You read that correctly. Giorgio Moroder, of Giorgio Moroder fame, has released a Giorgio Moroder cover of Tom’s Diner by Suzanne Vega, with none other than Britney Spears on vocals.
As you may know, I am something of a Suzanne Vega fan. So, if anyone should be calling the emergency services out to have a song pulled from a brutal car crash on this one, it should be me.
This cover version… really shouldn’t work. I mean, it really shouldn’t work. It very nearly doesn’t work.
But, first of all, the song itself can take it. It’s already gone from being an a cappella ballad to a 90s dance hit, and the lyrics are cool and wryly detached, so they feel like they’re in on the joke.
Also, Britney Spears does a deceptively good job with the singing. It sounds like she’s just singing it under a wall of autotune and vocoder and whatever else, “so anyone could do it, right?” Absolutely not. As I’m only too aware, from recently recording a vocal track that just didn’t work, it is SO easy to just put the emphasis on the wrong part, and change the emotion of the line, and make it sound weird. The singing completely fits with the tone of the track, all the way through.
Well, nearly all the way through.
There is one part where the song completely… how shall we put this? Has ‘a rather dramatic change of tone’. But that’s not Britney’s fault. Giorgio (presumably?) takes over for a hilarious middle eight, singing his own lyrics, that sound like they belong in another galaxy, never mind song.
But because the whole song is so tongue-in-cheek… who cares, frankly.
Current Favourite Part:
There’s an article out there in interspace with a clickbaity title: Suzanne Vega Had Some Things To Say About Britney Spears Covering “Tom’s Diner”
And what exactly does she have to say?
“Britney Spears?! Awesome!”