According to blabbermouth.net, in a new interview with What’s Under The Bed?, Powerman 5000 frontman Spider One was asked how he and his bandmates go about choosing which songs to cover after having previously released a covers album in 2011 called Copies, Clones & Replicants, which features versions of Debo’s “Whip It.” Van Halen’s “Jump”, David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, T. Rex’s “20th Century Boy” and Inxs’s “Devil Inside.”

“It’s funny how we have done a bunch of cover tunes and there’s no real reason for it. I hear songs every day that I would be, like, ‘Wow, that’d be great to cover that.’ I think I generally go for stuff that had some effect on me as a child or young person, although there are modern stuff I’d love to give a go at. But sometimes the idea is just, ‘Can I reasonably do this?’ There are just some songs that would just be a disaster. Like, I’m not gonna attempt to cover Curtis Mayfield or something; that would be terrible. So I try to find something that I, with my limited vocal ability, can hopefully do some justice to.” said One.

The artist adds: “I think it’s always most exciting when someone takes a song and kind of turns it on its head, takes a seemingly happy song and makes it sad or something that’s really heavy and turns it into a ballad and people have done it. But I always thought that ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’, if you didn’t hear the track, is a very sad song. And if you listen to the lyrics, or even Van Halen’s ‘Jump‘ seems to me to be a sad song. I don’t know. So I think there’s an interesting way to just maybe focus on the lyrics and then change the music into an entirely different mood.”

Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat