Songs can get rewritten for local/national purposes. Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” exists in several versions, like the Canadian one which is pretty close to the original in the verses, but the chorus is very Canuck:
“This land is your land, This land is my land,
From Bonavista, to the Vancouver Island
From the Arctic Circle to the Great Lake waters,
This land was made for you and me.”
And then there’s the Irish one, which rewrites it all:
"This land is your land, this land is my land
From the northern highlands to the western islands
From the hills of Kerry to the streets of Derry
This land was made for you and me
As I was walking by the Shannon water
Hand in hand with my little daughter
The church bells ringing, and the children singing
This land was made for you and me" (and so on)
…and speaking of regional variations, “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys kicked off a whole subgenre of local versions. Most would I guess not fit in with the OP because they’re basically parody, but the specificity of the local references in some of them read more like code-switching to me. From my YouTube deep dives when the song was big, I gathered that a lot of them were put together my morning DJ teams, like the one from Parma, OH:
Or the one here in Toronto, which is ust a shameless plug for a lousy dance music station:
My favorite was from Newport, Wales (“Ymerodraeth State of Mind”):
Though that got parody-incepted itself when Goldie Lookin’ Chain produced “You’re Not From Newport” in response, pointing out that a lot of the references were actually more Cardiff-central.
The Pretty Things’ “LSD” was recorded with entirely different lyrics by Giant Crab as “E.S.P.” The same group put the same recording on another album, “Confusion”, credited to Big Brother Ernie Joseph.
Done so because it was one of if not the first single and they didn’t want to skew sales of their separated double album to one or the other, so they put it on both with different lyrics. Kind of a bizarre solution to a weird manufactured problem.
“I’m the Face” by the High Numbers (aka The Who) uses the music from “I Got Love if you Want it” by Slim Harpo (also covered in it’s original form by the Yardbirds).
La vie en rose has to be one of the most well-known French songs ever. It has an English-lyrics version. Here you can hear Piaf herself singing some of them
Coldplay pretty much remade Kraftwerk’s Computer Love as their song “Talk”, same music and everything but different lyrics. I think Madonna did it with another Kraftwerk song too?
There is a version of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” (Dolly Parton’s, maybe?) that changes the line, “I felt like getting high” to “I felt like I could cry.”
Elvis Costello re-wrote his 1986 song “American without Tears” as "American without Tears #2 (Twilight Version) in 1987. Same song, almost entirely different lyrics. (tip: they are both awesome)
Huh. I remember this song, and never made the connection.
Anyhoo, here’s my contribution, though I’m not sure if this counts as changing the lyrics. Kitty by Racey was what it was called before Toni Basil had a hit with Hey Mickey.
Sigh…I love Dolly (if it was her) but even that bowlderization bugs me a bit. Kind of like Johnny Cash changing “crown of shit” to “crown of thorns” in his cover of “Hurt” and Art Garfunkel singing “Life’s a counterfeit, when you look at it” in his version of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
In Québec and in France, it was common practice for decades for a French-speaking artist to redo an English song. In some cases the lyrics had nothing to do with the original. One obvious case is Chanson d’innocence by Gérard Lenorman, based on The Sound of Silence.
There was also Canadian artist and 1980s heartthrob Peter Pringle, who sang in both English and French. He redid his own songs with different subjects, like I Could Have Been a Sailor becoming Si j’étais magicien (“if I were a magician”) in French. I see on YouTube that he’s now into singing ancient songs in Hebrew or Sumerian; I couldn’t say if he changes the words !
This has happened fairly often. Peter Gabriel recorded German vocals for his third and fourth eponymous albums and released them as “Deutsches Album” and “Ein Deutsches Album.” Sting released an EP of Spanish and Portuguese versions of tracks from “…Nothing Like The Sun” (I think it was called “…Nada Como El Sol.”) I know my mother, who speaks Spanish, had a copy of Abba’s Spanish-language record. Bowie recorded “Heroes” in both French and German for singles, and the Beatles made German versions of a couple of their early singles ( “Komm, gib mir deine Hand” and “Sie liebt dich”) and those are on the Past Masters disc.
It was indeed Dolly Parton, I saw a video of her singing the bowdlerized ATGR with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt. As for “in the twenty-first century”, Neil Young himself uses this line today when he sings this song.
Another great one…Billy Bragg’s “A New England” was covered brilliantly by Kirsty MacColl, who wrote a third verse for it (and swapped the gender of the narrator). Billy now includes that verse when he performs it, dedicating the song to Kirsty. As well, the lines in her verse:
"Once upon a time at home, I sat beside my telephone. Waiting for someone to pull me through, When at last it didn’t ring, I knew it wasn’t you."
Are sometimes misheard as “…when the bastard didn’t ring” and he’s sung those lyrics as well.
I’m not sure how I feel about such changes (though some bug me more than others). Are performers who do this being less true to the song, or are they making the song their own? Is it a similar sort of change to performers changing pronouns when they’re a different gender, or sexual orientation, from the original performer of the song they’re covering?
