I know, I know, I am totally abnormal, billions of people just love her, she is pretty, has a beefy voice, can hella dance,… but I can’t stand Beyonce. I just ignore the genre all-about-look-and-style diva, the never-make-mistake-and-can do-it-all ultimate artist.
She has now become an icon who can only be touched by her gangster rap husband, and she is looking for a surreal fake perfection, something that just doesn’t interest me. Anyway I digress,… and I would admit it, she was really trying hard on that song ‘Countdown’ off her last album ‘4’.
But this post is not about Beyonce, rather about Norwegian quiet songwriter Sondre Lerche, who surprisingly chose to cover the song as his annual holiday tradition. You can even download the song on his website (http://www.sondrelerche.com/2011/12/4096/) where Sondre posted the following:
‘From Sondre:
This year, it’s officially a tradition: for the third time my annual Christmas gift to you is my humble solo acoustic version of someone else’s song; my favorite of the year, no less. In 2011 there was a tie between two incredible songs (“Changes” by Sandro Perri being the non-Beyoncé one), and both proved equally impossible to tackle or do justice to alone. But it’s what I do, and there are worse jobs, so I did it. I took the liberty of making some gender-oriented changes to the lyrics to better accommodate my macho-persona (although I wouldn’t dare tamper with Beyoncé’s appeal to all women to show their man they are the flyest simply by grinding “up on it girl, show him how you ride it”). That being said, the trick is to get past the novelty-factor and just sing a beautiful song at the best of your abilities. Obviously, a significant part of this song’s appeal and ecstatic energy comes from the dizzying vocal performance and the mind-blowingly cool production work — elements and talents useless to even attempt replicating (especially not in my father in-law’s basement). But as long as there’s a song underneath, there’s a way. That’s how I operate. It’s what I do.
Thanks for all the good times this year — and for listening. Happy Holidays, y’all. – SL’
It is sure very very different from the original, and you will be surprised by the stripped down rendition of the exuberant bombastic Beyonce song! As he said there are elements ‘useless to even attempt replicating’, and I am glad he did not try, hey, who could compete with Beyonce on that level? But transformed this way, the song has another life. Will the goddess notice it?