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Music

Beck Covers Elvis's "Can't Help Falling In Love" for 'Resistance Radio,' Because We Must Have Nice Things

The full project hit streaming services this morning.

This Sam Cohen and Danger Mouse-produced Resistance Radio project has been both quietly prescient and sprawlingly ambitious in the run-up to its full release. Pre-1962 pop tracks, handed over to contemporary artists like Angel Olsen, Sharon van Etten, and Benjamin Booker, have been released to coincide with Amazon's The Man in the High Castle series, a show that wonders what might have happened if the Axis powers had won the War. Maybe nobody meant for this to be quite so politically relevant, but we can't help it now.

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The album was released in full today, and you can listen to the whole thing here, but the immediate headline is Beck's cover of Elvis Presley's 1961 classic "Can't Help Falling in Love." There are changes: Beck trades the walking keys for a picked guitar and uses the grand chorus more sparingly, bleeding the harmonies into soft strings. He retains a lot of Presley's original, too, from the brush-stroke drums to the unassuming bass. What stands out above all is Beck's voice, nodding to Presley's deep drama and contradicting his own often straight delivery. It's heartbreaking and lovely and it's good to remember that beautiful things are more important than ever right now.

Listen to the track below and listen in to Noisey on Beats 1 this weekend, where Danger Mouse will be talking about the project.

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