Ball of Wax 59 Songs: Tomo Nakayama – “The Sugar Nile”

It’s quite an experience to hear one of your songs covered for the first time, and I can’t think of a better one to have than hearing Tomo Nakayama do “The Sugar Nile.” In fact, “cover” seems a woefully inappropriate term; I’m thinking maybe “resurrect” or “define” might be more apt verb.

For many of us indie artists with small fanbases, songs live and seem to die by quickly becoming obscure and mostly unlistened to on streaming services and bulk order boxes of CDs gathering dust in the storage space. If you stop playing it live too, then the reasons for writing said song in the first place also become obscured until the song itself almost seems to have never existed at all. It’s a true gift of this compilation and Tomo to have a song written by my younger self given back to me in such a way that the new version seems to be the realized and finished one and the old version just a demo.

From a musical standpoint, what Tomo does is reharmonize the melody with different placements of the song’s chords underneath at various times. In the original recording, the minor vi chord is slightly more prominent in the verse, whereas Tomo saves it to use once at the end for maximum impact. He then inversely uses the same chord as part of the main chorus progression, whereas the original recording saved it for end of chorus THERE for maximum impact. To my ear, this makes the verses more confident than melancholy and the choruses more anthem-like and pleading than surrendering.

I bring this up only to say that this reframing of the melody comes from a more seasoned and nuanced worldview than that which the original arrangement of the song came from, and I relate to this new presentation greatly more than the old one. I don’t want to get too much more pedantic about this because I wasn’t thinking this analytically when listening Tomo’s version for the first 20 times or so. I was just blown away.

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