Like many people of my vintage, I always knew Matthew Sweet for “Girlfriend” and “Sick of Myself,” a pair of top-notch power-pop songs from his heyday in the 1990s. Sweet has kept busy since then, of course, with a steady stream of albums, including last year’s Catspaw, and other projects (does anyone remember the Thorns, with Pete Droge and Shawn Mullins?). He’s back just in time for Halloween with muscular cover of “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush. It seemed like a clever cover on first listen, and now I can’t stop listening to it.
Bush has had something of a career resurgence lately, thanks to the Netflix show Stranger Things using her song “Running Up That Hill.” That reminded Sweet that he had long ago recorded a demo of “Wuthering Heights,” an altogether stranger, more haunting song. Bush’s version was her debut single, and also appeared on her first album, 1978’s The Kick Inside (co-produced by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour). Based very much on the 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, the song is at heart a ghost story that’s perfect for Halloween.
While her version sounds as cold and desolate as the Yorkshire moors where it’s set, with witch-y vocals that sweep through the song like a chill wind, Sweet’s take is more robust and somehow more melodramatic, if that’s possible for a song about a ghost coming back to the remote farmhouse where the love who spurned her waits. He plays all the instruments on the track except drums, which Ric Menck provided.
“Although Kate’s range for singing is quite high on her version, I had only to sing the song an octave lower in the original key and it worked well for me,” Sweet said in a press release about the cover. “Hopefully somebody out there might enjoy it, and be led back to Kate’s own very special music.”