What the Funk? Artists Who Went Back to the Well [Pt 3]

The list, it turns out, is longer than two instalments can hold

Image: Gemini AI-generated

Part two made the case across 10 artists that re-recording is a legitimate creative act — not nostalgia, not contractual housekeeping dressed up as art, but a genuine second look at material that still had something to offer.

But we were only scratching the surface.

So here is more. Ten more artists — most of them icons — who returned to songs they’d already released and found reasons to record them again. The same rules apply: no live versions, no Unplugged treatments, no remixes, no instrumentals, and nothing that simply replicates the original without earning its existence. What counts is whether the new version does something the first one didn’t — shifts the perspective, changes the emotional register, or simply sounds like a different understanding of the same idea.

Not all of them work — many of them don’t — so let’s take a look at why.

AC/DC — Can I Sit Next To You Girl

Before Bon Scott, before the schoolboy uniform became scripture, AC/DC’s first single arrived fronted by a man the Young brothers had already quietly decided didn’t fit. Can I Sit Next To You, Girl is, in that sense, a document of a band still auditioning its own identity. Dave Evans sang lead, ex-Masters Apprentices drummer Colin Burgess kept time, and George Young eventually overdubbed himself on to bass, smoothing over the original parts laid down by founding bassist Larry Van Kriedt. The result peaked at a modest №50 in Australia and vanished almost as quickly, a curio rather than a statement of intent.

What makes it worth revisiting isn’t the performance itself but the contrast it sets up. When Scott took over the following year and the song was re-recorded for the Australia-only T.N.T. and later the international High Voltage, the arrangement tightened, the comma in the title was dropped, and something unmistakably AC/DC clicked into place. Evans’s version, glam-tinged and tentative, plays almost like a rough draft of a band’s future self, captured on tape just before the real story began.

[embed]Source: YouTube

Ryan Adams — This Is It

This Is It first surfaced on *Rock n Roll, an album whose title was less description than dare, and the song wore that brashness accordingly. Heard again on Follow The Lights*, re-recorded with The Cardinals behind him, it’s almost unrecognisable. Where the original lived up to its parent record’s swagger, this version is something gentler entirely, more pastoral, the urgency traded for space and breath.

It’s a useful reminder that Adams has never treated his own catalogue as fixed. Surrounded here by live-in-studio readings and a clutch of new material, the song settles into the loose, unhurried company The Cardinals specialised in, closer in spirit to the same EP’s Easy Tiger leftovers than to anything Rock n Roll attempted. The rougher edges are sanded down, the tempo eases, and what once sounded like a young man itching for a fight now sounds like someone who’s already had it, and made peace. Same words, different weather entirely.

[embed]Source: YouTube

Electric Light Orchestra — Do Ya

Four times now Jeff Lynne has gone back to Do Ya, which suggests either restlessness or genuine conviction that he hadn’t quite nailed it. The first version arrived almost as an afterthought, tucked onto the B-side of The Move’s California Man and somehow becoming the bigger hit in America, a riff this sturdy refusing to stay buried. ELO’s 1976 re-recording for A New World Record wasn’t really about improving the song so much as reclaiming it, after Bev Bevan grew tired of journalists crediting Todd Rundgren’s cover as the original. Then came a *2000 alternate mix on Flashback, unearthed and preferred by Lynne himself over the version everyone already knew. And finally, 2012’s Mr. Blue Sky* re-recording, Lynne the producer turning his perfectionism on his own back catalogue, technology in hand, polishing what was already a hit.

Do ya think that’s enough? Probably not, if history’s any guide. Lynne treats this song less like a fixed artefact than an ongoing argument with himself, and Do Ya keeps giving him reasons to reopen it.

[embed]Source: YouTube

[embed]Source: YouTube

John Fogerty — The Old Man Down The Road

There’s a particular irony in Fogerty being accused of plagiarising himself, but that’s precisely what happened when The Old Man Down The Road became his comeback hit in 1984. Saul Zaentz, the Fantasy Records boss who’d once owned the rights to Fogerty’s own Creedence catalogue, decided the song’s chorus bore an unmistakable resemblance to *Run Through The Jungle*, and took him to court over it.

Fogerty won, guitar in hand, demonstrating to the jury that two songs from the same writer’s pen will often sound like siblings without being identical twins. The case became a landmark, eventually reaching the Supreme Court over the matter of legal fees. But put the records side by side, that swampy, insistent groove, and it’s hard not to hear what Zaentz heard. You be the judge: this is functional swamp rock at its most committed, Fogerty mining a sound so deeply his that even he, apparently, can’t always tell where one vein ends and the next begins.

Postscript: Fogerty would later rejoin Fantasy and on his third solo album for that label included a track called *Creedence Song*.

[embed]Source: YouTube

Bad Moon Rising

Fogerty has now made a habit of returning to the songs he wrote in his twenties, as though the past were a house he keeps finding reasons to revisit. Wrote A Song for Everyone [2013] brought in famous friends, the Zac Brown Band lending Bad Moon Rising an untroubled, faithful reading among the star duets. Fogerty’s Factory [2020] kept it in the family, sons and daughter gathered for lockdown performances that left arrangements largely untouched, Bad Moon Rising delivered with the same low-key warmth as everything around it. And Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years [2025], arriving after he finally reclaimed his publishing rights, frames the song once more, this time as a statement of ownership as much as nostalgia.

Three albums, one song, the same storm rolling back in. You can judge for yourself whether he should have left well enough alone.

[embed]Source: YouTube

[embed]Source: YouTube

[embed]Source: YouTube

Paul McCartney — The Long And Winding Road

There’s a special kind of nerve required to remake a song already mourned by some as the Beatles’ weakest moment, and McCartney managed it anyway on Give My Regards To Broad Street. The new The Long And Winding Road doesn’t just fail to improve on the original; it actively makes the case for never going back. Where The Beatles’ version at least had the Spector-orchestrated melodrama to justify its sentimentality, this remake settles for a cocktail-lounge arrangement so syrupy it sounds piped in from a hotel bar at closing time, the kind of thing aging fans might play between bottles of Scotch and old Sinatra records.

It’s redundancy dressed up as reinvention, McCartney adding nothing and subtracting whatever rawness the song once had. Across the rest of the soundtrack, the pattern repeats: old classics dutifully revisited, none improved, several diminished. This particular remake stands as the clearest evidence that the whole exercise was less artistic necessity than ego on parade.

[embed]Source: YouTube

Van Morrison — Gloria

Few songs have lived as many lives as Gloria. Written by a teenage Morrison and recorded with Them in 1964, it spent its early years as a B-side, modest and overlooked, before the Shadows of Knight’s cover sent it climbing the American charts two years later. Patti Smith then claimed it entirely for herself in 1975, splicing her own poetry into the verses and turning a garage rock riff into something closer to incantation.

Morrison, characteristically, refused to let it become someone else’s property. On 1993’s Too Long In Exile, he revisited it alongside John Lee Hooker, the two trading the song back and forth like old friends finishing each other’s sentences, a sweaty, lived-in reading that owed nothing to nostalgia. It’s the sound of a songwriter reclaiming his own origin story, three decades on, with the blues lineage that shaped the song in the first place standing right beside him.

[embed]Source: YouTube

Streets Of Arklow, So Quiet In Here

Morrison has now mined his own catalogue for duets twice over, a decade apart, and the results suggest diminishing curiosity rather than renewed purpose. Duets: Re-working the Catalogue [2015] promised reinvention but mostly delivered note-for-note repetition with famous names grafted on; *Streets Of Arklow, that hushed Wicklow postcard from Veedon Fleece, gets the same treatment, present in spirit but barely reworked. Nearly a decade later, New Arrangements and Duets [2024] repeats the formula, [So Quiet In Here](https://open.spotify.com/track/7iFsqU5yvxpQv0KW4jL8GF?si=36144a72cf384386)* arriving similarly untroubled by ambition, another deep cut wheeled out and left largely as it was.

Did the Hooker duet, all sweat and genuine collaboration, plant the seed for these later exercises? If so, the lesson didn’t transfer. Both songs sit in their albums exactly as billed: pleasant, professional, forgettable. Like the records that house them, neither reimagining does much for the imagination, Morrison content to revisit rather than rediscover.

[embed]Source: YouTube

[embed]Source: YouTube

Willie Nelson — Bloody Mary Morning

Bloody Mary Morning began life as something quieter than what it would become, a 1970 RCA recording originally titled *Bloody Merry Morning, written while Nelson was wrestling with his own shortcomings as a father. The song went nowhere, as most things on RCA did during those lean years, buried on Both Sides Now* and largely forgotten.

Its second life arrived through circumstance rather than design. Nelson sang it at a Nashville party in 1972, gut-string guitar and a barstool, and impressed Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler enough to land a contract. By the time it resurfaced on 1974’s Phases And Stages, the song had been quietly rewritten in spirit if not always in lyric, repositioned within a concept album charting a divorce from both sides, and recast as a man fleeing Los Angeles for Houston to outrun heartbreak rather than parental guilt. Even the recording itself proved unsettled, scrapped and redone after an A&R man decided the Muscle Shoals sessions sounded too R&B. What emerged was tighter, sadder, and finally a hit, reaching №17 and outliving its own false start entirely.

[embed]Source: YouTube

Paul Simon — Can’t Run But

*Can’t Run But first appeared on 1990’s The Rhythm Of The Saints*, built from the polyrhythmic foundations that defined the album, its melody and lyric shaped around percussion patterns Simon had absorbed in Brazil rather than imposed on them from the outside. It sat comfortably within that record’s adventurous chord work, one current among many in an album steeped in Salvador’s street rhythms.

Nearly three decades later, In The Blue Light gave it a thorough repaint. Working with a chamber ensemble, Simon reimagined the song with a touch of the Psychos about it, a jittery electronic pulse that lets him hear, in his own words, a DJ whose sub-bass feels like an earthquake. It’s a startling update for a song that began life in acoustic, organic terrain, the original’s warm percussive weave traded for something colder and more clinical. Whether it improves on the source is debatable, but it’s certainly the boldest transformation on an album otherwise inclined toward subtlety, proof that Simon’s overlooked catalogue still has surprises left in it.

[embed]Source: YouTube

Sting — Shadows In The Rain

We featured The Police in Part 2 of this series, but Sting wasn’t done with that catalogue just yet. *Shadows In The Rain began life on 1980’s Zenyatta Mondatta*, a dubwise, faintly menacing reggae number, all paranoid atmosphere and clipped tension. It was effective, but unmistakably a Police song, built for three musicians who could bend rhythm and melody around each other without anyone else in the room.

Five years later, launching his solo career with The Dream Of The Blue Turtles, Sting handed the song to a different kind of band entirely, jazz heavyweights including Branford Marsalis and Omar Hakim, and the transformation was total. The spooky original got reborn as a soul-jazz workout, Kenny Kirkland’s organ chords steaming alongside Hakim’s stomp, Sting and Marsalis trading syncopations like seasoned sparring partners. This is one of those rare cases where the remake genuinely outdoes the original, the song finding a muscularity and swing The Police version only gestured toward. Sometimes leaving the band behind is exactly what a song needs.

[embed]Source: YouTube

Roxanne, Message In A Bottle

Sting has now circled back to his own catalogue twice, a decade apart, with markedly different results. Symphonicities [2010 reimagined *Roxanne* as a lush Latin ballad with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra in tow, the kind of radical retooling that only works if the songwriter genuinely believes the original can withstand it. By most accounts, it did, the song’s seedy Parisian origins traded for orchestral sweep without losing its core.

[embed]Source: YouTube

My Songs [2019] attempted something similar but landed with considerably less grace. *Message In A Bottle gets the contemporary refit treatment here, “reconstructed” and “reframed” in Sting’s own words. The results suggest diminishing returns: where Symphonicities found new contexts that illuminated the originals, My Songs* too often flattens them, The Police’s sharper edges sanded down into something closer to easy listening. Not every backward glance improves with age.

[embed]Source: YouTube

Neil Young — Mr Soul

Mr Soul arrived first as a Buffalo Springfield B-side in 1967, born out of genuine crisis, written in a hospital bed after an epilepsy attack that Young, in the moment, believed might kill him. That urgency shaped everything about it, the dark double drop D tuning, the riff borrowed and warped from The Stones’s Satisfaction, the five-minute writing session that suggests a song that simply demanded to exist.

Young has never quite left it alone since. The Trans re-recording, built from drum machines and vocoder at a time he was quietly auditioning for a Springfield reunion that never happened, is the more radical reinvention, stripping the original’s organic dread and replacing it with something colder and more mechanical, oddly fitting for an album already preoccupied with distorted communication.

[embed]Source: YouTube

I’m including Before And After here too, even though it’s technically a live album, because nothing about its presentation suggests one. Recorded across his 2023 tour but assembled into one continuous, unbroken piece, it folds Mr Soul back into solo acoustic terrain, weathered and reflective, the song’s original anxiety softened by five decades of distance.

[embed]Source: YouTube

Related reading

Artists Who Went Back to the Well [Pt 1]

Artists Who Went Back to the Well [Pt 2]