What Natasha Khan Does to Other People’s Songs

Natasha Khan has a talent for making other people’s songs feel like they were always waiting for her voice. Her cover of Kings of Leon’s Use Somebody—already emotionally direct in its original form—gets stripped back to something more private and unsettled. And Springsteen’s I’m on Fire, barely two minutes of coiled longing and slow menace, turns out to fit her gothic sensibility the way it fits the Jersey Turnpike: completely, instinctively.

Daniel had already done the convincing work—that synth build, the way it converts a male name into something mythological, something half-remembered from a film you can’t quite place. The remix that paired Bat For Lashes with The Cure was a logical union of two acts trafficking in the same dark romanticism, different decades, same emotional frequency.

What Khan does with covers is what the best interpreters do: she doesn’t outperform the original, she relocates it. Use Somebody in her hands becomes less a cry across a crowded room and more something said quietly into the middle distance, to nobody in particular. Which, honestly, is the better reading of the song.