Song Reassignment Surgery 5; Bold Covers

People Are Strange (The Doors), 1967: Stina Nordenstam (1998)

Fun fact about atoms: 

Everyone in the world is made up of nothingness. While that may sound grim, it's the truth.

In fact, everyone currently on earth, all 7.6 billion of us, we could all fit into the room you're in right now. The entire human race, every single person, could all be compressed into a solid cube with the equivalent size of a sugar cube – all because we are made up of nothingness.

So, to extend the metaphor, space can be as significant—or more, even—as the material, in both matter and art. It’s often the very place where the most interesting things happen.

To wit: Swedish singer Stina Nordenstam’s reworking of an album’s worth of severely reductive and nearly unrecognizable covers, including her arduous filleting of People are Strange (from her 1998 album of the same name). On Nordenstam’s Strange, the formula brings new and uneasy new layers to the sound while adding other dimensions to the lyrics—larding even more to the original’s ethereal dread and intrigue.

On The Doors’ original, the vibe was that of a kind of Weimar Republic cabaret, much of that launched on it’s mid-century striding rhythm and what one contemporary critic called “whorehouse piano” (actually a tack piano), the sci-fi tremolo on the Vox “Connie,” and the guitar’s unrelieved tension fade-out on the finale. Nordenstam takes the whorehouse and adds some David Lynchian surrealism, and ladles on even more dream space and whatnot. For the listener, it’s an utterly barren landscape to be dropped into, leaving them to make whatever archetypal jungle out of it they may.

And while she may be adding to the ambient nothingness, her nothingness seems only to make the whole even greater.