theyoungfolks (-) review of WTS

[Tom22]

To be fair, as touched on in the album thread, there are commercial reasons to re-record classic songs with cleaner, well engineered recording quality.

-- I don't think that needs to be disowned or refuted. Yes, for commercial reasons some of the songs were recorded very close to their originals in order to give those songs continued life in new contexts that a cleanly engineered cover can bring.

There are a number of wonderful original songs of Haley's on the album. I like them very much.

There are a couple covers that have been re-made or considerably interpreted (like Sunday afternoon) .. they were also super and showed that creative flair on top of honoring the songs.

But many of the covers, I believe DELIBERATELY , kept extremely close to the original recordings.

I believe that "These Boots" is the perhaps the most clear example of that, with nearly every drum kick and bass lick replicated and Nancy's diction and syllable emphasis also nearly duplicated by Haley (atlhough for us Haley fans extrondinaire, we can certainly still hear "haleyisms" within that nearly mirrored diction.

I believe that the covers like "Boots" that held extremely close were done to serve as artistic contributions that can/will allow those songs to be put into movies, tv ads, etc in ways that using the original recordings with perhaps too heavy a snare.. too much echo in the voice etc(the original recordings sound like 'recordings' - you don't always want the sense that 'ok, cue the jukebox' etc).

So, I think it is a fair criticism to some extent making very very close covers at some level, however when the purpose is exactly that, to make nearly exact covers to extend the live's of songs, that is a high goal in terms of preserving art in itself.