Bowie cover for the week: Celestino Telera sings “I Can’t Give Everything Away”

Once again I have chosen a later Bowie song as the cover of the week, this time, arguably his latest in the sense that “I Can’t Give Everything Away” closed out his last full album, Blackstar. And before going forward its worth noting that since I’ve been posting these covers of the week, I have never been at a loss of options — many Bowie covers are uploaded to YouTube every week.

As with most of the artists I have selected for these weekly covers, Celestino Telera is not famous and was not previously known to me. He’s Italian and posts songs in both English and Italian. I think his rendition of this song is beautiful.

As I’ve written before, I think Bowie selected this song to close out his career quite deliberately. You can listen straight through to his studio albums, in order, starting with Space Oddity and ending with Blackstar, and the exact song order seems to make sense in some intuitive way. The song, “Space Oddity,” slowly faded in, and this song slowly fades out. In that respect, and in the context of Blackstar seeming to be at least partially a reflective commentary on Bowie’s final thoughts about mortality, “I Can’t Give Everything Away” seems awfully personal.

So, is Telera appropriating something that should have been left to Bowie alone? Not at all. Devoid of context, the song stands on its own, perhaps less meaningful but still beautiful. As a more recent song, it is probably less familiar, and though Telera’s arrangement is faithful to Bowie’s, it might sound like a totally new song, ready to be explored for meaning on its own terms. Or not— you can just listen to this guy sing— that works, too.