Many songs have the potential to be reinvented and become even more widely loved when they are recreated. This is the case for Ritt Momney’s cover of Corrinne Bailey Rae’s Put Your Records On, a 2006 tune. The cover of Put Your Records On by Momney manipulates various musical elements, including form, melody, tempo, and text setting in order to create an ethereal feel to the piece.

https://open.spotify.com/track/2nGFzvICaeEWjIrBrL2RAx?si=cabfb07d4b3940eb

https://open.spotify.com/track/1fah1uAs7HeTYDlNftKr3K?si=752e692b9c544fa9

The forces in the song are led by the solo singer, who is accompanied by synth-like piano, drums, higher synth, and other voices, sometimes choral, at 1:35 and 2:37. The singer’s voice sounds pitched up, which creates a dreamy atmosphere, along with the high repeating synth in the background.

The melody generally has small intervals between notes, with large jumps occurring very rarely in the piece, like at 0:48. The lack of wild jumps in pitch allows the listener to sink into the song, giving it a calming feel. The chorus, which repeats in different octaves, is an earworm and is also extremely singable. The melody can be described as sweet and almost reminiscent of summer, but takes advantage of the tension that dissonance can build by utilizing more dissonant chords as the chorus approaches, and then resolving them, such as at 1:35. This contributes to the dreamlike feeling this song evokes, as it’s almost disconcerting to listen to the choir’s disagreement with the established chord progression, making the listener feel like something is off, before resolving the tension in the chorus which follows a conventional, happy chord progression. The tempo of the song also goes to this point, as the song slows down dramatically at 2:25. This, accompanied by the reduction in pitch, establishes a surreal, almost psychedelic feeling to the song.

The text setting also plays a large role in establishing an ethereal feel to the song. This also relies on the major change in the song at 2:25. In the first part of the song, the song is mostly syllabic, but is melismatic for specific words that it puts emphasis on, like “on” and “same,” which are generally at the end of the line. The introduction is completely syllabic, almost as if a person is being drawn into a comfortable sleep, before it becomes more melismatic and dreamlike later on. In particular, after the switch, the modulation in the voice makes almost every single syllable extremely melismatic, switching very rapidly between different pitches, which contributes to the almost psychedelic feeling the song invokes. This switch is a large factor in the ethereal feeling the song invokes, as it follows a form where the chorus is interspersed between parts A, B, and C, but the last chorus is an adjusted version.

Momney, and in part original composer Rae, expertly manipulate form, melody, tempo, and text setting in order to create a dreamlike atmosphere in the 2020 version of Put Your Records On. This version in particular incorporates a switch partway through which places full emphasis on this feeling, making it the main sensation the listener takes away from the piece.