The Bird and the Bee – Interpreting the Masters, Vol. 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates
I love Inara George and when I heard that she (The Bird) and Greg Kurstin (The Bee) would be producing an album of Hall and Oates covers, I was very excited by what seemed like an inspired choice. And while this is a relentlessly catchy album, I’m left with an empty and unsatisfied feeling at the end of it.
They start Interpreting the Masters with an original song (Heard It On The Radio) that is so true to the Hall and Oates style that it wasn’t until after several listens that I looked more closely at the liner notes that I realized that this wasn’t a cover. It’s a good song that neatly introduces the idea of listening again to these pop tunes of the 80s (“Every time I hear it play/I think of you and those summer days/Oh, I can still remember/When I heard it on the radio”). But what follows is eight perfect recreations of very familiar H&O songs — no forgotten gems and no creative arrangements that make an old favorite seem fresh. I was never much of a Hall and Oates fan, so I’m sort of astonished that all of these songs are so familiar to me.
It’s not that there aren’t some good moments. They do a nice job on Rich Girl and Sara Smile — these are really great pop songs that stand up well. And on Kiss On My List, I’m glad they resist the urge to “fix” the gender of the lyrics and turn all the she‘s into he‘s because the singer is now a woman. But even a change like that might have been a welcome surprise on an album that’s devoid of surprises. On She’s Gone, I feel like there’s a missed opportunity. As the song winds down, it briefly shifts into a new key and I feel like here’s finally a chance to hear something different like a bit of the song in a new key, but at that moment the song just starts to fade out — opportunity lost.
The subtitle is true: this is truly a “tribute” album, but the “interpreting” part is false — these songs are really perfect copies of the originals. Fun to listen to, I guess, but so much more could have been accomplished with this. This is advertised as volume 1 and I’m curious to see who gets covered next, but I hope they reach out with a little more ambition next time.
C+
Next week: Inlets
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