Mariah often throws a cover on to the latter halves of her albums. Some are wildly successful, like her cover of Prince's "The Beautiful Ones" on Butterfly. Some are less inspired ("I Want to Know What Love Is," MOAIA). Since it's 2014 release, I've thought that Me...I am Mariah: The Elusive Chanteuse contains one of her finest covers: George Michael's "One More Try." As I've written in these pages before, one of the most gratifying aspects of this song is that M retains the male identity found in the lyrics, i.e. not changing "uptown boy" to "uptown chick" or something ridiculous like that.
Since George Michael's passing this song has been on my mind, and I discovered this lovely fan-made "duet" on YouTube that lays the two vocal tracks over each other. You can hear how closely she hews to the original in the first verse, with slightly more alteration (although still very faithful) in the second verse. And her interpolations during the break are spot-on in emulating the song's tone while putting her original spin on it. It's really unexpectedly lovely to hear these versions together. Enjoy.
