On Singing a Song Again

What kind of feeling is it, to sing someone else's song again? I kept circling back to that question all night, with Roy Kim's album of six beloved songs, sung anew, playing on a loop. Earbuds in, I rewound the same track over and over. I wanted to catch the moment a song I already knew arrived in a different voice. And in that first phrase where an unfamiliar breath settles onto a melody you know by heart, I felt like I was reading an old letter again, this time in someone else's handwriting.

Songs That Already Have a Place

'No More Encore', 'Twenty-five, Twenty-one' — these are songs that already hold a place inside us. For some, they were the background music of a certain season; for others, the song of a night when the words "I like you" stayed swallowed to the end. A melody you've heard so long it has soaked into your body carries more than the singer's voice. It carries the hours we spent listening, too. That's why some songs stop being songs and become another name for a season we've already passed through.

Touching a song like that is a frightening thing. Do it poorly and you're crushed under the shadow of the original; do it well and you'll still likely hear that "the original was better." To set your own voice beside something already complete takes a certain cool resolve, I think. And yet, if someone chose that song anyway, it was surely because an affection they had held for a long time came first.

A Heart That Isn't Out to Win

A remake that works doesn't try to beat the original. It simply makes a quiet confession — I've loved this song for a long time — in its own voice. Step back just one pace from winning and losing, and the feeling of first falling for that song comes through all the more clearly.

So as you listen to a remake, you start to see which songs the singer grew up alongside. Which melodies they lingered in front of, what they wanted to resemble. It's a kind of self-introduction made out of music. Instead of explaining yourself with a new song, you show yourself by borrowing one you've long loved. The way the things we love end up telling the world who we are.

How a Song Crosses Time

Old songs don't vanish easily. Each time someone sings one again, it stays with us wearing a slightly different face. For those who remember the original, two voices overlap; for those hearing it for the first time, it simply becomes a song of now. And so a single song holds many eras at once.

That's how a song crosses time. The one singing changes, and we who listen change too, but the melody alone keeps quietly linking one to the other. To sing something again may be a way of passing on a wish — that it not disappear — in the form of a song. A quiet, tender relay, placing what you loved into the next person's hands. Leave that album playing one more time tonight, and it feels as though twenty-five and twenty-one are still out there somewhere, waiting for us. 'Twenty-five, Twenty-one'.