Roger Waters often performs songs he wrote with Pink Floyd in his solo concerts. Can someone point me to where in the documentation is something that helps me to point out these are not covers when following MB’s definition of “cover”.
And it is still not a cover no matter who else is singing with him.
A good example is his concert in 1990 in Berlin. He performed “The Wall”. A Pink Floyd album, with the majority of the tracks written by Roger. Now solo he performed with his own band, the Bleeding Heart Band, and had many other guest performers on stage. Either as the vocal leads or as the band.
As I understand it, these are not “covers” because it is primarily a Roger Waters performance.
not that it’s set in stone, but wikipedia does say:
“In popular music, a cover version, cover song, remake, revival, or simply cover is a new performance or recording by a musician other than the original performer or composer of the song [emphasis mine].”
the original intent of the term may have been lost to time, as this cited source had supposedly suggested.
i also don’t think later instrumental re-interpretations of songs (that were originally sung) should be attributed as covers.
I agree with @IvanDobsky - as another example, songs originally performed and written by Marillion aren’t treated as covers within MB when they’re now performed by Fish (who has been performing solo for a long since leaving the band) or other members of the band.
Another discussion that is about semantics (the meaning of a word), making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find 100% consensus, especially with our international editing community.
Personally, if I played a song from an old band, that I wrote, with my current band, I would call it a cover, and I would expect a database to follow suit.
Where artist intent is unclear I suppose we have to come to a decision. For my part, I suspect that the rest of Pink Floyd had a lot to do with the writing of the song/was not simply incidental, even if they are not the primary songwriter.
The Wall was always Roger’s project. He brought it in fairly complete, Dave Gilmour worked on a few tracks with him, but look at the credits of the album and it is mostly Roger’s. There is some autobiographical in here. Ask Roger today and he’ll tell you it was his creation. Even the albums he did collaborate on, like Animals, DSotM, he still will stake his claim as “his” works to perform.
This is how I’ve always understood it. And was explained to me by other editors early on.
maybe it’s the Mandela effect at work, i’m not sure, but i somehow seem to recall being told ages ago that you don’t apply the cover attribute to recordings of standards (ie from the Great American Songbook); and
you don’t use it either for recordings from a cast album soundtrack (for a stage musical, perhaps even for a film version), though i’m less certain in the case of an original soundtrack of a film that’s not strictly speaking a musical film. the logic probably being they’re not the recordings of cast members as individual artists, but of them playing their roles as parts of a production’s entire ensemble. (or else, you’d have a situation where each subsequent cast album soundtrack of a show would in a sense be considered a cover of the original cast album of that show, which should not be the case.)
as i’m not absolutely positively sure about either one, i’ve never really gone out of my way to make/correct/undo edits with them in mind. but perhaps someone could clear this up for me.
My general understanding is that this is music effectively expected to be performed by many people and in that case “cover” seems to lose meaning. We certainly don’t use “cover” in performances of classical music, since that’s the entire point of it. The same would seem to apply to musical theatre, which is in general made to be performed by different casts and at different times.
If I wrote songs for my current band, they might be my songs, but they are written for that band. Even if the members didn’t bring their own style and influence, performing them with a different lineup is a substantial change, for me.
I know that you are the expert on Pink Floyd so I am not arguing the writing credits - just that the meaning of “cover” can be interpreted differently by different people, and for me it has little to do with who is credited as writing all the parts.
The meaning will change from country to country and, especially, from genre to genre. I can see @reosarevok dodging the question, but it might indeed need a style lead call
The Wall is a good example as it is music personal to Roger, his views on war, and the loss of his father. If you ask him he’d tell you it was his music that he plays with whoever he is performing with at the time. And he has a heap of legal paperwork to back that up (When Roger left\split the band in the 80s there was a LOT of legal argy bargy)
All of the lyrics I write are personal to me, and I can prove I wrote them, but nonetheless they were written for my current band to perform. Even if I had the guts to say that my band mates are just drones who stand there and play the notes that I tell them to, I would still call the songs a “cover” if I played them with a later band.
e.g. the discussion is not about who in Pink Floyd wrote what - the word “cover” has an intrinsically different meaning to both of us, and I don’t know if that will change.
I can see where you are coming from, but we’ll agree to disagree. I’m only quoting a Pink Floyd example as that is where the thread started and an example I know. Same as you picking a personal example.
I prefer the dictionary definition of cover as was quoted above from Wikipedia.
I’d define a cover as "a performance of a song from another band’s repertoire’
I think we cannot avoid a grey zone in case the ‘other band’ involved members of the original band.
If a certain part of the repertoire is mostly from the hand of a certain member, which later keeps performing that repertoire in a new formation, it’s not a cover.
I believe this is the case with the Pink Floyd / Waters example
The easiest way to look at it, is when bandleader “X and his Orchestra” would keep performing the same repertoire with a later formation “X and his Cool Band”.
Bands which don’t really have such Leader + Band kind of relationship, would simply be covers, regardless of sharing members.
Different examples will have different outcomes, and sometimes it will not be a clear cut.
If the performing band itself considers it a cover, it surely is.
what about all of those lovely K-Tel-esque compilations that feature The tracks listed here are new recordings performed by one or more members of the original band
(When Roger left\split the band in the 80s there was a LOT of legal argy bargy)
I’m only quoting a Pink Floyd example as that is where the thread started and an example I know. Same as you picking a personal example.