I just heard the Nina Persson cover of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”, and it brought me back to 1991, me as a 13 year old, a freshly minted teenager. I can’t say I grew up immediately loving indie rock music: the first album I bought, really, was Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl.

But then I entered secondary school, and nicely timed with my entry into adolescence was the coming of two albums that changed my musical tastes: R.E.M.’s Out of Time, and Nirvana’s Nevermind. And slowly it came to me, that music could be multi-layered, could be lyrically challenging, could be about despair and the whole range of human emotions.

Which is not to say that good disposable pop like the Sugababes doesn’t have a place on my iTunes list. But some songs of angst will always be the songs of my youth.

As for Persson’s version of the song itself? Persson is capable of much better singing, I think - obviously, her work with the Cardigans is excellent, and I’ve been a fan of some of the stuff she did with A Camp. But this take doesn’t have the end-of-one’s-rope hope/despair mix that the R.E.M. original does, and it’s much the poorer for it.