trentemøller  Transformer Man

'Transformer Man' by Neil Young

Hey folks,

I cover a very special song by Neil Young for the 'Harbour Boat Trips Vol.2: Copenhagen' compilation that will be released on hfn music in a few months. With the suggestion of Marie Fisker and after long reflection I decided to cover the controversial song 'Transformer Man' from Neil Young's record 'Trans' from 1982. 

Although I’m a huge Neil Young fan, I actually didn’t know about this song until Marie Fisker played it to me when we sat down and thought about some songs that would be fun to cover for the Harbour Boat Trips Mix I was working on. I wasn’t a fan of the song and its sound in the first place, but the melody, especially the hookline, somehow caught me.

The song is quite far away from what I would normally listen to and so it wasn’t an obvious choice and instead I took it as a challenge to see in which direction we could take the song. I thought it could be interesting to get rid of all that disco/vocoder stuff and focus on the song itself and suddenly it shined in new splendor. Marie interprets the song in such a personal way that it feels like, for us at least, it’s nearly a brand new tune. That’s what she’s really good at. I also felt it fits perfectly into the whole mix.