Earlier this year, Sonny Smith closed out his 100 Records project, which had him singing as fake artists with a series of different styles. But for all the different genres he was interpreting, you couldn’t escape Smith’s distinctive voice. For Record Store Day (April 20), he’s enlisted his band the Sunsets to interpret an extremely familiar tune: John Lennon’s “Imagine”, or, one of the most instantly recognizable songs of all time. It’s been covered by Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, Queen, Madonna, Cee Lo Green, Avril Lavigne, and far too many others to list here.
Most renditions of “Imagine” sound outright beatific, kneeling at the altar of Lennon and paying strict reverence to the source material. Thankfully, though, Smith doesn’t treat “Imagine” with kid gloves. He sloppily jumps into the song, slightly changes up the vocal delivery, rearranges the song’s chord structures, and chops up the ultra-familiar piano line from the original. It’s “Imagine” all right, and even though it’s just a little off, the melody and tone are still recognizable. Smith can’t help but make a John Lennon song sound like Smith, and the cover is all the better because of that. Besides, some of these lines are perfectly suited to Smith’s matter-of-fact delivery: “Imagine there’s no countries/ It isn’t hard to do.”
