Linda Draper : Mother's Little Helper

I said at the beginning, "The music should just be really good, or at least interesting." This one falls into the latter category. Don't get me wrong. It is good. I enjoy it, and I wouldn't put anything up here that I didn't like. But posting this song is more about giving you something different than giving you something great. I don't think this song rings with the same universal appeal that the previous posts might have had, so if you don't like it, I won't think any less of you. But you should still hear it, because it's cool.

I couldn't find much about Linda Draper. She's apparently a folk/indie singer, which means she's probably a singer-songwriter who either wants to be Tori Amos or Norah Jones. I haven't heard anything else she's done, as is the case with many of the covers I've heard, but I'm sure she's wonderful if you like that sort of thing.

Here though she provides a stripped-down take on the Rolling Stones' Mother's Little Helper. Draper lilts her way through the song with nothing but a little bit of double-tracking and a tambourine. Where the original rocks, this version sort of ... floats. The weird thing is, it doesn't really sound full enough to have originally been imagined as an a cappella recording. Even most solo vocals have a sort of weight that seems to be missing here. It's almost as if they instead took a song that originally had all the parts, bass, drums, guitar and whatnot, and stripped them out, leaving only the backing percussion and the voice. Or maybe it's just a matter of some weird equalization. Either way, the result is a flat, dark, empty take on the song, which resounds with the subject matter quite nicely and makes for a vaguely unsettling experience, like driving down your neighborhood street in a light snow at three in the morning: familiar, yet eerie.

Mother's Little Helper can be found on Linda's 2009 album Bridge and Tunnel.

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