A few weeks back, we alerted you, the loyal Vulture reader, that Shane MacGowan thumbed his way to the “Cooler Than Cool†section of his Rolodex and made some calls to his famous friends to see who would be interested in joining him on a charity single for Haiti. Well, it turns out that Johnny Depp, Nick Cave, Chrissie Hynde, and Bobby Gillespie, among others, picked up the phone and got themselves to a London studio to record a cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s seminal “I Put a Spell on You.†The result is pretty much the antithesis of the ego-driven and self-aggrandizing awfulness of the “We Are the World†sessions; rather than haphazardly collecting a mix of flavor-of-the-month MP3 pushers (Bieber, T-Pain) and publicity-hungry gazillionaire lionesses (Streisand, Dion) in a pricey studio where the craft-services bill alone likely reached into five figures, a few badasses decided to get together in a tiny room for a few hours to lay down a no-nonsense track that will hopefully raise some dough for a good cause. Bravo!
Shane MacGowan, Johnny Depp, Nick Cave, Chrissie Hynde & Friends - “I Put A Spell On You†(For Haiti) [Stereogum]