Tim: Every day, round about five o’clock, Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’ comes on the music system at work, and every day, round about five o’clock, I expect to hear Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, because of that identical opening guitar strum, and somehow I never learn. Except it’s not Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, because that’s a cover of an American rock band’s song.
Tom: What. What?! I… wow. I had no idea.
Tim: Except even that’s a bit weird, because there’s also this: probably the only song in existence where a cover version was released before the original.
Tim: Let’s have a timeline, because this could get confusing:
– 1993, the song is written and recorded as a demo by Scott Cutler, Anne Preven, and Phil Thornalley; they didn’t think much of it at the time, but the recording lingered.
– Later in 1993, Lis Sørensen met Thornalley, who played her the song, and thought she might have a crack at it. She translated it (ish – Brænt actually means Burnt, but the gist remains the same), kept it musically largely the same, released it, and became the first artist to make money off it.
– 1995, the band Ednaswap (formed of Cutler, Preven and a few others) finally got a recording deal, and released the song in English, reworked to be a bit rockier. By all standard counts – original authors, singers, lyrics – this became the original, two years on from its foreign language cover.
– 1997, Natalie Imbruglia recorded it, became the only act to have much chart success with it (according to Wikipedia, it’s ‘considered an “All Time Pop Hit”‘, though there’s no mention of by whom), and if you ask most people, basically became the owner of the song.
Tom: Blimey. Thanks for the lesson. I still think Natalie Imbruglia’s version is the best, but then, I suppose I would.
Tim: Well, quite. And there you go. Chronologically, we’ve a cover, then the original, and then a cover that basically became the original. Along the way, there came a vast number of other versions, in a variety of other languages and genres – without exhausting the list, we’ve a Brazilian girlband’s O amor é ilusão, a Slovenian band’s On, an American punk rock version, an Uzbek soloist’s Sogʻindim ishon, and, perhaps inevitably, the Almighty Records take on it. And people say covers are boring…
Tom: You’re forgetting the very best version: David Armand.
Tim: Oh. Oh, that has made my afternoon.