Run Remedy – aka Robin Koob – grew up on rock radio. But the Manchester-based, New Jersey native’s reworking of Jessie’s Girl totally transforms an FM classic. Steve Morgan tunes in to an artist exploring boundaries
There are covers and there are covers. Then there’s Run Remedy’s Jessie’s Girl, which gives Rick Springfield’s eighties soft-rock tale of unrequited love a sapphic spin as brilliantly executed as it is unexpected. Backed by a hilarious video, almost a frame-for-frame match of the 1981 original, singer Robin Koob blurs gender – her protagonist, Jessie and partner, are all female – the song’s key and tempo, and just about everything in between.
Released on 12th February – perfectly timed for both Galentine’s and Valentine’s Day – Koob is keen to point out that her playful update is a love letter to a childhood favourite.
Growing up in New Jersey, Springfield’s deathless power ballad was a soundtrack staple.
“It’s on the radio constantly,” Koob laughs. “From before I was born, to now when I go back home and turn on the local station – Classic Rock Radio 95.1, WAYV – it’s the same 100 songs that have always been played. Within an hour or two, Jessie’s Girl – or Steve Miller’s The Joker – will be played.”
Despite relentless exposure to Great Man theory, “the canon that I’ve seen in every area of music history that I’ve studied,” Koob’s not getting mad. In fact, she’s having a laugh while trying to even the odds. In her hands Springfield’s song takes on a completely fresh feel. It’s quite a makeover.
“It’s a mixed emotion,” she admits. “I’ll go back home and I’ll be fist-pumping the air to it – I love the song. When I was a kid, dealing with all of the queer anxiety, the gay panic, I heard it – and Don Henley’s Boys Of Summer – and in my head, they were about queerness. I know they’re not at all, but I was translating the lyrics – “Where can I find a woman like that?” So, this is tongue in cheek, but with an element of truth.”
She certainly isn’t holding Springfield’s feet to the fire nearly half a century on.
“You can look at that video now and it might seem like a parody viewed through the modern lens of morality,” she says. “But there’s something so honest and unpolished about that cheesy time – you can drive yourself crazy over-analysing it now. It’s a universal song about yearning and envy, feeling lonely, wanting something you can’t have.”
The song also had a message for the young Koob. “I saw a lot of girls I had crushes on who were maybe straight, maybe not, and I knew all of those feelings had to be pushed down, and I couldn’t acknowledge them – so in a funny little way, even at the time, I was like: ‘Rick Springfield! You hear me, man!’ This is not spite – I’m taking it and making it my own because I love it, not because I’m mad,” she adds. “I’ve always had a genuinely soft spot for cheesy, cock-rock stuff – my first concert was Weird Al (Yankovic). So, I might do another one in this vein…” She breaks into The Cars’ Just What I Needed. “I’m coming for The Cars next!”
Across Zoom on a damp squib of a Saturday morning, Koob is highly engaging company, an artist immersed in her work on all levels. And there are plenty of them. A classically trained violinist, or ‘string slut’ as she puts it, hers is a familiar face on Manchester’s music scene, bending her bow in the service of sessions – be they live or studio.
In her own right fronting Run Remedy, last year’s debut album Xtian Skate Night was a beautifully bittersweet collection of autobiographical tales centring on Koob’s journey of sexuality and self-discovery, love and loss against a Christian (hence Xtian) upbringing. This is a heart that has known darkness: blistering live show-stopper Kerosene details a real-life, near-death teenage car crash.
“The kind of thing,” she says, “that can destroy or free you. That realisation of how short life is brings me joy and feeds everything I do – it has done since I was 15.”
Intense as that sounds, Koob’s confessionals are stuffed with singalong melodies, the ideal backdrop for vocal acrobatics that switch effortlessly between swoops, soars and whispers.
If a comparison with an artist such as CMAT seems lazy, it’s no stretch to join the dots. Sisters doing it for themselves – and others – with a tacit understanding of what it is to be human, dragging flaws or fuckups into the light and owning them with a wide grin. It’s a charming disposition; a celebration of not always being OK but rolling with the punches.
“I think so many of us have those thoughts,” Koob says. “They feel very personal, but when you let them out, you’re surprised. Like when you’re a kid in a classroom and you ask a question, you know somebody else is probably thinking of asking it, too. I think that’s the same kind of resonance with songwriting. If I’m feeling this way, then probably other people are.”
Jessie’s Girl is good enough to cut through the noise. When not balancing the books teaching Chinese corporate culture to French marketing teams by day, Koob is putting the finishing touches to the follow-up to Xtian Skate Night. “I’m calling it Almost Right,” she says. “It’s got themes of a similar nature – it’s an explanation of stages in life that are always in process, be they friendships, dealing with grief, or long-term love. Life is hard, but isn’t it beautiful? Trying to find that sweet spot between pain and hope. You’re never done!” It sounds like she’s just getting started. To paraphrase Rick Springfield, where can we find more women like this?
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You can find Run Remedy here: Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Facebook
All words by Steve Morgan. You can read more of Steve’s work here.
Steve is also on BlueSky and Instagram
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