Bowie cover of the week: Corey Herbert performs “Where Are We Now”

This one if firmly in the “guy in his basement” camp, but, despite stiff competition from a fez-themed cover of “Rebel Rebel” (I’ll get to that), I think Herbert’s rendition of this song is beautiful and deserving of “cover of the week” just because of how it sounds.

“Where Are We Now” was Bowie’s surprise comeback song, issued without forewarning after a decade-long absence from the public in 2013. It was later included on The Next Day and in many ways set the table for Bowie’s reemergence as a relevant maker of new music. “Where Are We Now” set up the album in a few ways— beginning with the song’s title, to which the album’s title almost seems like an answer. Surely, Bowie was conscious of people wondering where he was and what he was doing. His use of the word, “we” is, on some level, a reference to the covenant between fan and star (a theme vaguely hinted at in the song, “The Stars Are Out Tonight,” also on The Next Day).

I have long thought that the album title sets up Bowie’s return almost like a scene in a movie or play where one act comes to an abrupt end, the scene changes and words appear on screen signaling a passage of time or the turning of a page. Ten years later, he was picking up where he left off.

Of course, in true Bowie fashion, these themes don’t necessarily map precisely with the actual words of the songs. The song, “The Next Day,” has little or any resonance with Bowie himself, his past or even, “Where Are We Now.” “Where Are We Now” is a little more overtly self-referential. There are a whole bunch of references to Berlin, and the song is unmistakably reflective, so, it isn’t too much of a stretch to think of it as a lament on Bowie’s Berlin period. In case that wasn’t obvious enough, the album cover is a distortion of the cover of, “Heroes.” Taken as a whole, Bowie is lamenting a period of his past, signaling a connection to that past, but also establishing that what comes next is different. And it was.

Corey Herbert, a seeming amateur, managed to sing the song beautifully, but it goes without saying so, too did Bowie. Eric Clapton was so taken with the song that he sent Bowie a congratulatory note, to which Bowie responded with a note of his own in which he referred to Clapton as, “Old Sock.” That became the title of Clapton’s next album. I am slightly surprised that the song isn’t covered more regularly. It seems less broadly known than, say, “Lazarus” or “Blackstar.” That might be because it got somewhat lost in the deluge of (very different sounding) music that came with The Next Day and further obscured by the music of Blackstar, but also that album’s larger story and Bowie’s death. But it’s a song that deserves attention, and though I doubt Corey Herbert’s cover is going to generate much of that, I’m glad he did it.

So the fez-themed “Rebel Rebel”— there’s a produced video by an act that calls itself Smitte E Smitty and the Fezztones. Smitty performs wearing a fez, and fez iconography appears throughout the video. His arrangement is the way Bowie performed the song during his later periods, but, unlike the Fezztones, Bowie typically didn’t have a guy on Theremin in the band. I took the video to be tongue in cheek, but it is a competent rendition and not at all unpleasant. The video’s production quality was almost enough for me to choose that over this, but I just like what Herbert did with “Where Are We Now” better as a piece of music. So Corey Herbert wins!