Video: What Makes a Good Cover?

"Some of the most beautiful music ever made is people singing other people's songs. And one cover experience that we both have had that we also both just We love it is an album called Ventriloquism by Meshell Ndegeocello. That's Meshell Ndegeocello, one of our great musicians. Meshell and the band are just liberating these great pop songs from the constrictions of the pop form. These are perfect songs to begin with. Let's just say that."

"The songs are roving, adventurous, completely reconsidered. One of my favorite examples of this approach on this album is Ralph Tresvant's Sensitivity. I don't know if y'all remember this song. You need a man with sensitivity. But what I love about the version of Sensitivity on this album is that this very smooth R&B song with this almost raindrop percussion becomes a porch jam."

"She does a lot of reinterpretation. She basically reinvents TLC's Waterfalls, for instance. This is a Black person interpreting songs by Black people, but also understanding the history of interpretation and adaptation and what we loosely call appropriation and not a term I like because it's so much deeper than that. But she is reappropriating, but also acknowledging, by using the term ventriloquism, that these songs are kind of controlling her. She's a conduit for it. But she's also using their voices to speak through"

Great covers transform source material by freeing songs from their original pop constraints while preserving core qualities. Meshell Ndegeocello's album Ventriloquism reimagines classic pop and R&B hits as adventurous, roving reinterpretations. Songs such as Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam's "I Wonder If I Take You Home", Tina Turner's "Private Dancer", and George Clinton's "Atomic Dog" become newly textured and reconsidered. The version of Ralph Tresvant's "Sensitivity" shifts from smooth R&B with raindrop percussion into a porch jam. Reinterpretation can function as reappropriation that acknowledges musical lineage; the performer becomes a conduit and uses original voices to speak through new arrangements.

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