What truly is the magic behind an affective cover song—that elusive quality that transforms a piece of pop history into something completely new and dripping with artistic rediscovery? If there already exists within an original song an emotionality as moving and inspiring as Dreams by Fleetwood Mac or as powerful and intoxicating as Heart of Glass by Blondie, then what does it take to create a new type of magic from a work of art that already sounds near perfect? Every so often a cover song comes along that answers these questions with stunning clarity, a song so original in its reproduction that listeners cannot help but fall in love with their favorite pop hit over again in a new and exciting light. On this end of the cover song spectrum is a reinterpretation of a classic song that makes you feel even more—this rare gem of a track that makes its way onto every one of your Spotify playlists in place of the original precisely because it takes a song you know and love and turns it on its head. To rerecord the work of a musical icon, to create a successful cover, there needs to be a reason. It must do something else that the original could not. It must be something new and old at once. It must have something to say and a new way of saying it.
Elisapie Isaac (ᐃᓕᓴᐱ in Inuktitut syllabics) is one artist who recently released an entire album of covers, an album so stunning and emotional in its storytelling and sonic worldbuilding that each track feels like an original despite the familiar melodies. Her sultry reinterpretation of Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time exchanges synths and drum pads for a slower mix of cascading live instrumentation, from drums to acoustic guitar, layered vocals, and the sounds of jingling bells giving the song a fresh new perspective, plucking it from the 80s and gifting the listener with a fresh take of a classic love song. Even in a song like Going to California, a cover that is more similar to its original than some of her other renditions, Elisapie adds moments of cathartic throat singing and jaw harp playing, seamlessly blending Indigenous traditional sounds with the country-tinged Led Zeppelin rock of the original. From her careful instrumentation to her beautifully clear production, Elisapie delivers a cover album with a lot of love and a lot to say.
Elisapie is an Inuk artist from Salluit, a remote village in northern Quebec, best known for her clear vocals and uncategorisable, somewhat indie folk-pop style. The Juno winner (one of the biggest honors for a Canadian musician) takes musical and thematic inspiration from her Inuit heritage to inform and shape her writing; an NPR feature describes her music as the melding of stories from her life with “hypnotic arrangements that channel ‘70s rock, indigenous folk music and the low, moody rumble of barnstormers like Tom Waits and Morphine (Thompson Reference Thompson2019).” Each of her four albums drip with emotion, painting sonic murals of a life chocked full of love and fear and joy and trauma. Through her journey from jazzy pop hits in her first album There Will Be Stars with the sunny optimistic sound of 1960s free love rock, to her sweet pop vocals in Traveling Love, supplemented by deep orchestral groves in The Ballad of the Runaway Girl, all three previous albums have been leading up to an extraordinary collection of emotionally charged covers, all made new in their arrangements, instrumentation, soul and meaning. Elisapie is an artist who gives an incredible amount of herself to her listeners in every song she pens, and her latest album is no exception.
In 2023, Elisapie released her fourth and latest album that includes reworkings of some of the biggest songs in classic rock history. On the cover album, Inuktitut, the artist completely transforms the works of big names in music including The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, and Metallica. Creating an effective cover song is its own art form, and Elisapie delivers an incredibly moving collection of covers on this compact, 10-track album. The most easily recognisable change from original to cover comes in Elisapie’s choice to record the songs in Inuktitut, the Inuit language spoken in the central and eastern Canadian arctic. The practice of translating English-language pop and rock hits to Inuktitut was not a unique endeavour for Elisapie, but a practice she saw all around her growing up. Her uncles played in the popular Canadian rock group Sugluk, and in an interview with Darcy MacDonald for Cult MTL, Elisapie muses that “it’s almost like I’ve always been familiarised by other Inuktitut artists, where it’s natural to sing other people’s songs but translate them into the language (MacDonald Reference MacDonald2023).”
Alongside a tradition of translated song, Elisapie also joins a growing number of contemporary Indigenous poets who choose to publish their work in their Native languages, authors such as Brandy Nalani McDougall, Margaret Noodin, and Joan Naviyuk Kane giving readers full pages of text in their native languages, often with no offered translation (McDougall Reference McDougall2023; Noodin Reference Noodin2020; Kane Reference Kane2017).Footnote 1 The importance of expressing in languages crafted pre-contact and practiced in the age of colonial power and violence cannot be ignored in Inuktitut, and the ties between language and culture, place, experience, and ancestry, are uniquely apparent in the ways Elisapie merges language and traditional musical elements together with the well-known melodies of classic hits. Her addition of throat singing and various traditional instruments along with her use of Inuktitut language in songs such as Going to California bring a deep history to place and being. The Led Zeppelin hit about the allure of the West, the lust of the California landscape, reflects a deeper understanding of connection to place when the ancient traditions of throat singing and language practice are introduced. It is more than a beautiful song about a beautiful place, it is a connection to ancestral peoples and past experiences in the sounds being uttered in the recordings. “There is something very rich and very real in my blood,” Elisapie states in an interview with NBHAP; “In the process, I had to rethink how I see Inuktitut. It is more than just a language or a cultural reference. It is a way of life” (Toerkell Reference Toerkell2024). Inuktitut is more than a language structure, but a deep tie to a cultural past, present, and future—a sonic connection to ways of being and knowing counter to hegemonic colonial rule.
Inuktitut is ultimately an exercise in storytelling, incorporating a multiplicity of sonic experiences from various people and communities into each track. “In my storytelling, there is never just one thing.” Elisapie tells NBHAP, “I don’t want to just tell stories because we have to do it, I also want to challenge the way in which we tell those stories” (Toerkell Reference Toerkell2024). In each cover on the album, multiple stories are told at once—the original story by the original composer, the new story of Elisapie creating her own version of the track, the story of her ancestors before her who taught her the ways of language, life, and song, the story of each friend and relative who saw these tunes as emotional support and refuge—there are so many layers to the meanings within each song, and part of the brilliance of Inuktitut is that our active listening becomes a part of the layered story of the album as well.
The discrete sonic elements woven through these covers rely on each other to tell Elisapie’s story; her relationships to place, community, and the artists whose work she chooses to reimagine all come out in the ways she crafts the sonic environment of the album. Past stories are made new in the inclusion of ancient traditions on various tracks, such as the inclusion of throat singing and traditional Quilaut drum patterns on Californiamut or Going to California. Stories crafted by non-Native songwriters take on distinctly Indigenous meanings, such as in Isumagijunnaitaungituq or The Unforgiven, Elisapie’s slower, more delicate and sweeping version of the Metallica classic that to her evokes “an Inuk story about a man who was going through hardships, trying to find his identity, being put down and trying to stand this silent suffering.” The story is told through the lyrics but also the screaming patterns of voices being layered throughout the track (Gordon Reference Gordon2023). Qimatsilunga or I Want To Break Free turns completely away from the poppy, synth-heavy Queen hit of the 1980s, instead lifting the iconic melody and shifting it into a melancholic, stripped-back ballad dedicated to her cousin Tayara who died by suicide. Qaisimalaurittuq or Wish You Were Here takes the Pink Floyd song heard in every 1970 teen rocker’s bedroom and replaces the smooth guitar with soft, metallic brass parts, creating a fanfare of grief lasting almost 5 minutes. Each track on Inuktitut is its own little universe, some full of elation and joy, others soft and sombre, all tailored to evoke a different emotional journey and sonic story, Elisapie taking only what she needs from the original tunes and offering an entire lifetime of musicality and emotion in return.
A single listen makes clear that the emotion spilling from each track is no accident; Elisapie famously has told interviewers that the way she chose which pieces to include on the album all came down to which ones made her cry. If a song unlocked past memories or elicited an emotional response so clear that tears would fall, it was added to the album. Through this process of selection, Elisapie found a way towards healing. The project became a reclamation of classic songs that each played a part in her various stages of her life., “I realised,” she told CBC News, “there still needs to be work and healing. And it is not just healing for me, but collective healing” (Gordon Reference Gordon2023). Inuktitut is an album for Elisapie, but also for her community, her relatives, people suffering under the hands of colonial rule, people affected by rampant youth suicide, people just trying to get by, and people trying to survive. It is an album like no other, a call for collective healing and listening. It is not just a cover album, it is a piece of deep emotional and cultural expression. With this album, Elisapie is asking us to listen to these classic songs in a way many of us have never been asked to listen before. She is asking us to look at these giant rock and pop hits, many of them that have been covered countless times before, and hear and feel something new within the depths of their melodies. This album is for those who love classic rock, but also those who hate the commercial pull of pop and rock giants. It is an album for those curious about Indigenous popular musics and those who already know the greats. It is a learning experience in Indigenous history and colonial emotional response to collective, ongoing trauma. It is an album about existing in this confusingly beautiful place we find ourselves, and that is more than I ever expected when first picking up a classic rock cover album.
