I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, fresh out of the shower and with a face full of shaving cream, when I said, “Hey Siri, play ‘Your Love is Lifting Me Higher and Higher’ by Rita Coolidge”.
Now, I expected the smooth version of this track from the late 1970s to start playing on the small speaker in the bathroom as I started scraping the shaving cream and bits of stubble off my face.
Instead, I got a much older version of Rita Coolidge croaking out the track in question in a key that was much lower than the original recording. I feel like there may have been whiskey or something involved with the vocal stylings of the track.
I told Siri to stop and asked it to play another song from that era. “Undercover Angel” by Alan O’Day started playing, but again, it was not the original track from the 1970s but rather some re-recorded version that had way too much in the way of late 20th or early 21st century stylings to the instrumentation.
Still lathered up and feeling my blood pressure go up a little bit, I decided to try something completely out of the blue. “Hey Siri, play ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ by Sister Janet Mead”. This track was originally released in 1972 and has a very early-1970s sound to the entire thing. It’s also the only reason I can recite The Lord’s Prayer when required to do so; I have to have the song playing in my head while being solemn in a church setting.
The HomePod mini started playing the track in the right key, but it definitely was not the original recording. The fuzzy guitar seemed to be replaced or, at the very least, augmented by very 1980s sounding synthesizers.
Curious, and with the Barbasol drying out on my face, I fetched my iPhone and pulled up Spotify to play the same track. Yep, it was a re-recorded version as well. The vocals sound like they were an older Sister Janet Mead, but the instrumentation was missing that early 1970s goodness.
To reset my expectations, I pulled up the track on YouTube and confirmed that I remembered the song correctly. The streaming services were definitely claiming a re-recorded version was the original.
I don’t like that.
One of my complaints about the streaming services is that a lot of our musical history simply isn’t included in their libraries. There are remixes and edits and all sorts of variations from the original releases of pop songs back in the day that are not available for streaming. And now, it appears the streaming services or record companies don’t want to release the originals but rather are starting to rely on soundalikes or re-recordings.
I’m going to delve a little further into this to see how much is being re-recorded and the like and probably write about this a bit more.
In the meantime, I’m going to finally finish my shave.
