Tori Amos has recorded a version of Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Swimming Pools (Drank)’, with Buggles’ Trevor Horn. Listen to the track below.
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The new version is the opening track of Horn’s new album ‘Echoes: Ancient & Modern’, a record made up entirely of covers, with the famed producer teaming up with a host of other guest vocalists. The album came out on Friday (December 1).
Speaking about ‘Swimming Pools (Drank)’, Horn said: “I thought of it as a kind of literate, modern American standard, a rap song open to reinterpretation. I wanted something distinctly 21st-century with original, eloquent lyrics, and my longtime engineer Tim Weidner suggested this.”
“Tori Amos took the idea of adapting Kendrick Lamar’s psyched-up swagger in her stride and made it intensely cinematic,” he continued. “I listened to numerous other rap songs but nothing seemed as smart and funny. And it sets everything up like it’s the beginning of a song cycle.”
‘Swimming Pools (Drank)’ was first released on Lamar’s 2012 album ‘Good Kid, MAAd City‘.
Other guests on the album include Iggy Pop, who sings a version of Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’ and Lady Blackbird singing Grace Jones’ ‘Slave to the Rhythm’.
In July, Amos performed two covers of Sinead O’Connor songs in tribute to the singer following her death. At a show in San Francisco, she played ‘Three Babies’ and ‘I Am Stretched on Your Grave’, both originally from the 1990 album ‘I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got’.
Amos’ most recent album was 2021’s ‘Ocean to Ocean’, her 16th overall. The singer explained that it was inspired during her time in lockdown in Cornwall.
“This is a record about your losses, and how you cope with them,” she said at the time. “Thankfully when you’ve lived long enough, you can recognise you’re not feeling like the mom you want to be, the wife you want to be, the artist you want to be.
“I realised that to shift this, you have to write from the place where you are. I was in my own private hell, so I told myself, then that’s where you write from – you’ve done it before…”
In October, Lamar announced his own limited edition mobile phone model, without modern features like a web browser or colour interface. It is designed to be “less distracting” than other modern smartphones.
The rapper also recently re-recorded his verse on Taylor Swift‘s song ‘Bad Blood’ for the pop star’s deluxe edition of ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’.
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