4. Nina SimoneHere Comes The Sun

Nina Simone has this incredible technical ability mixed with a gift to take a familiar piece of music and just completely transform it, to take a song like ‘Here Comes The Sun’ and reprocess it into something even greater than the original. Like, I can’t imagine The Beatles hearing that and not feeling like she made it better. And that is the case for a lot of the songs on this record. It really is inspiring to hear somebody take a song you know so well, and apply such a unique take on it with the arrangements, and deliver something better than the original – like, her cover of ‘Suzanne’ by Leonard Cohen is the version I think of whenever I think of that song. And on the version of this album that I have, there’s a song called ‘22nd Century’ by this Bahamian artist named Exuma, a crazy post-apocalyptic screed that applies so much to the times that we’re living in right now. It’s a great song. It’s not comforting, at all, but it lays things out in a really, really wonderful way. And it’s 12 minutes long. This was not a track recorded for the radio!