This just came on WCBS. It’s a cover of “Here Comes My Baby,” the best tune on Cat Stevens’ first record, Matthew and Son (1967). The Tremeloes made into a hit the same year by employing two apparently-contrary strategies. Their first, extremely traditional move, was simply to make it jauntier. They twist what started out as an elaborate campside curio into a full-band dance floor romper, punched in with percussion and party sound effects: the latter reminiscent of the Trini Lopez version of “If I Had A Hammer” or Gary U.S. Bonds’ (perhaps legitimately live) “Quarter to Three”—both rather antique, each having charted five or more years prior in a very fast decade.

In fact, in appropriating that format they tread rather heavily on the concept of the song: the original warbler isn’t quite a tear-jerker, but it certainly is by-the-book bittersweet (which, paired with its vintage, guaranteed its usage in a Wes Anderson movie). Strangely, at the same time they also move the song in the opposite direction: they omit the last verse, in which Stevens starts to dream a little: “I’m still waitin for your heart, / cause I’m sure that some day it’s gonna start. / You’ll be mine to hold each day, / but ‘til then, this is all that I can say.” Maybe it was a time-constraint issue, but the two together make the song considerably brassier, dressing it more for La Bamba than Rushmore. But the same sort of decision can have the opposite effect, too: Neil Young’s version of the Don Gibson country standard “Oh Lonesome Me” normalizes the music to the gloomy lyric by replacing Gibson’s wry self-pity with uncut melancholy: the result is sort of a morass. A rather pretty morass on the surface, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s almost a spoof on Gibson’s character, who has “thought of everything from A to Z” while “she’s out and fancy free”—not sentiments that sit easily on Young’s rough, gloomy intonation. The Gibson song and the Tremeloes version here are similar, actually: they are in a tradition of songs (perhaps alongside, say, “Alone Again, Naturally”) that leaven an inner darkness with a outward spring, however half-hearted that may be. I guess sometimes there’s something to be said for playing a song against itself.