With Phil Collins' recent emergence from retirement, re-releasing his discography and gearing up for a tour and a memoir, the temptation is to dig into him a little as an artist, re-evaluate his work. But every time I tried to sit down and write a retroview of “Face Value” or “No Jacket Required,” I came up blank.

“Take a look at me now,” sang Collins, in “Against All Odds.” “There’s just an empty space.” Indeed. I found the more I looked at Collins, I discovered a mess of cultural detritus: I hated his music, except that I liked some of it. His work was trite, but some of it was actually kind of interesting. I needed some way to recontextualize him, so I took to Facebook and asked if any musicians would be willing to cover a song, without knowing what that song would be, and then post that song online. I didn’t tell them they were all getting Phil Collins songs, although a few got songs from Collins-era Genesis, to mix things up. I ended up with 35, and the results were often surprising and staggering.



“I only knew the hits and never got into any deep cuts,” says James Keyes, who covered “The Roof is Leaking. “Phil has some crazy phrasing, odd chords and twists in time. I wanted to keep the spirit of that weirdness going and try something different at the same time.”



The musicians that embraced the challenge took to it like a puzzle, trying to figure out what makes the songs tick and how to make them their own. Rich Leufsted, covering “In the Air Tonight,” tried to “arrange the song like it was written in the 1800s then performed by the Carolina Chocolate Drops.” Danielle Staples Magario, of Fox and the Dragon, says “we literally rewrote (‘Do You Remember’) with chords that we like.” Gabby Sherba, of the Furies, said she “tuned my guitar in a mysterious way and searched blindly for the chords until I shook them out,” when she tackled Genesis’ “Dodo/Lurker.”





Some took an absurdist path: “Cowboy” Matt Hopewell did “Doesn’t Anybody Stay Together Anymore” in the style of William Shatner. Eric Urban recorded a 20-minute-long rendition of “Easy Lover” over visuals from “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” which included transformations into “Angry Lover” and “Danny Glover.” Shrewsbury musician Bob Moon got the Phil Collins Challenge confused with the Ice Bucket Challenge, before playing a gentle and straightforward rendition of “I’m Not Moving.”





“I always thought Phil Collins was Satan incarnate preying on the feeble minded in order to sell Michelob Lite,” quipped Moon. “After listening to the song you picked 100 times I realize how incredibly stupid I have been as I sit back with a cold one waiting to do the bidding of my new master.”





Most of the musicians tried to bring out the soul of the song, even if they didn’t care for it. “It was very challenging and ultimately enjoyable as I had to take something that I absolutely loathed and try to turn it into something somewhat listenable,” said country musician Stan Matthews, who covered “Behind the Lines.” The stylistic diversity of the players alone was transformative: Mauro DePasquale offered a jazzy “Billy Don’t Lose That Number.” Cougar Bait delivered an upbeat electro-pop “Keep It Dark.” Sarah Fard, of the Boston band Savoire Faire, brought a smoky blues to “That’s All.” Rapper Danny Fantom and producer Eggy Pinero completely reimagined “Long Way To Go,” resampling the original recording into a beat, over which Fantom rapped new lyrics. Fernanda Alves Pereira covered “If Leaving Me Is Easy” as a quiet, delicate acoustic number.

Pat Clark delivered four tripped out, electronically distorted songs, including Genesis’ “Invisible Touch.” Los Angeles’ Jack Bowman & the V.I.P.s offered a crunchy version of “This Must be Love.” Gary Hoare used a drum machine, autotuned his voice and played tenor uke on a rendition of “Do You Know, Do You Care.” Neil Lucey, of Thinner, maintained a rock edge in “Heat on the Street” amid the recording's distancing effect. Katyana Hall, a 10-year-old singer from Los Angeles who sang on Andrea Bocelli's CD “Cinema,” sang over the original tracks of “You’ll Be in My Heart,” from Disney’s “Tarzan,” to stunning effect.



“This project, much like Phil Collins as an entertainer, has been a study in bewilderment and respect,” says Reggie Bates, of 33 Leaves, who covered “Who Said I Would” under the banner of his solo project, Engines. “I wasn't familiar with this song whatsoever. It was easier when it dawned on me that we all had to do Phil Collins songs. It gave me the inspiration to take the song in a new direction. I kept the tempo and most of the chords, but decided to emphasize the first instrument I learned, bass.”





There were some musicians who unapologetically loved Collins’ work from the get-go, including Matt Soper, who covered “Like It Or Not,” saying, “my original idea was to go even more Phil Collins on this song by adding a dance beat and making it a pop song … but the more I listened to it, the more I dug it, so I ended up leaving the overall structure and groove intact, but turned it into a slow build with some other twists.”



Many were stymied by outright distaste: “This song is so bad,” said Florida musician Will Ryan, who covered “Colours.” “Every time I walk away from it I find myself thinking, surely it can't be as bad as I think it is … then I read the lyrics again and shudder.” J. Stuart Esty, who handled “Something Happened On the Way to Heaven,” “struggled with Phil's lyric message and had to take some liberties to sing it with conviction.” Rob Hewlett of Good Question says he and his band struggled with “All of My Life” before deciding to “just play the darned thing.”



Hilary Thomas-Oliver, of Texas’ Ponytrap, says her husband and bandmate, Quentin Thomas-Oliver, realized their song, “That’s Just the Way It Is,” “was the perfect blank canvas, prepared with only the loosest suggestion of shape and color, ideal for creative interpretation. He had a blast working up the riffs and song structure that came together in the final version.” The result was a stunning instrumental with strings and a robot drummer, and it was hardly the only surprise. Jessica Lovina, Steve Blake and Gregory Sullivan joined forces for a beautiful “Inside Out.” The Deadites delivered a startlingly soulful version of the ballad, “I Wish It Would Rain Down.” Geoffrey Watson Oehling, bassist for the Manhattans, turned out a gorgeous instrumental of “Another Day in Paradise.” Amanda and Trey Holton, launching a new project, Eurydice, took what’s usually considered one of Genesis’ worst songs, “Who Dunnit,” and pushed it into something dark, brooding and beautiful. Matt Robert’s version of “Against All Odds” features brilliant finger-picking and a surprisingly upbeat emotional turn.

“I write pretty much straight up cowboy songs,” says Sean Ryder, who got stuck with instrumental “Droned,” and decided to make the most of it. “It's your typical keys and drums infused polyrhythmic number that transitions from 2/4 into 5/4. I think. Syncopated African beats. Droning bowed double bass. Lots of piano. No guitar. No ukulele. No mandolin. No (expletive) lyrics. Sounds like a hybrid Japanese- and African-influenced number. No problem, I says. I'll check out other covers on YouTube … No other covers exist. No one has ever covered this (expletive) before. Because it's insane. It's unusual. It's Phil Collins. So I rearranged it for guitar, and pennywhistle. And hand drum. And xylophone, because my son has one for school.”

Boston composer Cliff Anderson says of the song “Sussudio,” which he turned into an engaging jazz lounge number, “there is no song here. It's completely an illusion. There is a neat idea — seizing on the truth that if you're crushing hard on someone, any superficial handle is enough to prompt giddiness — but the lyrics never actually open up that line of exploration. They are all ‘tell,’ and no ‘show.’ (What's so great about the person, anyway, and why should the listener care about her or the singer?) And so absent both real lyrics and any compelling performance moments, we're left with just the production values of the recording itself, which are disposable and generic for the era.”

One consistent theme in the discussions is that many of Collins’ songs either had bits that were great amid shallow schmaltz, or which could have gone further. But a few of the musicians came away with at least a slightly improved view of the man and his work.

“Sometimes you have to actually break something down,” says Arizona musician David Sprinkle, of Alan Smythy and the Stockholm Syndrome, who produced his wife Sumiko’s cover of “Abacab,” “meaning give it the time and space in your head, to come to respect it. Make no mistake … I'm not going to be rushing out to pay top dollar for Phil Collins vinyl today. And, I still think just throwing together a song form potentially killed what might have been a decent song in ‘Abacab.’ However, as we worked on it, I noticed some cool and interesting segments of lyrics, a great secondary hook, and some cool production ideas in the wreckage of an otherwise dreadful song. … The man made up a word for the most important word in the song, wrote an instrumental hook that will absolutely grab you by the throat, and made us all, no matter how much we protest, sing along."

Email Victor D. Infante at Victor.Infante@Telegram.com and follow Pop Culture Notebook on Twitter @TGPopCulture.







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