According to blabbermouth.net, in 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
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