Follow me through a little journey

~leeksoup

Today's tale will walk through some music, and a little exploration into a hypothetical about it.

The song I Will Follow You into the Dark is a quite meaningful song to me. Having read up a little about it, it's got quite an interesting journey. Originally, the song was meant to be played with the whole band's setup, as you would do when a band goes to record. But by happenstance, Ben Gibbard, the singer, played through it on guitar alone during a break, and the result seemed good enough to record as-is instead. Thus, this rock band features a quiet guitar ballad in the midst of their other songs, providing quite a contrast. Have a listen:

Wikipedia tells me also that the song was recorded quite ex tempore, and it went through minimal editing. This can be heard in the song, with some mistakes on the guitar being audible, for example. It provides a little rough edge to the song, which I think adds to its charm. The song itself has an importance to me, since in the very beginning of learning to play guitar, I encountered it, and it served to me a demonstration of how much can be done with so little. Being interested in writing songs, being able to make "a complete product", so to speak, using only guitar and voice, ended up being very motivating to me, boosting me to put in the effort to play this song myself on the guitar, and also learning a whole bunch more. I can and do play this song for myself still two years later, although in a rather sloppy manner still.

The song is a reflection on death, stemming from Gibbard's situation at the time, where he was almost 29, and had still not lost anyone special to him yet. Compiling his thoughts on death and the afterlife, he came to write this song. While I did not know this background for the song for a long time, I do notice some parallels in myself - I was a few days short of 28 when, for the first time in my life, I had to encounter the loss of someone important to me. Thus, on some level, I could relate to the song. And now knowing the reason why, I can keep that in mind. This song was not the one I comforted myself with when the loss finally came, rather I wrote a song myself, alone, with only my guitar in hand. Perhaps I Will Follow You into the Dark, having provided me that burst of motivation to learn in the first place, was there in the background, letting me seek my own peace through my own words and music. Perhaps I would have worked out my grief and emotions in some other way, had I not been set on this specific path back then.

The song I wrote is also a contemplation on death. It is rather more direct, a more personal message to the one I lost. The things I remember. The ones who still remain. The moment I got the news. I expect this song to stay in the drawer, perhaps I might never perform it to anyone. But it exists as its own creation, and I've demonstrated to myself that I can do that. In an emotional time like that, I could gather all the things I felt into a piece of music. And that's really important in itself.

Back to the original topic of this post, however.

The original recording of I Will Follow You into the Dark is not the first version of the song I ever heard. In fact, I encountered it before as a cover, sung by Red from Overly Sarcastic Productions. Something about the song captivated me, leading me to seek out the original.

Red's cover is a simpler version of the song, with simple strumming chords, and her own little singing flourishes. She also cuts out the third verse. It is a very warm cover - cosy and personal. The kind of performance you would hear when you visit a friend who wants to play you a song. Music for the sake of music. It's really nice.

Once I had sought out the original, I bounced between these two, taking in the feeling of each as they suited my mood. This was a comfortable arrangement, and besides me singing and playing it myself, this is where my exploration of this song stopped for a long while.

That was until this morning. I was idly listening to the original again, when I remembered the story about its composition and recording. It was originally meant to be played as a rock song, but instead we ended up with the acoustic guitar alone. What would that band version have sounded like?

"A cover might answer this question for me!", was my immediate thought, and I headed out to Youtube. Many people cover this song, and they keep the guitar + voice soundscape, so I knew to exclude those from my search. Putting in "I Will Follow You into the Dark rock cover" into the search bar led me to find three rock-type covers. I was curious to hear how they had adapted this song I was so used to hearing as it so often is played.

The first version I took notice of was Nobody Yet's cover. They did a punk pop version.

I'm not really a fan of the punk genre in general, but I took the time to listen through this cover a couple times. It does very much have that nostalgic 1990s - 2000s pop punk sound to it, and did in general a good job of adapting the song into that style. I had a little hangup in the second verse, where the drumbeat sounds off to me. Maybe it is done on purpose? However, for me, it felt a bit distracting. They also added a guitar solo to the song. It works pretty well for what it is supposed to do, playing the melody and riffing on it as well. All in all, a very different version of a familiar song. For me, it demonstrates the work that goes into arranging a song to a wholly different style - the "so much with so little" feel is difficult to translate into a soundscape that rather literally cannot be "so little", so another approach has to be taken, employing tips and tricks of the style you want to use, and trying to catch what parts to change and retain from the original.

The second cover of interest is MikeCovers' version.

It is a rock/metal style cover in turn. This one... this one didn't quite capture my imagination. It has some interesting elements - the acoustic guitar can be heard in the background even as other sounds take over, and the dynamics between verses and choruses provide some nice contrast the original doesn't have. However, in adapting the song to this, it takes away that "so much with so little" element, as I mentioned with the first cover as well. This one, for me, doesn't however feel like it quite successfully makes up for that which it loses in doing so. The one term I feel suits the best my experience of this cover is "overproduced". I'm perhaps biased toward the original, and am accustomed to there being some rough edges, but this one felt a bit too polished to really capture the song in a way that convinces me personally. I also felt that the changes the singer made to the lyrics detract from the experience a little, though they are quite minor. I don't know. This one does a lot more, but in a way that obscures the original song's message a little, perhaps?

The third cover I found was a metal cover by Violet Orlandii.

This one! This one I like!

I would describe it as specifically a metal ballad more than anything else. But I think it works really well! I'm not the greatest fan of metal, since I find that the dense soundscapes and intensity can be a bit much for me. But turned into a ballad version, it strips off a lot of the aspects of the genre that I stumble on. Especially when Violet sings her cover in a noticeably slower tempo than the original song, it gives me time to take in the flourishes of the instrumentation and her delivery quite well, making it feel much more accessible. It also allows Violet's vocals to shine quite nicely. This is certainly a polished cover - well made all over, and the vocal delivery is very clean. It takes away those rough edges that I quite liked, but, it instead gives me a lower tempo, making the song feel more personal again, in a different way, and the instrumentation has a clear buildup in intensity, climbing toward that loud and powerful final chorus. It works really well! It takes many interesting aspects of metal songwriting, and applies them into an easily approachable whole that can be picked apart to learn what I specifically like about it. Very good! Also, compared to the metal songs I have heard in the past, I feel like within the genre, this cover version managed to retain that "so much with so little" feeling! It adapts the song to the metal style, adds a few little flourishes, but still keeps true to the original version's feel in some difficult to explain way.

Those are the three cover version I listened to in trying to find out what a Death Cab for Cutie band version of the song might sound like. Conclusions:

- I don't think any of these covers could serve as a convincing example of how the band would have made their song sound. But, in being covers, that is not their point either. Why try to sound like somebody else when you have your own artistic voice, style and vision to express?

- Different genre covers are quite few and far between. That's perhaps not too surprising.

- The question I sought to answer remains unanswered, but it led me to pick up some other things listening to these covers, so I find this foray to have been a successful little journey of music exploration.

- Maybe the band themselves have performed their song live using the whole band sometime? I didn't even think of that.