jazzist keyboardist Morten Qvenild, aka the Magical Orchestra-- emerged with the album of originals Sonata Mix Dwarf Cosmos. But she's back to her old tricks with her second solo disc Flower of Evil, another collection of radically rearranged covers. Well, mostly covers. Susanna slips a couple of originals onto this disc, too, but "Goodbye" and "Wild Is the Will" tend to blend right in, so thoroughly does Susanna adapt each chosen song to her particularly despondent milieu of dramatic piano and spare accompaniment by pals Helge Sten and Pål Hausken.
Frankly, it's hard to tell what we're meant to take away from Wallumrod's introductory take on Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak", no matter how heartbreaking she makes it, especially when she's backed by the master of malleable sincerity himself, Mr. Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Will Oldham turns up again later as duet partner on Badfinger's "Without You", and his own "Joy and Jubilee" gets the Susanna treatment, too. It's a great fit, brittle and beautiful in all the right places, getting to the heart of Oldham's song in a way that the elusive songwriter himself sometimes disallows.
A few other tracks prove apt fits as well, particularly Sandy Denny's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes", Roy Harper's "Forever", and Nico's "Janitor of Lunacy", songs you'd think couldn't get any more melancholy or morose...until they do. Black Sabbath's ballad "Changes" especially benefits from its new setting, not to mention Susanna's female touch, as does Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More", plucked from its 80s trappings and remade as a funereal hymn. Fresh readings of Prince's forgotten Lovesexy track "Dance On" and ABBA's "Lay All Your Love on Me" highlight the strength of lyrics too often subsumed by each respective original song's ace production, even if in the latter case, the original Eurodisco trumps Susanna's Eurodirge.
Yet whether you're Chan Marshall, Mark Kozelek, or Susanna, when a cover goes beyond mere interpretation to outright reinvention, it does raise a question: If you're going to radically change a song until it's virtually unrecognizable, why not go all the way, write new lyrics, and call it something else? Revisiting Lou Reed's Transformer nugget "Vicious" as a piano ballad or "Can't Shake Loose" (a solo hit for ABBA's Agnetha Fältskog) as chamber gloom unfortunately further amplifies the perils and pointlessness of this kind of novelty.
Sure, recontextualizing songs can sometimes reveal something new about the source material. At least that's what the most gifted interpreters accomplish. But in Susanna's case, more often than not, the literal meaning of the lyrics is left intact after all else has been jettisoned. With every track projected through the same spectrum of depression, sadness, and misery, the song becomes unimportant and we're left only with her affected, ultimately monochromatic approach. As morbidly effective, thoroughly gorgeous, and sometimes wrenching as the results may be, in the end Susanna simply doesn't own these songs. She smothers and snuffs them out like a candle.
