Tabishland

What is amazing is that they've barely changed the arrangement.
 

I noticed this same thing a few years back with a Carpenter's tribute album -- all the arrangements of the best cover versions were virtually identical to the originals by Richard Carpenter. There is a Burt Bacharach tribute disc with many pretty extreme artists contributing (like Patton) and it's the same story.

It's sort of a lost art maybe? The art of arranging songs. Composition vs arrangements. Dunno.
 

But don't you think that there's also an element of "why mess with perfection?", especially when you're talking about the musical genius of musicians like Burt Bacharach or Richard Carpenter?
 

Well, the composer is different from the producer. If those originals were produced by someone other than Burt or the Carpenters, then the arrangement credit goes to them. The song originally written could be quite different from what we hear.

I wrote a lot of songs in college, and one of my college friends, a composition major, always liked them. She mentioned them recently, and I said, "yeah, but those songs are really dated" and she said it's never the songs that are dated, it's the arrangements. My (to my ear) hokey '70's songs could apparently sound ... well, I guess like hokey '00 songs if produced today.

Usually when an old song is covered, it's given a modern spin in the arrangement. I guess maybe that trend is changing.