On covers

A surprising amount of the music on these playlists is cover versions. Someone takes a song that was loud and writes a quiet version of it; or someone takes an old folk tune and lays it under a piano. The new version often fits a room better than the original ever could.

The interesting thing about a cover is that it tells you what the song was actually doing. Strip the arrangement off a pop song and you sometimes find a hymn underneath. Slow down a hymn and you find something stranger. The cover is, in this sense, an X-ray.

For the rooms here, the cover is often the right answer for a song I love that's too eventful in its original form. The sleep room has a few covers of songs you'd hear on the radio at noon. The wellness room has covers of things I'd never play on a wellness playlist in the original.

There is a risk: a bad cover trades on the listener's affection for the original, and contributes nothing of its own. I try to avoid those. The covers that go on are the ones that would be good even if you'd never heard the song before.