Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

This is “Pop Life” by Dump:

Dump is a project by James from Yo La Tengo. On this impeccably titled album, That Skinny Motherfucker with the High Voice?, he covers a selection of Prince songs, reinventing them in subtle and and wonderful ways.  “Pop Life” here is completely transformed from the funk of the original into something quiet and just a little fragile. Then again, that fragility is there in the original, too, and in particular in the lyrics–“Is the mailman jerking you around?” is a line that carries irony and sympathy in equal measure. Sure, there’s a Prince-shaped space in the world where the man used to be, but there’s also all those frequencies vibrating in all kinds of shapes because of what he did while he occupied that space.