Back in 2018, Double J called Paul Dempsey “arguably Australia’s own Patron Saint of Covers”.
Last year, The Music dubbed him “Australia’s King of Covers”.
They’re lofty titles for the unassuming frontman of Melbourne alt-rock band Something For Kate, a trio that boasts five top five albums, 11 ARIA nominations, and 14 entries in triple j’s Hottest 100 to their name.
But outside of Something For Kate, and even outside his own two much-loved original solo albums and his recent ’80s-inspired collaboration with Powderfinger frontman Bernard Fanning (Fanning Dempsey National Park), Dempsey has developed a formidable side-hustle playing other people’s songs.
And he does them so well that critics are bestowing sainthoods and royal titles upon him.
“It’s subjective, isn’t it?” Dempsey said, laughing at the lofty nicknames.
Why is Paul Dempsey so good at playing covers?
“It’s very nice that people enjoy my cover versions, but I’m just playing songs I genuinely love, and trying to do them justice in my own, very stripped back, solo acoustic fashion.”
From Taylor Swift to The Clash
So where did this reputation come from?
For some, it was Dempsey’s 2014 internet-igniting cover of Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball, which still accumulates reaction videos online from baffled but awed American YouTubers.
For triple j listeners, it may have been Something For Kate’s Like a Version of Taylor Swift’s Cardigan or Calvin Harris and Florence Welsh’s Sweet Nothing, or Dempsey’s take on Middle Kids’s Edge Of Town, all of which made it into the Hottest 100 Like a Version countdown in 2023.
Something for Kate’s Paul Dempsey performing live in the triple j studios for one of his many Like A Version contributions.
But diehard Something For Kate fans know to dig deeper. The band’s history is littered with killer covers of songs by Duran Duran, Bruce Springsteen, Blondie, The Clash, Midnight Oil, Jebediah, Divinyls and dozens more (those who dig really deep might even strike gold with their acoustic take on Christina Aguilera’s Genie In A Bottle).
Whatever the entry point, Dempsey made it a proper side-hustle by doing an all-covers album in 2013, called Shotgun Karaoke.
A sequel, Shotgun Karaoke Vol. II, came out last year, and a sellout capital city tour followed.
Dempsey is about to hit the road for a 20-date regional tour, his biggest non-metro jaunt since Something For Kate’s early days, songs from Jeff Buckley and REM to Cher and Don Henley are likely to get an airing.
But what makes his covers so cherished that they attract widespread acclaim, reaction videos and sell-out shows?
It’s all about fun
Dempsey said there was no common thread through the songs he chose to cover.
“It’s a pretty eclectic mix of songs, so it’s hard to identify a thread,” he said.
“The simple thread is that they’re all songs that I love.
“I’m purely having fun. I’m not trying to make a science out of it.
“I don’t really go hunting around for candidates — sometimes I’m in the supermarket and some one-hit wonder from the ’80s comes over the PA and you just go ‘God, this is a good song’ and you hear something in it that maybe you hadn’t heard before and you just realise it might be fun to have a go at.”
Something For Kate have a great back catalogue of covers dotted among their many releases over the past couple of decades. (Daniel Boud)
And when he “has a go”, he sticks to a set of rules — it’s just his voice, his trusty acoustic guitar, and the cover has to be in the same key as the original.
“So if I just can’t hit the notes, then it’s not gonna happen, and that’s the only reason why I haven’t covered (Pat Benetar’s) Love Is A Battlefield yet,” Dempsey said.
Despite a phenomenal vocal range — seriously, check out his covers of Grant Lee Buffalo’s Mockingbirds, or Cher’s If I Could Turn Back Time — he said there were “sadly … plenty of notes I can’t hit”.
“I love Julianna Hatfield, she’s one of my favourite songwriters ever, and there are so many of her songs that I would love to reinterpret, but she just has a very, very high voice and my range is not getting there,” Dempsey said.
But his rule of only playing songs in their original key hints at what may be his secret weapon.
The secret weapon
Dempsey said he has “somewhat perfect pitch”, which makes it difficult to deviate from the original.
“I remember the [original] key, and even if I’m just walking around doing something else, when I hear music in my head, I hear it in the key that I [originally] heard it in,” he said.
“Deviating from that just makes me feel a bit nauseous.
“When I hear other covers that have been transposed into different keys from the original, it makes the hair on the back of neck stand up.”
Even more than that, Dempsey’s perfect pitch means figuring out the chords and melody lines of a song is shockingly easy.
Paul Dempsey is taking his second Shotgun Karaoke album to regional Australia. (Double J)
“When I hear music, I know what chords are being played without having to pick up an instrument, for the most part,” he said.
“So in being able to do that I can hear a song and go, ‘Well it’s that chord, then that chord and that chord’.”
The thing that can take the longest for Dempsey is working out how to turn multiple musical elements into something one human can play on one guitar.
For a song like Don Henley’s Boys Of Summer, which Dempsey regularly introduces as “the greatest song of all time”, it means playing a synth line, a lead guitar part, and the chords of the song, all at the same time.
Paul Dempsey has a set of rules for his solo acoustic covers. (Double J)
“Probably the trickiest thing in the set at the moment is maybe Losing My Religion — that took me a minute because you have to have that mandolin part, you have to have the chugging rhythm guitar, and the bass is also doing these really important melodic movements, so I had to figure out a way to do all that at the same time,” Dempsey said.
“It’s fun, it’s a puzzle.
“When I figured out a way to do it that worked, I was like ‘OK, this is tricky on the hands and now I have to sing it at the same time’, but I just practised and then you go, ‘That’s kinda fun — that’s cool!’
“I remember when I was a kid I went and saw Tommy Emmanuel play.
“He sounds like five people playing at the same time, so I knew it was possible.
“And I’m not comparing myself to Tommy Emmanuel, but he certainly inspired me [in] that you can play the guitar in such a way that you are being more than just a guitarist in some sense.”
‘A good song is a good song’
Another secret to Dempsey’s song-covering success is his ability to strip a song to its core elements and hold it up to the light for re-examination — that he can take something like Life On Mars? by David Bowie, remove Rick Wakeman’s “massive incredible piano part” and the song’s “huge orchestral arrangement” and make it work with just an acoustic guitar.
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“I think maybe it helps people find a different appreciation for just how well constructed the song is, that it doesn’t even need all the bells and whistles,” he said.
“That’s kind of why I also like doing it in this strictly bare bones way, because it’s illustrative of really good songwriting.”
And while some people might be shocked to see an alt-rock ’00s hero playing Cher or Miley Cyrus, Dempsey is adamant “a good song is a good song”.
“The way I hear music, the way I feel music, I don’t draw massive distinctions,” he said.
“It hits me in a place or it doesn’t, and I can be hit by Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits or Miley Cyrus or Cher or Black Flag or Slayer or Dire Straits or Metallica or death metal or reggae.
“I don’t need any further analysis than that, and I get really bored really quickly when people start getting opinionated about music.
“Who cares? It either hits or it doesn’t. It’s all just there to be enjoyed.
“And it’s not a competition. There’s enough room in the world for a lot of different kinds of music and for everybody to play what they want to play and listen to what they want to listen to.”
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But with all that said, is there a band he would never try to cover?
Dempsey conceded that Washington punks Fugazi, one of his favourite bands of all time, might be too sacred to reinterpret.
“There’s something completely unique about Fugazi, which is why I love them so much,” he said.
“I haven’t tried [to cover them] … I think it would be folly.”
Paul Dempsey’s Shotgun Karaoke Vol. II regional tour kicks off on May 1 and covers Victoria, Tasmania, NSW, Queensland, ACT and Western Australia.