I like Motown, and if there's two motown songs you should listen to than they should be My Guy and My Girl and I don't know, maybe neither of those songs. I don't know anything about music. So here's the original track.

My Guy, it's a simple song about a woman's devotion to her partner, the lyrics are entirely straight forward and simple. It's a motown standard, released in the mid sixties. horns organ and a jazzy rhythm. It's a classy song. It has a lot of instrumentation along with backing vocals to give it a full sound. Mary Wells sings the lyrics with sincerity and conviction. There's a lot I could say about how this influenced the motown genre along with soul and blues music. I could mention producer Smokey Robertsons part in it all, as he wrote a lot of music for the band The Miricles who Mary Wells sang for.

The cover this week is by Warpaint, and it's not an exact cover. It's titled Billie Holiday, although it adds some new lyrics including a chorus where they spell out the name Billie Holiday. They also have an extra verse in the beginning and a bridgelike verse at the end. In the beginning, it ends with the line, Well if you want to know me, I'm a war - Companion. But starts with As I walk this line, I am bound by the other side - And it's for my heart that I'll live.
At the end she repeats, If she wants to go, if he wants to go, if she wants to go, if he wants.

And why Billie Holiday? Billie Holiday is a torch singer from the thirties and forties. Torch music could be considered a very early precursor to motown so there's that. Torch is often associated with blues, always sung by woman but it tends to have a jazzy sound to it. It's associated with heartbreak and how men treat women badly. It really puts a spin on the song, which has a haunting taste to it, stripped back to just a guitar at first with a marching beat that comes in later. The lyrics sound desperate, as if the woman singing is being faithful despite some unsaid reason. Does she not love the man she's with? Does she love him, but he has someone else on the side and she suspects his infidelity? Or perhaps she really loves someone else, maybe she loves the guy she's with but she's also interested in another man but she chooses to stay with the first because she must. There are a lot of ways you could interpret the mood of this song.

So which is better? Motown is great, for the most part I love it. But My Girl isn't a terribly interesting song musically or conceptually. Warpaint takes the idea, turns it on it's head, makes it their own and gives it a completely new meaning. And they're successful in doing it. Point for the cover.