Bowie cover of the week: Jerry Leger performs “Janine”

This has all the makings of the type of Bowie cover I really like— a real but unknown (to me) band putting its own take on a relatively obscure Bowie song. This cover is off Leger’s presumably new album, Latent Uncovers.

I’ve always liked, “Janine,” which is off of Space Oddity. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it outside the context of listening to the album. Leger’s version is similar to Bowie’s, though his voice is very different.

The song is an early version of Bowie contrasting a happy, upbeat sound with darker lyrics of conflict. He’d do this a lot later, form instance with “Let’s Dance.” Like “Let’s Dance,” the lyrics for “Janine” are ominous but not exactly sensible. The subject of the song wants to get to know the singer better, but the singer won’t open up to her (“you’d like to know me well, but I’ve got things inside my head that even I can’t face”). He seems to equate doing so with being attacked, but then, in addition to that, he layers in that the attack will fail because “if you take an axe to me, you’ll kill another man, not me at all.” Throughout the song, there’s this dynamic of the singer wearing a “mask,” that Janine’s is trying to penetrate, and that being a form of identity-rending conflict *your strange demands to collocate my mind scare me into gloom.” There’s a lot of that going on in this song.

Jerry Leger is a Canadian singer who has released thirteen albums. He has a Wikipedia entry and here is a link to his website.