James Mercer of the Shins has just recorded his cover of Squeeze’s ‘Goodbye Girl’ at the Levi’s Pioneer Sessions.
James Mercer explained that he grew up around a lot of music, his father being a country western musician who used to perform in the house. When he was in high school, the period when you fell in love with music as he put it, his family moved to England, and he began to have fantasies about being in a band. Since his first musical emotions were in England, he probably chose to cover a UK band for that reason.
The English New Wave band Squeeze had several UK hit songs during the 1970’s, and continued to be influential in the 1980s and 1990s. Although not as well known and commercially successful in the US, some of their songs were American chart hits. Their name is an homage to the Velvet Underground’s 1973 album ‘Squeeze’.
‘Goodbye girl’ was first recorded for Squeeze’s 1978 album ‘Cool For Cats’, and a far less subtle version was again recorded in 2005 for an Under Armour ad, a Baltimore sports apparel company which wanted to retarget his public from muscled men to athletic women.
But forget about this last one!
James Mercer gave the Shins treatment to the song for our auditive delight. He said he picked the Squeeze song because there was something about it he really connected with, and because it sounded something he wished he had written. It is very humble of his part to say this because he certainly wrote a bunch of songs of excellent quality with very elaborate lyrics.
But I can see the attraction James Mercer saw in the harmonies and vocal melodies of ‘Goodbye girl’. His version is quite faithful to the original with better vocals, that remind us plenty of the Shins’ songs. From the light cowbell sound effects of the beginning, to the harmonious and hopeful lines delivery and upbeat but resigned ‘Goodbye girl’ chorus, James Mercer’s voice floats along with the melody line with great ease and some ethereal changes from the original version. The way his voice rises at the end of ‘I looked around to find her but she’d gone’ instead of going down, cleverly reinforces the ironic tone of the song.
The Squeeze original song has a playful and upbeat chorus, simple lyrics which right away depict a nostalgic remembrance about a connection, a sudden attraction, a theft, a disappearing move, and suddenly a new life path ‘My wife has moved to Jersey’ which is actually sang ‘My wife has moved to Seattle’ by Mercer.
It’s probable that James Mercer took the liberty to change from ‘Jersey’ to ‘Seattle’ since Squeeze had already modified ‘Jersey’ with ‘Boston’ for the US market.
This is the first Shins recording since their 2007 album ‘Wincing the Night Away’, and since James Mercer is still collaborating with Danger Mouse and does not have plan to release another Shins album before at least 2011, I will put this ‘Goodbye girl’ in loop in my Ipod.
The song can be downloaded for free here: