Pan Amsterdam – This Coverband Rules
Pan Amsterdam called this one “This Coverband Rules” and then wrote a song about how much playing by someone else’s rules can wear a musician down. He’s the trumpeter, rapper and jazz-hip-hop crossover artist also known as Leron Thomas, described elsewhere as “a musical enigma wrapped in an enduring riddle”. Thomas made the beat himself, then brought in Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs on guitar and Interpol’s Brad Truax on bass.
The lyric plays out like a working musician’s honest gripe: learning someone else’s songs to keep the gig, singing prideful to whoever’s paying, and admitting flat out that the industry sucks and everybody already knows it. He says he’ll keep covering anyway, playing by the rules, which reads as either resignation or the whole joke, depending on how you take the title.
I like that Pan Amsterdam doesn’t let himself off easy here. It’d be simple to write a cover-band song as a joke about other people’s mediocrity, instead it reads like a musician being honest about his compromises, then dressing that honesty up as a title that sounds like a boast.
I don’t know whether the joke is on the industry or on him, and I don’t think Pan Amsterdam does either, that’s probably the point.
