Image Credit: Ash Ludkin

Calling shotgun on songs: Paul Dempsey discusses the art of covers

There’s an art to covering a well known anthem by a revered artist and making it wholly your own. In Cyndi Lauper style, time after time Paul Dempsey delivers flawless catalogue entries of cover songs.

He has proven himself each occasion he has stepped into the Like A Version studio for triple j, taking on massive anthems, big voices, and brilliant artists both on his own and with his mainstay band Something For Kate. There was the teenage love and nostalgia-laced ‘Daniel’ from Bats For Lashes, Cheap Tricks sultry ‘If You Want My Love’, the powerhouse pipes of ‘Sweet Nothing’ from Calvin Harris featuring Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, and of course the transforming ‘Edge of Town’ take on a Middle Kids hit. It’s not an act of regurgitation. It’s an honouring of the song with his own signature stamp. That’s Dempsey’s secret.

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“It’s important to understand what the elements in the song are. It’s sort of post mortem slicing into the original version. You have to work out what stays, and what goes, and what is important, and how it was put together, and what made it come to life in the first place. Then you can add your own self into the story with that emotional and educational understanding. I guess it’s more of that engineering perspective that I want to try to dissect it to honour it to my full ability,” Dempsey explains.

It’s this methodology that has gone into his most recent body of work, a collection of covers for album Shotgun Karaoke Vol. II. A project first taken on in 2013 with, you guessed it, volume one of Shotgun Karaoke, featuring reimagining of Queen’s ‘I Want To Break Free’, Australia’s biggest rockers INXS for ‘Never Tear Us Apart’, and You Am I’s ‘Berlin Chair’, and Green Days ‘I Don’t Want to Know If You Are Lonely’ amongst six more, Shotgun Karaoke Vol II, came over a decade later in the same fashion. At the top you know Cher’s ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’, Tanita Tikaram’s ‘Twist In My Sobriety’, and Don Henley’s hit ‘Boys of Summer’. Making your way along the list you are met with a mixed bag of cover anthems, high rotation requests at karaoke bars, and untouched gems that hold value to Dempsey. The halfway mark concludes with an acoustic take on a drama-laced track, ‘Because The Night’ by Patti Smith – a song that has also recently been adopted by Katy Steele for her Undressed album.

“It’s very passionate and it’s not complicated. What she’s talking about it’s a very raw almost plea about passion and physicality. There’s heat in the song, it has heat. She’s saying what we do tonight matters and is lustful and takes over the whole body and senses. I guess I can relate to that in a way as well because I feel when I sing, it’s the thing that kind of involves my whole body. Singing is not a thing I just feel like I’m doing with my vocal cords and my mouth and my brain or whatever – it sort of comes from my whole being. She is being moved by love and lust and I’m being moved, physically moved by the whole song. A good song does that which is why I can’t sit when I sing,” Dempsey details.

It’s an affect that Dempsey became very aware of during his last run of shows for Shotgun Karaoke Vol II, which saw him take to capital cities. Some of the theatre shows were sit down events, leading to Dempsey’s discovery of how he best operates. Returning back on the road for a regional run and round two of this tour, Dempsey is looking forward to intimate settings where people can stand and sing along to takes they cherish, ideally with a beer in hand.

“What I underestimated is how much people like sitting down,” he laughs. “They were beautiful shows but this regional tour I’m expecting people to be singing along and really letting loose to the songs that they know and love. It’s different to my solo shows or Something For Kate shows because you may have fans of a couple of songs and then they just absorb the rest of the set, but these tracks are mostly well-known universally so I hope it feels more like a karaoke night or a cover band at a pub with people getting involved.”

While he has been diving into the details of other artists’ songs, the segway back into Something For Kate songwriting has also begun. Whilst not necessarily a direct influence from the project, that power of song has been a driving force in this next chapter.

 

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“I’ve been analysing things a lot recently and actually said to Steph, my partner in life and in Something For Kate, that I’m not interested in doing something if it’s going to feel like work. Good songs should pull me not push me to get them finished – it should be self-powered, and the best ones are the ones that keep me up at 3am, that I continually come back to because I can’t escape them and you’re motivated. I’m feeling that way at the moment, organically motivated and energised with these new songs.”

While we wait for those tracks to see the light of day, you can experience Paul Dempsey delivering the songs of others as his own across the next three months in Frankston, Castlemaine, Geelong, Warrnambool, and Meeniyan.

Find ticketing and more dates to sing along with Paul Dempsey here.