Faye Wong Changes Who a Familiar Tune Is Talking To
Faye Wong’s Cantonese recording of “Dreams” keeps enough of the original to make the change of voice unusually exposed.
The first pleasure of hearing Faye Wong’s “夢中人” after The Cranberries’ “Dreams” is recognition. It is also the source of an inconvenience. A tune that seems to offer a route back to a familiar way of listening quickly begins to carry a person you can no longer hear in those old terms. The authority of the recording comes partly from being willing to let you notice how much of the material is recognisable.
Both recordings have motion in abundance. The vocal in “Dreams” can make an ascending phrase sound like a statement somebody has spent all day waiting to make. In Wong’s version the pressure within the phrase feels different to me. The lightness invites a listener closer, while the pace gives the voice a credible ability to get away. That changes the nature of the excitement. A melody can draw you in without making it easy to say to whom, or to what, its singer is offering that intimacy. Faye Wong’s recording. The Hong Kong Story archive on the Cantonese adaptation.
An inheritance that still has to work
I dislike the way arguments about covers often ask who owns the more authentic emotion. They can make two recordings sound as if they were attempting to pass the same examination. The difference here is partly a difference in musical scale. A forceful lift in one recording is something the other might let a listener hear as a shift in where the words sit. The instrumental motion keeps each singer in a position to do something specific with her kind of exposure.
It is fair to say the Cantonese version enjoys a great deal of the appeal already won by the original tune. A listener may feel that its extraordinary fluency depends on inheriting a particularly good piece of material. The case for it begins after that observation. The singer gives the melody a social world and a distance from the listener that I don’t hear in quite the same way in the original. A change can matter that much while the place somebody would hum along is intact.
This is the sort of cover I would like to see music education treat as a composition problem. The next question after where the song came from ought to be what the new place made possible. Fame, fidelity and chronology can tell the story of its arrival. The sound gives us an account of what happened after it got there.