“Monkey Dance is a cover of a relatively obscure song by T-Bone Burnett, who has long been my favorite music producer.

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I’m not sure when I first learned about him, but I’d bet it was when I saw his name as producer on Sam Phillips’s Cruel Inventions. It blew me away at the time, and that has lost none of its power in the decades that followed.

I do know that Talking Animals was my first exposure to Burnett’s own music — a great, if at times unusual, album.

“Monkey Dance” is on that album.

The point, of course, is not to improve on the original. That would be crazy talk. Burnett is a genius, both as an artist and as a producer. Further, the album was mixed by Tchad Blake, one of the greatest mixers out there (he’s also my favorite).

And me? This is all a learning experience. I’m improving, for sure, but there are a lot of flaws in my version.

Still, I hope that my cover is a bit like a good film adaptation: one that (as I said in my review of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein) honors the original, embracing enough of it to be recognizable and familiar while offering enough variation to create surprise and wonder.

You can judge that for yourself, if that interests you; here’s the original:

Or you can just enjoy my cover (I hope!?) on its own terms.