During the summer break I have been working on a One Direction covers album.
It's something I have been thinking about for a long time but something I wanted to get right in my head before starting.
Covers are a tricky business, in more ways than one might think. Songwriting is a multi-faceted art and, in my mind, the way you deliver the song is as important as the structure. Delivery is what ultimately connects or alienates someone from a song.
Lyrical content really doesn't vary that much across the board but the way a song can sound is seemingly infinite. A huge part of delivery is sentiment.
With some music, it's easy to see exactly what feeling the writer was hoping to portray and a lot of the time that feeling can be twisted and distorted depending on the delivery.
For example, when I first started recording I took two buoyant pop songs, stripped away most of the instrumentation and slowed the melody right down to a distressed crawl.
The lyrics of these songs are all about heartbreak and longing - when that content is coupled with major chords and a driving rhythm the result is infectious pop music. When you take all that away, what is left is a sentiment many people relate to, just packaged in a different way.
What has been weighing on my mind is the idea pop songs can be good but they don't know they're good until they're twisted to the point that their sound becomes not-so-pop.
I didn't want to record pop songs I absolutely love, only to make people think the songs are only good because someone who doesn't have a million-dollar recording contract is mournfully singing them into a single microphone.
In 2015, singer-songwriter Ryan Adams covered Taylor Swift's 1989.
Where Swift was soaring vocals and crashing pop production, Adams was sadly crooning, full of regret. The critical response to Swift's original had been pretty good but the response to Adams' interpretation was immense and overwhelmingly patronising.
Critics insisted Adams had uncovered something in this collection of songs that Swift hadn't realised was there, despite having written them.
People took it into their own hands to explain her album back to her, essentially saying if she'd delivered it differently it would have been important, perceptive, and original, but she didn't and so she got her own feelings, and her own art wrong.
For me, the beauty of the pop song is its powerful, life-affirming urgency in the face of overwhelming emotional pain. I listen to pop music when I am sad, when I am angry, and when I am happy. It is malleable and that's why I love it.
In stripping back songs and singing them like my heart was about to break I was dipping around trying to express what the songs meant to me, and that is absolutely important.
And, of course, Ryan Adams wasn't trying to explain Taylor Swift, it just meant something to him and he expressed it in the way he knew how, and those who connected to his versions but not to Swift's weren't wrong, either.
I think it is important to acknowledge, however, that another artist covering a song is rarely going to add to the song.
Rather, they are going to expose a pre-existing element that wasn't necessarily highlighted in the original.
And sometimes, when you go to cover a song, you find that doing it in another way simply doesn't work because the original just got it so right the first time, and that's OK too.
● Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
