Sometimes, you turn on the radio and hear a familiar song but it doesn’t quite sound right. Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” is one of those records – because, over the years, it’s been released to radio and streaming services in so many versions.
Best known is the take that you saw on MTV and heard on most radio stations in 1987. It’s the version with the picture up top, where they didn’t bother to take the price tag off Tawny Kitaen’s new shoes. Today, it exists on YouTube as a blurry “official” clip from Rhino Records.
Just a year before Huey Lewis and the News first released music under the name we all know, five-sixths of the band put out a 1979 disco single as Huey Lewis and (the) American Express. Yes, it’s a terrible name.
Disco covers of songs from movies and TV soundtracks were a mini trend. Meco hit #1 in 1977 with “Theme from Star Wars.” At about the same time, studio musicians Wilton Place Street Band had a smaller hit (#24) with “Disco Lucy,” a cover of the “I Love Lucy” theme.
Last year, I wrote a little about Brenda’s Lee’s Christmas classic, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” and how, at 78, she had just made a music video to go with the song she recorded when she was 13. Whomever handles Brenda Lee’s business affairs knows how to keep the money coming. For 2024, there’s a new Spanish-language version of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and Brenda got to take it easy. Producers used AI to go back to 1958 and have “Brenda” sing en Español.
I was a weekend Smooth Jazz DJ for about three years in the early 2000s, right as the number of stations that could make the format work on commercial radio was getting smaller. I was never one of the main on-air talent at Orlando’s WLOQ, 103.1 FM, but you might hear me Saturday afternoons or Sunday mornings. I’d be playing – still on CDs – Euge Groove or Mindi Abair or Acoustic Alchemy. Smooth Jazz was never my personal favorite, but it can be nice while reading or studying – not a lot of lyrics to distract you.