With June shaping up as an excellent month for new album releases, I’m in between jotting together a few potential reviews at the moment. As these albums require more detailed listening and examination for the sake of an informative dissection, I’m often lacking the time to hear many other 2015 releases at the same time. What I often do in this case is stockpile a handful of EPs, for the obvious reasons that they take less time to listen to. By pure coincidence, I came across 3 consecutive EPs last week that were all acoustic based. For the record, I enjoyed all three, which were recorded by Pvris, Brigades and State Champs.

I recall looking at the track-listing for the State Champs EP (titled ‘The Acoustic Things’) and being disappointed that only one of my highlights from their album ‘The Finer Things’ was included. Yet, upon listening to the 7 included tracks, I found that the tune ‘Simple Existence’ stood out. I wondered why I had not included that as an LP highlight, so I went back and listened to the electric version. The answer was simple? The acoustic version was better!

Without harping on the pop-punk goes acoustic factor, it reminded me of a couple of years back when I was listening to the discography of (arguably middling) Massachusetts quintet A Loss For Words. Sure, they have a knack for a catchy hook, but so does 90% of pop-punk bands. The fact that they have released a duo of ‘Webster Lake’ acoustic EPs probably should tell them something. In one case, they absolutely blew one of their own originals (‘Finite’) out of the water by involving We Are The In Crowd’s Taylor Jardine.

But the aforementioned bands are all small-fry in the grand scheme of things. So it got me to thinking of what are some of the best and most famous examples of musicians who have recorded an acoustic version of their own song, which betters the original. It’s actually a tricky proposition, because I find myself instantly drawn to originals that were fantastic in their own right. Songs such as Foo Fighters’ ‘Everlong’, Breaking Benjamin’s ‘Diary of Jane’ and (controversially) Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’. The other thing that comes to mind is the ‘MTV Unplugged’ series from the early 90s, which especially gave greater credibility to grunge and alt-rock bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Live and Alice In Chains.

And then, of course, there’s ‘Everchanging’; the highlight from Rise Against’s 2001 debut ‘The Unraveling’. “Have you ever been a part of something that you thought would never end… and then of course it did”.

Ok, enough with the videos because I’m no expert… So let’s have a discussion: What is your favorite version of an acoustic song that betters the original, where both were performed by the same artist? Let me reiterate that last condition by ruling something like ‘Hurt’ by Johnny Cash out of eligibility. I see that more as a cover version, which sounds like a whole different discussion topic (“Coming Soon” to a fantastic website near you).

As they say at the end of those dreaded English essays: DISCUSS…..