Dave Gahan is no stranger to singing other people’s songs. Although for most of his career, those songs all came from the same source. As the lead singer and frontman for seminal synth-rock outfit …
, Gahan spent his first flush of fame as an interpreter of sorts, using his plaintive, sensual baritone to turn songs written by bandmate Martin Gore into deathless goth-pop anthems, inspiring acts as diverse as Nine Inch Nails, the Deftones and Coldplay. But aside from a few one-offs, he’d never attempted a full album of covers until now.
Gahan says he was initially approached to record a covers album nearly two decades ago, but turned it down. “I didn’t have the confidence, for one,” he says. But also, “when I was approached to do it, it was like, ‘we’ll pick these songs for you, and put these great musicians together for you…’ But I have to have a relationship with the people in the room when I make music.
“Shangri-La was available for most of November, so we used the whole place. We had amp lines running everywhere, little amplifiers and guitars and Wurlitzers and Rhodes everywhere. Singers all over the house. And we took over for just shy of four weeks. It was very important to Rich and I that we were going to track a song a day.”
“Once I’d been singing [these songs] for a couple of months, there was some point in there where I stopped thinking about the originals, and realized I was just singing, the song was just in me,” Gahan says. “Much in the same way, to be honest, that I approached singing Martin’s songs in the band for years. When Martin sends me a song, I have to get to the point with it where I’m singing it in my own way, in my own phrasing, my own timing, and in my own key.