Something about a real classy, traditional cover that just hits all the right notes.

With her voice, so bluesy and pure, and this song, so traditional and heartfelt, I cannot help but sip some tea, light a cigarette, and indulge in the purity of grand piano keys and soft brushes on a snare.  A good torch song will do you right, and a singer like Fiona will bring out its most delicate and honest moments. It’s easy, I think, on first listen, to write off the kind of songs you’ve heard time and time again, or at least thought you have, the kind of songs with this old-school vibe. So easily we forget how much these words meant to the one who wrote them, back in the 30s, 40s, 50s, or whenever.

<a href="http://

” target=”_blank”>This Sinatra standard was composed with Cy Coleman, a Broadway type, and Joe McCarthy, a lyricist of the Tin Pan Alley cohort. I can’t even find the exact year they wrote this (at least, on the first page of Google), because people forget these things so easily and songs then just seemed the breathe their way into existence. I just know Sintara recorded it as a kiss-off to Columbia. But when McCarthy wrote these words, he felt something, he knew something, about not being conventional and being off and having bad habits, and knowing in his soul that maybe it was worth staying true to who he was, despite the melancholy of the day, the melancholy this melody captures so well? Songs had integrity back then, and that is what makes them so timeless, so worthy of reinvention without sacrificing the classic sensibilities. At the end of the day, the songs worth revisiting will be the ones that tap into something beyond modern trends, into something with much more heart and honesty and purity that, when crafted in the right hands, needn’t be made by trying too hard.

“I’m sentimental
So I walk in the rain
I’ve got some habits
Even I can’t explain
Go to the corner,
I end up in Spain
Why try to change me now?

I sit and daydream
I’ve got daydreams galore
Cigarette ashes
There they go on the floor
Go away weekends,
Leave my keys in the door
Why try to change me now?

Why can’t I be more conventional?
People talk, people stare.
So I try
But that can’t be,
Cause I can’t see
My strange little world
Just go passing me by.

So let people wonder,
Let ’em laugh, let ’em frown
You know I’ll love you
Till the moon’s upside down
Don’t you remember?
I was always your clown.
Why try to change me now?

Don’t you remember
I was always your clown
Why try to change me,
Why try to change me now?”
~Why Try to Change Me Now
Fiona Apple, Then Was Then & Now Is Now