Why I created a cover song

Full disclaimer, I’m not a huge fan of creating cover songs. For me I've always wanted to prioritize my own original art to create my own sound.

There are lots of cover artists out there and I respect the musicianship required in order to play covers at a high level.

However, for me the challenge of creating something brand new from the unknown and having to delve deep into that ambiguous space with no formulas is where I really get excited.

I don’t want to sound like anyone else and I feel like often with covers I have a hard time truly letting my artist's identity shine.

Recently though as I’ve started getting my music career off the ground (with basically zero fans) I realize how hard it is to promote original music with no established base.

I decided to revisit covers because of the built-in discovery opportunities (ie people searching for covers or the original artist on social media). There's probably a helpful sense of familiarity that may make people more willing to check out a new artist.

One example of a cover song being used really well by an artist is Chet Faker. He used his cover of No Diggity about 10 years ago to blow up on the scene.

The thing that separates this cover for me is that it sounds like an original track, meaning Chet Faker's artistic stamp is all over it. This is in stark contrast to facsimile covers which don’t really offer much new in terms of artistic exploration over the original.

If there was any doubt on how much of an amazing artist Chet Faker was, it was clear to everyone in his live follow up performance of the "No Diggity" cover that this dude is for real artist...

He of course followed it up with a career of amazing original songs like this one.

If I'm gonna jump into also using covers, I definitely want to use this model of using covers to establish my artistic foundation and trajectory, instead of merely copying.

For sure original music is my ultimate goal and I will be releasing a ton of original music but at least early on while I decide I am gonna mix in a few covers to help people discover my sound too.

With that said, here’s my first one, a cover of “Return Of The Mack” by Mark Morrison, of my all-time favorite songs!