Swamp Dogg – “Answer Me, My Love”
The great cult soul singer Swamp Dogg is 75 years old, and he’s still pushing his music out into strange new places. On his new album Love, Loss, And Auto-Tune, he teams up with Poliça and Gayngs producer Ryan Olson, experimenting with digital vocal effects and synthetic sounds. That experimentation led to great things on first single “I’ll Pretend,” a duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and, well, it’s still leading to great things.
Swamp Dogg once again works with Vernon on “Answer Me, My Love,” a cover of the classic song popularized by Nat King Cole in 1954 and the second single we’re hearing from the upcoming Love, Loss, And Auto-Tune. Vernon uses the Messina, the hardware-based vocoder rig developed by his engineer Chris Messina, to add his own distorted vocals, and sudden blasts of horns and warped electronics pull the song’s classic R&B off into unexpected directions.
“‘Answer Me, My Love’ is what we call a ‘money record’ and since I need money, I recorded it,” Swamp Dogg hilariously explains in a press release. “You can’t go wrong with a Nat ‘King’ Cole hit! He never recorded a bad song and always got hits. I need to pay some bills.” Amen, Swamp Dogg. Listen to his version of “Answer Me, My Love” below.
Love, Loss, And Auto-Tune is out 9/7 on Joyful Noise. Pre-order it here.