Music Review: Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs - Under The Covers Volume 2

The Beatles sang “All You Need Is Love. Love is all you need." Well, that’s the main thing that Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs want you to know about the songs they have recorded for their new CD, Under the Covers Volume 2. They want you to know how much they admire this collection of songs from the 1970s. They are important to them, and you get the sense that they went into the studio to have fun and to see if anything magical would happen. If not, they knew their love of the material would carry the day.

Under the Covers Volume 2 is the sequel to Under the Covers Volume 1, which was released in 2006. The first volume contains songs from the 1960s. It was praised by music critics and was well received by fans of Ms. Hoffs and Mr. Sweet.

For an artist, the appeal of doing an album of cover songs is that typically the songs that are chosen are already very well known. The most popular songs can even become etched in the minds of the listener for decades. As Glenn Frey of The Eagles has said on many occasions, the group's fans have adopted their songs as the soundtrack of their lives. One downside of releasing an album of cover songs is that there will inevitably be some negative or unfair comparisons to the original recordings.

Once Mr. Sweet and Ms. Hoffs settled on the song list, I’m sure they had some other important decisions to make for this project. It was engineered and mixed to reflect the sound of recordings that were made in the 1970s. It has the feel of a record that was recorded with analog equipment. with a hint of compression and a lot of reverb. As the producers of the disc, it's fair to say that Hoffs and Sweet probably questioned whether they should play it safe with the arrangements or change them in some fashion. Experimentation with changes in tempo, key, and instrumentation are quite common in the production of any record, but especially when performing cover versions of well known tunes.

Article Author: Carl J. Mancuso

Carl J. Mancuso is a graduate of Louisiana State University. He earned a B.A. in Journalism in 1983. He has been a very astute observer of all things music related since the early 1970's. He likes to play guitar, sing, and record music in his home based studio. …

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