"Additional Verses", my first cover album, released one week ago! In celebration of this new release, I'm sharing a bit about each track I chose to cover -- one song a day -- until all is told. Let's begin!
🔴 Track 1 on "Additional Verses" 🟢 🔴 Depeche Mode - "Enjoy the Silence" 🟢
Having debuted this live last July, I've been waiting to share it with you! It gets straight to the point, so it was a natural choice for the album's opener.
I was a freshman in high school when this song really started to hit for me; I'd get into "Violator" (the album this song appears on) as a whole a bit later. I was already the weird kid for liking alternatingly "old" or "weird" music, though it's funny now because the gap from then to now is a bit wider than the gap between this song's release and then. My English teacher mentioned liking Depeche Mode in class and I couldn't share my enthusiasm without catching shit for it later, so I didn't, and that's a shame. It really is miserable to feel pressured, over petty shit, out of making those little connections that help us feel less alienated from one another. As adults, we learn to recognize and mitigate that somewhat (with varying levels of success); in navigating adolescence, it's much harder. To me, "Violator" largely sounds and feels like a response to that kind of isolation and others like it. All that said, my English teacher won't ever hear this cover, but having created it will help keep me from forgetting that I heard her, silently, in that moment.
Listen to / download "Additional Verses" here.