as a belated valentine's day gesture, my first reverse-lent cover is a love song by stephin merritt, "kiss me like you mean it." the original magnetic fields version is below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbgkIxBbld4
one of the things i want to experiment with in future covers is lending my female voice to pieces originally sung by men, to see how the difference changes (or doesn't change) the meaning of the song. in this case, though, stephin merritt--who is gay, and is also a master of gender bending--already employed this trick in the original, choosing a female vocalist to give voice to his own romantic feelings toward men. (unless, of course, the songwriter and the song narrator are distinct personas, which is also a possibility.)
another thing i want to explore with my covers is testing the resilience of a given song--is its success dependent on a specific performer and arrangement, or can it work in my stripped-down acoustic rendition? the style of "kiss me like you mean it" is timeless and durable: drawing on the traditions of gospel and soul, it combines the sacred and the profane, using the language of religious worship to extol an earthly (and sexy!) beloved :) this song was also a change for me to really belt out, so thank you all for indulging me.