Some of the world’s most popular songs are covers — think Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You, Amy Winehouse’s Valerie, and Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn.

Music fans love a new take on the familiar, which explains why triple j’s Like A Version has grown from a bare-bones cover song segment to a coveted slot for musicians both here and abroad.

But there’s pressure that comes with covering a classic.

Brae Fisher, lead singer of Dear Seattle, felt the nerves as his band prepared to cover Missy Higgins’s hit The Special Two. 

“It was just like, the most anxiety-inducing thing we had ever done,” he says.

They were about to give the piano-ballad an indie-rock twist, layering the song with electric guitar chords, a driving bass line and pumping drums.

But the real momentum came after the band launched into the track, giving it a double time feel while boosting the tempo.

And you can hear the difference — take a listen to Higgins’s The Special Two, followed by Dear Seattle’s cover. 

“It was probably a bit of a cocktail of nerves, as well as just pushing [the tempo] a little bit more to lean into what felt good,” Fisher says.

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But not all artists dialled up the tempo in the same way as Dear Seattle.

More than 840 Like A Version covers have been performed in the triple j studios across 20 years.

The segment has attracted big local and international artists such as The Wiggles and Billie Eilish, and it will the focus of the upcoming triple j Hottest 100 countdown.

By comparing data behind the Like A Version performance and the original it’s based on, we can see how musicians from Australia and around the world craft and perform a cover song.

Choosing the cover

The first decision for an artist is the song.

Just under half of Like A Version artists chose to cover a song from the 2000s and 2010s.

And most of these songs were popular — about 60 per cent of songs ranked in the yearly top 100 ARIA chart or on triple j’s Hottest 100.

Dear Seattle chose a song with a lot of commercial success.

The Special Two was a big hit in 2005, peaking at two on the Australian charts.

Some artists pick cover tracks released very close to their Like A Version slot, with nearly a quarter of all songs covers released in the same year or the year before.

A significant exception is Swedish musician Jens Lekman who covered a traditional folk song from his home country in 2006, which has roots in the 18th century and was said to be officially released in 1909.

Double J music reporter and former triple j music news producer Al Newstead says artists are wanting to hit songs that are “in the Zeitgeist” to get maximum traction.

“It’s probably easier than going for a song that’s older because it might be totally unknown to the average triple j audience or be a ‘classic’ that’s overly familiar,” he says.

But Melbourne punk outfit Clowns went against the grain and chose a song released nearly 35 years earlier when they did Like A Version in 2015.

They paid tribute to Sydney punk band Sunnyboys and covered Alone With You — a track likely unfamiliar with most triple j listeners. 

“I think the song reminded us of late nights out in Melbourne dive bars and has a lot of Australian punk rock heritage held within,” lead singer Stevie Williams says.

Stay true or mix it up?

Changing the tempo – or the speed of a song – is another way artists can make a song their own.

Dear Seattle sped up their cover, but they’re in the minority.

Just under half stayed within 5 per cent of the original tempo, while a quarter sped up more than 5 per cent, and slightly more than a quarter slowed down.

It’s the same when it comes to the length of the cover.

More than half of artists kept the length of their cover within 30 seconds of the original, including Dear Seattle’s cover.

At the far end of the spectrum, Tash Sultana extended their cover of MGMT’s Electric Feel by close to five minutes with a psychedelic guitar solo.

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Newstead says he notices that artists tend to keep the underlying structure of the song the same.

“If you’re going to cover a song, it’s much easier to be like: what’re the chords, what’s the tempo, what’s the structure,” he says.

“Then figure out how you can mess with that, as opposed to being more abstract.”

That’s how Alex Lahey approached Imbruglia’s Torn when she did her first Like A Version in 2017.

Lahey’s cover kept the length and tempo of the song similar, but gave the highly-produced pop hit an indie-rock flair.

“The idea came to me, and I was like, that just plays itself,” she says.

But she changed her approach for her next Like A Version in 2019.

Lahey’s second cover tried to get as close as possible to the original recording of My Chemical Romance’s Welcome to the Black Parade, with a seven-piece band including an orchestral percussion section.

“We had so much more at our disposal, we were in a proper recording studio,” she says.

“With a song that’s as ambitious as [Welcome to the Black Parade], I thought, why not try and push the performance as close as you can get to [the original recording].”

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Genre-swapping

How does Lahey’s approach compare to other Like A Version covers?

To capture the difference in how artists changed the sound of a cover, we took a value called the “spectral centroid”, which correlates directly to the “brightness” in sound.

It averages the audio frequencies of a recording, so a higher value indicates an overall “brighter” sound, and a lower value is “darker”.

“Brighter” songs often include twangy acoustic guitars, tambourines and shakers, and penetrating, high-pitched vocals, such as those heard on The Vines’ cover of Clint Eastwood.  

“Darker” tracks, such as Ásgeir’s cover of Love$ick, are often driven by lower-sounding instruments including bass guitars, mellow synthesisers, and deep and resonant vocals.

Lahey’s My Chemical Romance cover is closer in sound to the original track, while her Imbruglia cover is “darker”.

Newstead says anecdotally there are heaps of examples in Like A Version of artists changing their sound through “genre-swapping”, which is reflected in the spread-out distribution of the data.

“When Polaris did Eskimo Joe and made it sound like it was always meant to be a metal song; or Luca Brasi doing [Paul Kelly’s] How to Make Gravy as a punk version.”

He also says artists will change their approach depending on the song, such as six-time Like A Version alumnus Paul Dempsey, who has performed covers by himself and with his band Something for Kate.

Dempsey has covered a variety of genres, from dance music with Calvin Harris’s Sweet Nothing, to indie rock with Middle Kids’s Edge of Town.

“He just understands what a song is and how to do it, and he will range from super faithful to totally transforming it,” Newstead says.

There was another element at play too – Like A Version sound engineer Greg Wales says for most of the segment’s history, the studio could only accommodate eight audio inputs or less.

It meant early covers had to be acoustic or significantly stripped back.

The segment then moved into a bigger studio around 2018 which could take in 48 inputs, meaning artists could incorporate more instruments and musicians.

Here’s Chet Faker (aka Nick Murphy) and his choir crowded around three microphones in 2014, compared with Sampa The Great and her band in the larger space in 2022.

But Wales says musicians can still come in with minimal set-ups if they want to.

Sharing a message

Combining more than one song, whether it’s completely merging them together or giving another a subtle nod musically or lyrically, is another way Like A Version artists have made their mark on a cover.

For Baker Boy’s cover, it was about taking people back to where he grew up in Arnhem Land when mixing Who Let the Dogs Out? into Blur’s Song 2.

“I wanted to tell a story about the energy back home.”

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It reflects a trend in rap and hip hop artists changing lyrics in their Like A Version covers.

Close to two-thirds of rappers or hip hop artists who have done a Like A Version either added a new verse or completely rewrote the words.

JK-47 performed Changes by 2Pac in 2021 with Bronte Eve, opening with lyrics in language written by Jarulah Slabb from the Gudjinburra tribe.

Then JK-47’s cover featured his reflections in English about experiencing racism in Australia.

“2Pac goes in like that for how it is in America,” he says.

“If you’re going to do someone’s song, and it’s in honour of someone you look up to… [I had to] match that intensity and passion and got to come up with different words.

“I think I just really got out what I wanted to say… hip hop is the voice for the voiceless.”

Even choosing a song performed by a person of a different gender is a way artists can alter its meaning, something which Lahey did with her My Chemical Romance cover.

“Some of my favourite covers have a difference in gender perspective — not only the timbre of the voice that comes with that, but ‘the gaze’ as well,” Lahey says.

“Those things excite me.”

Across all Like A Version covers, about 47 per cent of artists chose a song sung by an artist of a different gender.

Presence of the performer

For some covers, the magnitude of the difference couldn’t be captured in data.

Instead, the context told the story.

Sarah Blasko’s stripped back cover of David Bowie’s Life on Mars? stayed close to the original.

But she performed it shortly after the celebrated artist died in 2016.

“We listened to his music for such a long time that we kind of felt like we knew him.”

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She performed Life on Mars? on the verge of tears, a song she says was both uplifting and emotional.

“I’ve only had a few moments like that through my life where… something really huge like that gets to the heart of why you make music and why you love music.”

As for the ingredients which make a successful cover song, the Hottest 100 of Like A Version will give an indication of what music fans like to see: will it be versions that play it straight, or ones that break all the rules?