David Bowie Cover of the Week: Pedro Boyd performs “Lazarus”

Pedro Boyd, AKA “Texanspaniard,” describes himself as a musician, artist, podcast host, and “creative soul.” He showcases some of his talents with this stripped-down, moving rendition of “Lazarus.” Boyd personalizes the song by presenting it almost quietly, with just his guitar accompanying his singing, alone in a dark room. I selected this as “cover of the week” in part because I like the song and how Boyd performs it, but also because I recently saw the song performed at the “Sound and Vision of David Bowie” concert at the Cutting Room in New York City. There, Gail Ann Dorsey sang it with her booming voice, and Donny McCaslin’s sax brought an intensity to the performance that literally brought Dorsey to her knees.

What I find striking is how different artists can perform the same song in distinct ways, using what they have to infuse it with personalized meaning. It’s hard not to watch Bowie’s video and think, in part, that the meaning he gave to his own song was inseparable from the process of dying. Weeks later, I’m still reflecting on the Dorsey-McCaslin interplay, in which, to me, McCaslin’s increasingly dominant sax represented— I don’t know—chaos overwhelming Dorsey’s interior monologue. Here, in this case, Boyd performs the song almost as if to himself. I feel like he’s giving us insight into his contemplation of the song as it exists in his mind.

Still, Boyd is doing more than humming along to himself. Reverb seems to have been added to his voice, giving it a slightly unearthly quality. Boyd had a plan of attack and executed it well.

I also like that “Lazarus” has become one of Bowie’s songs that gets covered. I don’t see as many “Lazarus” covers as “Heroes” or “Space Oddity,” but nine years since its release, it seems to have become more recognizably a Bowie song than much of his post-’80s output. One of my ongoing topics of contemplation is why there seems to be a dividing line between Bowie songs that “everybody knows” from the first half of his career and those that seem obscure from the second half. I know I’m in the tank, but I just don’t buy that he stopped making great music after the mid-’80s (or, by some accounts, the early ’80s… very, very early ’80s). Yes, of course, there were misfires, and some of his songs were better than others, but that’s true of his earlier music as well (did you ever hear him performing “Buzz the Fuzz?”).

Anyway, “Lazarus” is as good a song as any to draw attention to Bowie’s later works. I like hearing it, and I like what Boyd did here.