New.Music.Live.: Re-work it Katy Perry

December 10th, 2010

Hey everyone. It is Jessica from the New.Music.Live. team. Katy Perry was on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Thursday and reworked her pop song “Firework” into a country jam. I have to say, it is actually pretty cool. Throw a little country twang in behind Katy and lady is a regular T-Swift. This got us talking in our New.Music.Live. morning meeting about whether we like it when our favourite artists stray from what they recorded on their albums. And we noticed it is about 50/50.

For me, I have had a good and a bad experience with experimenting musicians. Over the summer, New.Music.Live. team member Kathleen and I went down to New York to the Rock the Bells Festival to see Lauryn Hill perform at one of her few recent shows. Lauryn performed some of her classic tunes but if you weren’t listening hard enough you might not know it. Lauryn did a cool mix of her songs, cutting some of them shorter and blending some of them into a super-song. Although some critics were not down with the lack of clarity in Lauryn’s set, I loved the way she worked the songs into each other.

However, I also saw Bob Dylan a few years ago in Toronto and had the opposite experience. Granted, he did play a lot of his newer stuff that I was less familiar with but it took me two minutes for me to realize he was playing “Like A Rolling Stone.” Also, Bob never once picked up his guitar, electric or otherwise, and stayed planted behind his keyboard at the back of the stage behind the rest of his band mates. I left satisfied that I could finally say, “yes, I’ve seen Bob Dylan live,” but that was about the best piece of satisfaction I gained from the show.

It seems like each team members have had their own experiences with the creative change-up. Growing up, Cary always hated it when Guns N’ Roses’ Slash would change up the guitar solo in songs. Kathleen loved it when Justin Timberlake did a mash-up of his “What Goes Around Comes Around” and “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon at one of his solo shows. Let us know if you have a story about a musical change up in the comments below.

- Jessica
New.Music.Live Team
@nml