Waterboys - Sweet Thing (Van Morrison Cover)
Bear with me...

This is probably my favorite cover, ever.

Van Morrison is a very difficult artist to cover - his idiosyncrasies put him alongside few others in this respect. He inhabits his songs in a way that it seems no one else could.

Then there's this song, where Mike Scott takes one of Morrison's most identifiable compositions (and probably one of the best lyrics ever) and makes it entirely his own. The song starts like a plunge into warm water, sweeping you up and pulling you deeper as Scott's voice slides easily into the lines, turning the words over in his mouth over, over, over. It's a very Van Morrison thing to do, but Scott does it more, does it better. The words lose meaning as he repeats them, become mere sounds, syllables without reason, then, without you realizing it, the words reform themselves, pulling every meaning in, become all-encompassing. And the music pulls you along, pulls you right into the nearest any song can get to a "twist ending." Jarring? Maybe a little, the first time. Perhaps even the second, the shift will take you by surprise. But by the third, you'll wonder how the song could have ever been any other way. It couldn't, you know. This is exactly, perfectly, marvelously, how it should sound.