Spinner

Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs Go Back 'Under the Covers'

In covering the Yes classic 'I've Seen All Good People: Your Move/All Good People' for their '70s collection 'Under The Covers Vol. 2,' longtime friends Matthew Sweet and the Bangles' Susanna Hoffs joked, as big fans, how cool it would be to get Yes guitarist Steve Howe to lay down riffs for the track. "Sue and I were big Yes fans as teenagers so that would be huge for us," Sweet tells Spinner. "We got just so excited about the possibility that we might be able to get him. We were able to track him down through help from his fan club. We sent him our version and he played lead guitar for us. So we covered Yes and Steve Howe played guitar. For a minute we were just gonna find like every guitar player because it was so cool. But I think it would have been really time consuming and really expensive, so we really didn't continue on that path. Steve was the big star."

Sure, Howe is a big star. So is Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham and George Harrison's son Dhani, both of whom also appear on the album, which hits stores July 21. Sweet and Hoffs harmonize on favorites from the genres of power-pop, glam, classic rock and the aforementioned prog rock, such as Carly Simon's 'You're So Vain,' Rod Stewart's 'Maggie May,' Fleetwood Mac's 'Second Hand News' and George Harrison's 'Beware of Darkness.'

"It was so much fun, so much fun," Hoffs tells Spinner. "The most important era in terms of influence for me, musical influence, was the '70s. I went from [ages] 11 to 21 during that era. It was a really super profound time of life that I experienced all that music. It was the coming-of-age era. I don't know why, there's so many different styles, singer-songwriter to huge stadium rock to prog rock to punk rock really. It really was so diverse."

The release is Hoffs and Sweet's second together. The first, 'Under the Covers Vol. 1,' was a '60s compilation released in 2006. The duo was so inspired by the '70s that they over-recorded, laying down 39 to 40 songs for the album, and then chose which ones fit the collection.

"Doing these covers records together started out as a thing that was just kind of fun for us," says Sweet, who, along with Hoffs, appeared as Austin Powers' on-screen band Ming Tea in 'Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.' "It was a low pressure thing in my house. We had a lot of fun doing that. We kept trying all kinds of different stuff, kind of whatever we thought of that would be fun to do it. As we got toward being finished, there was a certain batch of songs that sort of seemed to work together as the main album. We have all the new wave punk stuff, there's six, seven, eight songs of those. Another sort of eight or 10 songs of just other '70s stuff we liked but didn't make it on the album. All that stuff's gonna see the light of day. We may do a New Wave EP, and there should be another album's worth of stuff that will surface over the months."

This summer Hoffs and Sweet may tour together, if it makes sense for both of them. "We'd really like to do it, if we can figure out a way to do it and not lose money," Sweet says with a laugh. "It's really tough these days with the amount of records we sell to make it all work. I would say it's quite possible. I'm sure we'll do some shows around the release of our record. I've been touring a little more the last year I'm going to be out in June and Bangles are touring a lot more. I think both of us would be up for doing it."

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Kevin

If you want the expanded version of this album, check it out on iTunes - 26 cuts for $15 - great deal - and hearing Matthew and Susanna do the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is well worth it.

July 30 2009 at 5:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply