What's your favorite cover of a song?

Travels with Charley, February 2024

Feb 15, 2024

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches every month or two, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), what I’m wondering, and what I’m writing. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine! I’d love to hear from you.

Where I’m living

I spent much of the past month in Salt Lake City, skiing as many mornings as possible. It’s beautiful to be outside and moving in snowy sunshine so much — skiing has made me actually appreciate and look forward to winter weather. It’s still/always surprising to me that I discovered a sport I like for the first time in my thirties. I guess it’s never too late to become athletic? It’s been fun to be transient again, but mostly, I was glad to realize that I really miss my budding life in Portland. A good thing to have a home that I’m eager to return to.

I’ve also been acutely aware of how many people don’t have a home to go back to right now, and especially how many children are trying to survive amid unconscionable violence in Palestine. Every time I interview a kid, about ice-skating or annoying siblings or their most embarrassing moment, I think of their contemporaries whose childhoods are being torn apart. It’s easy to cover my eyes or turn away from the news, but I’m trying to do what’s right — to continue to advocate for them with my voice, my money, and my vote. I hope you are too.

What I’m reading

The extraordinary inner remove that Ayşegül Savaş builds in this story (“Notions of the Sacred”):

As I walked down the street wearing the hat, I saw people glancing at me, and I beamed at them full of my own mystery, like a benevolence. I thought of the face of the Virgin Mother in scenes of the Annunciation, and had a new understanding of her inward gaze, at once present and far away.

I’m reading Tessa Hadley short stories for the first time, and every ending is a precise, quiet shock, like this one (“An Abduction,” from Bad Dreams and Other Stories):

It isn’t only that the drink and the drugs made him forget. He’s had too much happiness in his life since, too much experience; he’s lost that fine-tuning that could hold on to the smell of the ham in the off-licence, the wetness of the swimming costume, the girl’s cold skin and her naivety, her extraordinary offer of herself without reserve, the curtains sweeping the floor in the morning light. It’s all just gone.

Lydia Davis with a good kind of “New Year’s Resolution”:

I’m pretty close to nothing all morning, but by late afternoon what is in me that is something starts throwing its weight around.

One other recommendation: One of my favorite things in the world is when someone I admire walks me through something they adore and how it works. (Helpful attitude when I regularly ask experts questions like, “So, how do hiccups work?” for the kids section.) If you like this too, listen to “Just Add Music.” It’s a podcast started by my brilliant friend and former colleague Minna Choi, a composer and musician. (If you ever saw a Pop-Up Magazine show, the music and so much of the magic was Minna and her orchestra, Magik*Magik.) In “Just Add Music,” Minna lets you into her relationship with music, delighting in and explaining what lights her up about the songs she first loved. Listening to it feels like if, after dinner with an expert composer, you asked them, “Why do you love music?” and they wandered over to your piano and started to explain. A lesson in enthusiasm, curiosity, and paying attention to what you hear.

What I’m wondering

A few weeks ago, a friend played me some songs by Elisapie, a Canadian Inuk musician. In her most recent album, she translated songs you’ll immediately recognize (“Heart of Glass,” “Wild Horses,” “Going to California”) into Inuktitut.

The covers are so striking, and made me think about the covers I love the most. (Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs performing “Fast Car” together at the Grammy’s did, too.) What are your favorite covers of songs? Why?

Also, here are some favorites from me and from friends — send me your additions!

What I’m writing

Back in November, I asked you about your relationship with regret. Thank you if you wrote back. Regrets are still taboo to admit, to others and ourselves, but there’s a value to owning up to them, to dropping the facade that we get it all right and learning from the difference between who we are and who we want to be. I wrote about this for Vox, including the story of two people whose regrets have shaped their happiness today. (I won’t spoil Sjanna and Peter’s story for you.) I’m very grateful to them for their openness with me, and for showing the rest of us how living with our regrets can make us kinder, including to ourselves.

yours,

Charley