Sunday Songbook: Strings Attached

Every once and while one of your favourite artists goes out on an orchestral bender. Sometimes these extracurricular efforts to put old wine into new bottles pan out magnificently.

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Sting, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic

Gordon Sumner takes his 2010 Symphonicites album live, reworking of his Police tunes with classically-trained help.

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Peter Gabriel, Solsbury Hill

A song penned in 1977 about Gabriel’s decision to leave his band, Genesis, “Solsbury Hill” has long been one of the show-stopping staples of the solo artist’s concert tours. It isn’t weakened in the least by this live, string-laden version.

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Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

Joni’s composer husband helped her retool some of her best-known songs for the 2002 double album Travelogue. In the process, the couple polished “Woodstock” into something atmospherically adjacent to the original.

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Moody Blues, Nights in White Satin

Decades after its premiere on the 1968 album, Days of Future Passed, the reformed Moody Blues performed “Nights in White Satin” live with a full orchestra.

Penned as a song of yearning from afar by a touring, 19 year-old Justin Hayward, the ballad came to him after a girlfriend gave him a gift of satin bedsheets. “It was just another song I was writing and I thought it was very powerful,” said Hayward of the song. “It was a very personal song and every note, every word in it means something to me and I found that a lot of other people have felt that very same way about it.”

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Simply Red, Holding Back The Years

Mick Hucknall’s pipes hadn’t lost their luster in this orchestral version of Simply Red’s known song.

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Ultravox, Vienna

The moody yet anthemic album version of Vienna, which features an electrified viola, blew me away when it first dropped in 1981. Ultravox singer Midge Ure strains here to do justice to the original, with the RTE Concert Orchestra spurring him on.

The original here.

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Ian Hunter, Ships

The ageless Ian Hunter performs a ballad about a rock star son reconnecting with a retired military father. Originally a track on his standout 1979 album, You’re Never Alone With a Schizophrenic, “Ships” was symphonically retooled for the 2004 live album and DVD, Strings Attached. The session organizers in Oslo arranged for the singer-songwriter to stay a hotel suite normally reserved for Nobel Prize winners. In other words, Norwegians get Hunter.

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Led Zepellin, Kashmir

Time to get heavy. Has any artist or band ever outdone Plant and Page’s thunderous slice of symphonic rock, scored for both western and eastern instruments? I mean, other than Weird Al Yankovic?

That was a joke. The song is not.

BONUS TUNE

Hurr Torpedo, Total Eclipse of the Heart

Speaking of unusual instrumentation, I feel compelled to include this classic remake of Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 hit Total Eclipse of the Heart, a sturm und drang tear-jerker that’s been screaming for years for a clamorous, cantankerous remake.

That’s not a joke. But this version of the song is.