We are creators and consumers of music. While we’re partial to our tunes, we can’t ignore the good feels we’ve had or the musical influence that resulted from playing songs that we didn’t write.

So, we put together a list (and playlists!) of our favorite cover songs from past and present to share those good feels and influence.

Next up is A Perfect Circle’s cover of “Imagine” by John Lennon:

Em: A Perfect Circle’s version of this song is my favorite version. Super moody and down, in a depressing key, it snaps me right back to where I was when I had this album on heavy rotation in the mid ‘00s. Things haven’t really improved much politically since then, and since the song was originally written for that matter. I think it’s poignant to play such a pessimistic version of an optimistic song that we keep hoping won’t be a relevant commentary on society someday, but it still is.

Chris: This is the first installment of us covering a cover. In addition to echoing Em’s thoughts, I’ll add that I love how A Perfect Circle made this song their own. I would not be surprised if there have been folks that have heard this rendition and had no clue it wasn’t an original tune.

When putting together our “Imagine” arrangement, I stayed close to APC’s; spending several days with my headphones on and committing its layers of piano, strings, bass, etc. to memory.  Our drop C tuning allowed us to stay in the same key and maintain that droning vibe. The tuning also helped corral most (if not all) of those layers into a single guitar part. As a result, we’ve been able to pull off a very full-sounding unplugged performance as a duo. Over the years, we farmed out some of these layers when Drew Luigs was with us on bass (and also Cody Hughes on guitar back in the Chemcoma days).

The outro section is my favorite part. Here’s a video of us performing it at People’s Brewing Company in October 2018.