‘Lemonworld’: How a cover gave the world Bartees Strange
Bartees Strange makes music that defies categorisation. Ever since the release of his debut album Live Forever, his work has gracefully shifted from genre to genre. Not from album to album, but song to song and sometimes even within the same song itself. Just look at breakout number ‘Boomer’ going from chiming indie-trap to soulful blues-rock hollering in three minutes of utter magic. This isn’t the man born Bartees Leon Cox Jr being a dilettante either.
He’s not cycling through genre tropes for the novelty of it or covering up a lack of identity, far from it. If anything, it’s the opposite. Strange is a musical savant with a burning passion for any and all kinds of music. It’s not just that he likes everything from emo, hip-hop and country to soul, electro and blues, he understands it too, and knows how to deploy them while still retaining a songwriting voice that’s unmistakably his own.
So, on the surface, it might seem strange to know that Bartees Strange’s first release as a solo act back in 2020 was a cover record called Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy. It’s true: the very first EP made by a solo artist who made his name by being unabashedly, thrillingly himself was his take on the music of someone else. At first glance, it gets stranger when you take into account that the artist Strange was covering was The National.
Now, The National are a great band. At their peak, they are a genuinely special rock group that don’t so much discard the “sad dad band” tag they’ve been stuck with as transcend it. Bartees Strange would agree with that sentiment as they are his favourite band. However, merely listening to their music didn’t inspire him to cover them. It was actually a concert of theirs.
Why did Bartees Strange choose The National to cover?
Now, The National are one of the best live bands around; it’s easy to be inspired by the visceral noise they make on stage. However, it wasn’t the band themselves that inspired Strange; unfortunately, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience that inspired him. In an article he wrote for Talkhouse, Strange elaborated on why he made the record in the first place.
He said, “When I was at my last National show in DC… It hit me how few black folks were in the crowd, and how this genre (indie rock) seems to exclude the contributions black people have made to it. So I thought ‘Hey, I think I could do something to recast some of these songs'”.
He elaborated on this in an interview with the NME, saying he wanted “to reinterpret my favourite band… and I wanted to do it my way: my Black, southern country way.”
That’s exactly what he did. He turned ‘About Today’ into an ambient trip-hop joint that turned the original’s ennui into disjointed, fragmented isolation. ‘Mr November’ gets morphed from a rollicking, Springsteen-esque effort into a tight, Wire-y post-punk number. The pick of the whole bunch is ‘Lemonworld’, which Bartees’ enormous vocal turns into a rock stormer that lights up his live set to this day.
Considering that today, Bartees Strange has not only toured with The National, but is now also labelmates with them, I think it’s safe to say that Say Goodbye To Pretty Boy was a complete success.
