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Cover Me

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Notes

Dave Gahan wrote the song together with Peter Gordeno and Christian Eigner. Depeche Mode have said in interviews (like during the 2016 press conference) that producer James Ford taught himself to play Martin's pedal steel guitar within one day while in the studio, and thus this guitar was used in some songs including 'Cover Me'.

Dave talked about this song extensively to Phil Marriott:

"I wanted ['Cover Me'] to be very cinematic, and I had this sort of idea of us finally destroying this beautiful planet that we live on. Hence the northern lights: it's just one in many millions of beautiful things... the oceans, just things that we take for granted. And the "Northern lights" was just a methaphor that I wanted to use, because I did once experience actually being there while that was happening, way up north in Scandinavia. Yeah [it's quite an emotional experience], and it's also out of the world somehow, quite spiritual, and moving, moving to the point of tears, the beauty of something happening in our universe. And so I had this idea at that time, a little lyrical idea, not really a melody. But anyway, I came back to that, and that became that song. And I also saw the song in two halves, where the second half was where we are finally leaving or something. This person or whoever it is, who I live vicariously through, leaves the planet, only to find another planet that is exactly the same as ours, and he has this horrible feeling of like, "Oh wow, it's not the planet, it's me, I am doing this. I'm destroying this beautiful world that I live in. And that can be just an emotional relationship that you have with another person, or trying to be having a relationship with another person that you can't quite get to because you just can't. And that, for me, is quite often where I find myself with music and songs: I am quite often this other person. Of course it's me, but I can live vicariously through this performer, this guy that I've created, which is me, but a character. And throughout songs and films and books and stuff like that, that's where I get lost. [...] With 'Cover Me', the song that was coming to mind a lot, the feeling of the song that I wanted to get on this, and it's a totally different kind of song, but the feeling that I wanted to get was like Bowie's song 'Life On Mars', where the second half of the song seems to go to another place, or 'Space Odyssey', that kind of feeling. It opens up for you, the listener, to just be able to go off in their own dreams and ideas."

Keyboard programmer Matrixxman said in an interview with Mode2joy.pl:

"Cover Me required some quality time. Maybe there were some other [songs off 'Spirit' too that were difficult to make] but this one stands out in my mind. This particular track Dave wrote initially. He was adamant that we should all try to get busy and „fuck it up” as the kids would say. At first I had a tough time coming up with compelling things for this tune but Dave did a great job of urging us to get weird and creative. James did some really cool tweaking of the voicing of the chords which helped push it in a darker direction. I came up with a sort of Pink Floyd-ish arpeggiated synth pattern that I hummed to Martin and we set about making that. Kurt worked his synth magic as well. Next thing you know, all of the contributions really brought the track to life. It took on this eerie, cinematic quality that wasn’t previously present.

The coda [in the track] was either James [Ford's idea] or Dave’s doing, but creatively speaking, it was an amalgamation of everyone’s talent then and there. I’m happy that the arpeggio thing I contributed helped tie it together. Kurt [Uenala] came up some epic synth stuff as well."

Dates with available recordings of Cover Me

There are currently 42 recordings of Cover Me available.

Dates where Cover Me was played

2017-2018 Global Spirit Tour

Cover Me was played 139 times during this tour.

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