The thing about the cover version that made you hear the original differently is that it doesn't announce itself. You find it by accident, or you don't find it at all.
I've been thinking about this for a while. Not in a systematic way. More the way you think about something when you keep running into it from different directions.
How it starts
The first time I encountered this, I wasn't looking for it. I was looking for something else entirely — the way most good things get found. You're headed somewhere specific and you take a wrong turn and the wrong turn turns out to be the point.
There's a piece on end of 8 that captures something similar — the way the best discoveries are usually adjacent to the thing you were actually trying to do. Worth reading if you have the time.
The specific thing I'm talking about here has a quality that's hard to describe without sounding precious about it. It's not rare, exactly. It's just not where you'd think to look.
What makes it work
The details are the thing. Not the broad strokes — anyone can get those right. The details are where the character lives. The specific way the light falls at a particular time of day. The sound the place makes when it's quiet. The thing that's slightly off in a way that makes everything else feel more real.
I've noticed that the places and things that stay with you are almost always specific in this way. They have a texture that generic versions don't have. You can feel the difference even when you can't articulate it.
The writing on calitoy wares has been getting at something similar from a different angle. The specificity question. What makes a thing feel real versus what makes it feel like a representation of a thing.
What I keep coming back to
The honest answer is that I don't have a theory about this. I have observations. The observations are: the things that matter are usually specific, usually found by accident, and usually resist the kind of explanation that would make them easy to replicate.
That's not a satisfying conclusion. But it's the accurate one.
More at jeremy dean music and calitoy.