Despite my best efforts, I must admit that many of my musical tastes occasionally stray past the DISCO line in the sand that all metalheads are conditioned to never cross. False or not, Disco is the basis of pretty much all the dance/electronica/electronic music that I enjoy when I’m not listening to beats of a heavy kind. Today’s song is from the father of all Disco, and an easy entry to the Minor Key Monday pantheon of artists: Giorgio Moroder:
Giorgio Moroder drifts through my transom on a fairly regular basis and I’ve still somehow never done a full dive into his work (probably due to fears that his music will lean more on the disco side of things than the forlorn electronica I prefer). After realizing he was the one who wrote that great Blondie “Call Me” song (that I played at my wedding without ever really paying attention to the lyrics or knowing what movie it was written for), I checked out one of his early albums, 1975’s From Here to Eternity, which, based on the cover alone I knew would be something special:
Thankfully it wasn’t just an amazing cover, the songs were great too! Veering into disco territory occasionally, but largely staying on the Kraftwerk if they liked to dance side of things, it was understandably why the album had such legendary status.
“I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone” was probably my favorite song (which, based on the youtube comments, was most famous for being in one of the GTA games I did not play), a cold and forlorn bit of electronica with a driving beat and excellent robot vocals. The clean sung chorus gets a little disco-heavy, but it’s a fantastic song all around.
It’s also, theoretically a cover song:
Of course, Moroder only took the most basic elements of the Elvis song and jettisoned almost everything but the refrain for his version, but that’s how I prefer my cover songs–barely recognizable. To slavishly copy a song note for note is less a “cover” and more a pointless exercise in mechanical duplication. Moroder correctly identified the minor key refrain as a bit of musical magic around which he could build a morose slab of driving early electronica.
All of which is to say, I really need to finally check out his soft rock 80 minute colorized edit of Metropolis–it’s probably some good shit.
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