The cover to the original “Imitator” EP

Hear the original and retooled versions of “Imitators”

Listen to the solo work of, say, John Lennon and Paul McCartney - or just about any other musician who used to play with a band - and it’s easy to see the value of collaboration. There are certainly people out there who can go it entirely alone and come up with something brilliant. But I’m continually amazed at how different - and usually better - a work of art is when different minds take hold of it.

You see this a lot in film. Someone writes a script with one vision; a casting agent assigns actors to certain roles and it starts to take on a different shape; then the director pulls it in another direction; the soundtrack, written by someone who may have a completely different vision, changes the project even more; then the editor gets hold of it, tears it apart and puts it back together again with the final product frequently bearing little or no resemblance to the original idea the writer came up with. Remember Groundhog Day? That was written as an existential drama about a man trapped in time before Harold Ramis and Bill Murray took it over thinking, “You know, this could be really funny.”

I’ve been working a lot lately with a friend of mine on some music. He’s a classically trained jazz guitarist and I’m just someone who picked up piano and guitar over the years and figured out how to do desktop mixing on my computer. We’ve both been trying to write songs on our own and while I’ve come up with a few things I’m happy with, I’m the most surprised by the work we’ve done by collaborating. I’ll come up with an idea and it’ll get him to thinking about something completely different, which then makes me think of something completely different and the whole project starts to swirl around until it takes on a distinct shape that’s nothing like anything we would have come up with on our own.

This year he’s been trying to write a song every few weeks and put out an EP each month with a couple other guys. They’re calling the ambitious project or band Hello Come In. For one of their recent EPs my friend wrote a spare, country-flavored tune called “Imitators.” Think early Wilco. To him (and he did write the damn thing), it was an intimate, reflective, mostly upbeat meditation on our search for identity and meaning. I would call it “optimistic” or “hopeful.” But to me, I saw the potential for a lot of darkness. A few days later I had produced a completely different take on the song, taking his stripped-down, swinging tune and turning into a borderline-creepy, electro-pop song with a wash of fuzzy guitars.

The only thing I really flat-out changed in the song is the chorus. My version has a completely different chord progression and I changed the melody. But the vast majority of the song - that is the basic chord pattern, melody and words - is his. I just produced it differently.

For geeks wondering how it’s done, my friend used real instruments for his original version along with real people playing them, like a real-live drummer. For mine, it’s all computer, including the guitars you’ll hear at the end. They’re not real. Neither is the piano. I sang all the parts but processed my voice beyond recognition and layered six different takes. This was all done at my house with a 5 year-old desktop mac.

I can’t say who’s is better. It’s really just a question of taste. I’m not sure who’s version you should listen to first, but here they are:

Imitator - Before (original version)

Imitator - After (my version)