Magdalena Bay have covered David Bowie‘s ‘Ashes To Ashes’ for triple j‘s Like A Version series – check out the full performance below.
Last night, Australia’s triple j shared the latest edition of their famed Like A Version series, in which musicians perform covers of other artists’ work, albeit with their own stylings. This time, Magdalena Bay have taken on the iconic David Bowie’s ‘Ashes To Ashes’ while in Australia for their tour of the continent earlier this month.
For the most part, Magdalena Bay’s take on ‘Ashes To Ashes’ remains largely true to the original, only really altering the song’s vocal range to suit that of singer Mica Tenenbaum.
Check out Magdalena Bay’s cover of David Bowie’s ‘Ashes To Ashes’ below.
Discussing their cover with triple j, Magdalena Bay’s Tenenbaum said: “It’s kind of one of our favourite songs, I would say”. Matthew Lewin chimed in to add: “Yeah, it’s up there for sure. It’s a great kind of weird, experimental pop song that we took a lot of inspiration from.”
They also added that the song has never left their rotation, with Tenenbaum adding that she thinks she heard the song for the first time while watching its music video. She added: “I drew a lot of influence from his ideas of being an artist and what it means to create art, I found very inspiring going into the creation of our latest album ‘Imaginal Disk’“.
Explaining why they decided to stick to the original song for the most part, Mica shared: “When you love a song so much and you know what you love with it, and you also want to make it your own a little bit, it’s like how much did you really mess with it?”
“I just wanted it to feel like me,” she said of altering the vocals to fit her range and style. “Because obviously I love Bowie’s vocals but unfortunately I won’t be able to sound like him. So it was just kinda singing it as me, whatever that came out as. I feel like at first I couldn’t resist throwing a little bit of a Bowie impression in there but it felt better and more new and interesting to sing it in my own voice.”
The duo are next due to kick off a North American tour, which will begin in late April and will conclude in mid-May after 16 shows, after which they will embark on a round of European festival dates.
Magdalena Bay performing live in 2024. Credit: Rick Kern/Getty Images
In a glowing five-star review of ‘Imaginal Disk’, Otis Robinson wrote for NME: “Stylishly gauche and expertly overproduced, kaleidoscopically experimental and expressionistic, ‘Imaginal Disk’ is a zeitgeisty time capsule of anxious post-internet existentialism and the online condition observed through a synthy flower-power lens. Here, Magdalena Bay are underrated pop messiahs at the top of their game.”
The acclaimed album was also named NME‘s fifth best album of 2024, with Alex Rigotti writing: “Cue ‘Imaginal Disk’, which blends smooth rock, psychedelia and disco to give one of the funkiest examinations of the human condition. Straddling the line between considered craftsmanship and straight-up bangers, ‘Imaginal Disk’ is sophistipop at its finest.”
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