The Greatest Cover Songs of All-time: 8. Natalie Imbruglia - "Torn"

0:03 Caaloroga Shark Media. I'm Garrett Fisher and this is the Hit Maker Chronicles. We're at number eight on our countdown of the top ten best cover songs of all time, as voted by the staff at Kalaroga Shark Media. Last week we talked about Soft Cells Tainted Love, a cover so successful that most people forgot the original existed. This week, we're looking at a cover that goes even further, a cover so successful that most people don't even know it is a cover Torn by Natalie Imbruglia. If you were alive in nineteen ninety seven or nineteen ninety eight, you know this song. That opening guitar riff, that massive, soaring chorus, the music video with Natalie and a white tank top in front of a white wall, singing directly to the camera with that perfect combination of vulnerability and attitude. The song was everywhere. It defined nineties pop, It launched Natalie and Bruglia's career, and for twenty seven years, millions of people have believed it was her song written for her.

1:16 An original composition, It Wasn't Torn was written and originally recorded in nineteen ninety three by a Los Angeles alternative rock band called Edna Swap, and when they released it, nobody noticed. This is the story of how a completely unknown song by a completely unknown band became one of the biggest hits of the nineteen nineties when someone else sang it, and why most people still have no idea. Let's start with Edna Swap. The band was formed in Los Angeles in the early nineteen nineties by Ann Previn and Scott Cutler. Anne was the lead singer and co wrote most of their songs with Scott, who played guitar. They also worked with producer Phil Thornelly, who'd been the bass play for The Cure and had produced records for bands like The Psychedelic Furs. In nineteen ninety three, the three of them wrote a song called Torn. It was an alternative rock song about a relationship falling apart, about feeling disillusioned with someone you thought you knew about the moment when you realize the person you're with isn't who you thought they were. The lyrics captured that specific kind of heartbreak where it's not that the person changed, it's that you finally saw them clearly. Edna Swap recorded Torn and included it on their nineteen ninety five self titled album on East West Records. The album came out, the song was there, and almost nobody heard it. Edna Swap wasn't a commercial band. They were too alternative for mainstream radio, too polished for the grunge scene, too earnest for the

2:49 irony drenched indie world. They had a small following in Los Angeles, played clubs, made music they believed in, but they weren't breaking through. Torn wasn't a single, It wasn't promoted. It was just track seven on an album that got some nice reviews and sold a few thousand copies. That should have been the end of the story. Edna Swap wrote a good song, recorded it, released it, and it disappeared into the void, like thousands of other songs every year. But here's where it gets interesting. Phil Thornally, the producer and co writer, was still well connected in the international music industry, and in nineteen ninety five he pitched Torn to a Danish singer named Liz Cirnson. She recorded it in Danish, called it Brent which means burned, released it as a single in Denmark, and it was a hit, A legitimate hit. It charted in Denmark. People in Denmark knew the song. Then, in nineteen ninety six, a Norwegian singer named Tryne Rhine recorded it in English. Her version was closer to what would eventually become the Natalie Imbruglia version, more pop, less alternative rock built around that soaring chorus.

4:00 Tran's version was released in Norway and several other European countries. It charted. It was successful in Scandinavia. The song was starting to prove itself, starting to show that it had hit potential if it was arranged correctly and sung by the right person. But it still wasn't a global phenomenon. It was a Scandinavian success. Most of the world had never heard it. And then Phil Thornalley got a call about a young Australian actress who wanted to become a singer. Natalie Imbruglia was twenty two years old. She'd been acting on the Australian soap opera Neighbors, the same show that had launched Kylie Minogue's career a decade earlier. She'd moved to London in nineteen ninety six and signed with RCA Records, looking to transition from acting to music. The label was looking for songs for her debut album. They wanted something that would work at radio, something with a big chorus, something that could make her a star in a market that was extremely skeptical of actresses t trying to become singers.

5:01 Phil Thornalley played them Torn, not the Edna swap version, the trin rain version, which had the pop arrangement, but still felt like it needed something, a different vocal approach, a different energy. They thought Natalie could sing it. She had the voice for it. Young, vulnerable, but with enough power to sell the emotion. They brought her into the studio with Phil Thornally producing, and when Natalie Imbruglia sang Torn, something click. Her voice had this quality, part fragile, part defiant that made the song feel personal in a way the previous versions hadn't. She wasn't over singing it, she wasn't trying to belt her way through it. She was just telling the story of someone who'd been blindsided by seeing the truth about someone they loved. The arrangement was perfect, acoustic guitar opening building to electric guitars and drums, that massive chorus that felt both intimate and huge at the same time. The production was polished but not overproduced. It sounded like a hit. RCA released Torn as Natalie im Bruglia's debut single in October nineteen ninety seven. It entered the UK Singles Chart at number two, then it climbed to number one in multiple countries around the world. In the United States, it peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot one hundred airplay chart and number forty two on the main Hot one hundred, which at that time was still heavily weighted toward physical sales and import singles

6:32 were expensive, but on radio it was number one. It was the most played song in America, and it stayed on the charts for months. In the UK, it spent eleven weeks in the top ten. In Australia, her home country, it was number two for six consecutive weeks. The song was certified platinum in the US, multi platinum in the UK and Australia. It became the most played song on Australian radio. Nineteen ninety eight, it won an MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist. It was nominated for multiple brit Awards and ARIA Awards, and everywhere you went radio, MTV, VH one parties, clubs, shopping malls. You heard Torn, that opening guitar line, that voice, that chorus. Natalie Imbruglia became a household name overnight. Her debut album, Left of the Middle went multi platinum. She was on magazine covers, She was a pop star, and almost nobody knew she was singing someone else's song We'll be right back. Here's the thing about Torn that makes it number eight on our countdown.

7:53 It's not just that Natalie's version became more successful than the original. It's that the original was so unknown that her version replaced it entirely in the cultural consciousness with Tainted Love. Most music fans eventually learned it was a cover. With MadWorld, people who cared enough could find the Tears for Fears original and understand the transformation. But with Torn, most people never even questioned whether it was original. Why would they. It was Natalie and Bruglia's debut single. It launched her career. It sounded like it was written specifically for her. The emotion in her voice, the way the lyrics matched her public persona as this young woman navigating heartbreak and self discovery. It all felt authentic and original.

8:42 The fact that Scott Cutler and Previn and Phil Thornally had written it four years earlier for a different band that nobody had heard of. Was trivia a footnote something you'd learned from VH one's pop up video or from reading album liner notes, if you were the kind of person who did that. For most listeners, Torn is Natalie and Bruglia's song, not because she wrote it, but because she made it hers. Her voice defined it. Her performance became the definitive version. When people think of the song, they think of her. And here's what's complicated about that. Edna SWAP's version is good. It's a well written, well performed alternative rock song. If it had gotten the right promotion, if it had landed at the right radio station at the right time, if any number of factors had broken differently, maybe it could have been a hit. But it wasn't arranged as a hit. It was arranged as an album track for an alternative rock band. The tempo was slightly different, the production was grungier, rougher around the edges. Anne Previn sang it beautifully, but she sang it like someone in an alternative rock band in the mid nineties with a certain detachment, a certain coolness. Natalie sang it like someone who was living through the heartbreak in real time, like she just realized she'd been lied to, just understood that the person she loved wasn't real, just felt the floor drop out from under her. That vulnerability made all the difference, and the arrangement. Phil Thornelly knew how to produce a hit.

10:14 He'd been learning from the Trine Rain version, understanding what worked and what didn't. By the time they got to Natalie's version, he knew exactly how to build it. Start intimate, Build, gradually, hit that chorus like an emotional release, pull back for the verses, build again, make the whole thing feel like a journey from confusion to clarity. That's the craft of pop songwriting and production. The song was always good, but it took the right arrangement and the right voice to unlock its potential as a global hit. Edna Swap continued making music for a few more years. They released more albums, they toured, but they never had a hit of their own. The closest they came was writing a song that someone else turned into a phenomenon, and Preven has talked about it in interviews Over the years, She's been gracious about it, acknowledging that Natalie's version introduced the song to millions of people who never would have heard it otherwise. She's collected substantial royalties from it. Torn became one of the most played songs of the late nineties, which means significant performance writes income for the writers. But there's also a bittersweetness to it. You write a song, you record it, you believe in it, and then you watch someone else sing it and become famous for it while your version remains unknown.

11:31 That's the strange economics of songwriting. You can be wildly successful financially while remaining completely anonymous artistically. Natalie Imbruglia has always been upfront about Torn being a cover. She's never claimed to have written it. She's credited the writers and interviews in liner notes. But the reality is that for most casual listeners, the question never even comes up. They hear the song, they associate it with Natalie, and they move on. That's not deception, that's just how pop music works. Most people don't read credits. Most people don't think about who wrote what. They hear a song, they connect with it, and they associate it with whoever's singing it. In the streaming era, you can actually see this play out in the data. Natalie and Bruglia's version of Torn has hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify. Edna SWAP's original has a tiny fraction of that. Most people clicking on Torn don't even know there's another version to choose from. The song has been covered dozens of times since Natalie's version became a hit. There was a viral clip in the two thousands of a guy named David Armand doing a literal interpretation of the lyrics in a comedy sketch, which introduced the song to a new generation. The song remains a karaoke staple, a nineties nostalgia classic, a song that defines a particular moment in pop music history, and that moment belongs to Natalie Imbruglia, not to Edna Swap. The

13:02 song exists in two completely separate contexts, the original, which is a piece of nineties alternative rock history that almost nobody knows, and the cover, which is one of the defining pop songs of the late nineties. That's why Torn is number eight on our countdown, because it represents the ultimate example of a cover completely replacing the original in popular culture, because it proves that the best version of a song isn't always the first version. Because it shows that sometimes a song is waiting for years for the right voice, the right arrangement, the right moment to unlock its potential. Edna Swap wrote a great song in nineteen ninety three. Natalie Imbruglia made it a timeless classic in nineteen ninety seven. Both things can be true, but only one of them is remembered. This is Garrett Fisher, and this is the hitp Maker Chronicles. Join us next Sunday for number seven on our countdown of the top ten best cover songs of all time.