You've Changed That Lovin' Feelin'

Most covers, even by jazz artists, retain the basic harmonic architecture of the original tunes: Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," to give just one example, layers a few comps and substitutions into the chart, but it's still unmistakably Rodgers's song, while all Gary Jules did to Tears for Fears' "Mad World" was slow it down (and add a lovely piano riff).

Then there are versions that self-consciously depart from the original, like Sara Bareilles's mind-bending "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," which opens with a dark reharmonization and a throbbing pedal (credit to Dale McGowan for explicating this), or Bettye Lavette's devastating "Blackbird," which reimagines the song's melody, phrasing, and point of view (over the basic bones of McCartney's harmony), or Dylan's often thoroughgoing remaking of his own canon in the mid-1970s, or Aretha's gospel makeover of "Eleanor Rigby."

But aside from Cibo Matto's repurposing of "Candyman," I'm hard-pressed to think of a so-called cover that rewrites a song more thoroughly than Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway's rendition of the Righteous Brothers classic "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," from their brilliant 1972 duet album. It's a bold gambit, given the towering ubiquity not only of the tune itself but of the original Phil Spector recording to which it is irrevocably fused. And while I'm not sure I'd claim the Flack/Hathaway version surpasses the original (what could?), it definitely casts it own unique spell and deserves consideration as essentially a new composition.

The original by Spector, Barry Mann, and Cynthia Weil has simple, sturdy bones, despite its lush, expansive Wall of Sound arrangement. Its juiciest chord comes right at the top, with Bill Medley intoning the opening figure over a B (or C-flat) chord with a D-flat pedal, a shimmering sound that resolves to the home key of D-flat after two repetitions:From there it's just a steady climb up to the cliff of the chorus: D-flat, E-flat minor, F minor, G-flat, A-flat, with the desperate triplets on "baby, I know it" (later "beautiful's dying"), and the satisfying slam back to the home key of D-flat for that iconic chorus, each note and chord a solid brick in an indestructible cathedral of sound:

After another the chorus, the cry-out-for-mercy bridge is just a protracted vamp over the song's I, IV, and V chords, D-flat, G-flat, and A-flat, segueing seamlessly back to the chorus for a repeat and fadeout. There's plenty more I could say about this 1964 masterpiece's production, vocal harmonies, and distinctive stylization. But there's so much to say about what Flack and Hathaway, working with producer Joel Dorn, did with and to this song eight years after its debut, and it's a subject I haven't yet seen explored anywhere online, that I want to get right into it.

First thing to clock is the nervy, psychedelic, vaguely sinister bass-and-sitar funk vamp that runs through the song, which belies the fact that F&H are taking the song at a much more langourous tempo than the original:

We're in a kind of chord-less G here, with none of those shimmering pedal chords from the original, but plenty of harmonic mist sprayed by Hathaway's slightly embellished version of the opening melody over that vamp:

Flack embellishes her response in an inimitably Flackian way I won't even try to transcribe. But it's the next progression that takes a turn: Though the chords seem to hew closely to the original (ii, iii, IV, V), and the melody isn't even that far afield either, check the last two measures, in which some diminished chords make the upward climb sneakily chromatic:

What comes next, the chorus, is where this version earns its stripes, changing the key altogether yet somehow working, in a gospel kind of way. To make clear how wild their rendition is, here's what the tune would look like in G if they were playing it straight:

What Roberta and Donny do instead (more or less—this is my best guesstimation of their vocal harmonies and the chords):

I mean, where do we start with this? Key change aside, this is a I-IV-IIV-IIIb progression in place of the original's I-ii-V-I (or, if you don't think of this is as a key change, it's VI-II-V-I), and the melody starts on the fifth tone of the opening chord (B on an E) rather than the first (G over G), slopes down on "lovin'" rather than up, etc. And the final B-flat turnaround, hinging on either a flat V or a flat III (as opposed to the original's VII), is just bonkers, again putting the melody on the sixth and fifth tones of the chord (G and F over B-flat) rather than first (F over F). The traces of the original are but wisps and phantoms here, strangers in a strange new land, but they are remarkably bodied ghosts, quivering with recognition.

Indeed it's a testament both to the strength of the original song and to the craftiness of this rearrangement that this crazy left turn works at all, but work it does. The general phrasing and cadence of the melody is similar enough to string us along, yet consistently strange enough to keep surprising us. And the bridge? That's a whole nother song unto itself. The words are the same but they are the only things left from the Spector/Mann/Weil. I don't have time to chart the whole thing, but it's fair to say that I-IV-V vamp has been launched into the sun.

The track closes out with an obsessive repetition of the title line, accompanied by a slicing string part into the fadeout which, along with the tense funk bass and percussion, put this close to the neighborhood of Curtis Mayfield's Superfly score (which came out the same year). I've read some reviews refer to this as a jazzy take on the material, and that's certainly part of what's going on here. But this altered "Lovin' Feelin'" transcends genre, and in flying so free it finds at least as much as it loses.