Dylan and The Moon’s cover of “Yellow” made me tear up a bit. It’s a capable cover of a pretty song, of course, but it lands harder than that. The artist is trans, and it is edited to be a duet with his pre-transition self.
The production is great. It nicely illustrates the collapse phenomenon: I experience it as a duet, even though that’s a fictional, impossible performance. In this respect, it’s more akin to Natalie Cole’s “Unforgettable” (which I experience as a duet with her late father) than to the Beatles’ “Now and Then” (which I experience as a pretty but obviously-artificial acoustic montage).
The track also nicely illustrates the power of a particular performance to have a different meaning than the song does in general.1 The lyric “You know I love you so” usually parses as something that the singer is saying to the listener, to the person whom we are invited to imagine the song was written for. In this version, the line becomes about the earlier and later selves loving each other— which means ultimately loving themself.
- This is a big theme in Theodore Gracyk’s work on musical meaning, and I discuss it a bit in my book.