Bella Kaye takes a walk on the dark side, but still wears her sun dress

Born in Chicago, Bella Kaye’s love for singing and performing started at age three. She spent several years as a featured member of the Chicago Children’s Choir, as well as singing solo performances with her school. In 2015, she and her family moved to California to pursue her musical endeavors, following the lead of inspirations she cites such as Taylor Swift (whose track “Ready For It?” is one of Kaye’s most popular covers), Bea Miller, Madison Beer, and Nina Nesbitt. She's also posted impressive covers of challenging tracks like "I Love You" by Billie Eilish and a full music video cover of "Can't Blame A Girl For Trying" by Sabrina Carpenter.

Last year, the local teen (who recently turned 16) wrote and released singles for “Heartache” and “Fake,” followed in November by her debut EP, Reflections. Her originals are catchy, if unremarkable, contemporary pop tunes that are clearly borne of a generation raised on TV star singers, YouTube influencers, and micromanaged social posturing that blurs the line between aspiring and established more indistinct with each passing amateur hour. Her voice is pleasant, even powerful at times, and rarely in need of the Auto-Tune accents that seem to have become mandatory soundboard staples.

Lyrically, she's no lightweight. She might not be a poet, but neither is she likely to turn up onstage with dancing sharks any time soon. Currently touting around 50,000 Instagram followers, a new single called "Missing You" debuted in May that she says is about how someone important to her was unexpectedly taken away, and she wasn’t able to see them due to powers beyond her control. “The longing to be with someone, but being unable to, is difficult to accept, and the shelter-in-place order due to the COVID-19 pandemic made this heartfelt emotion more real,” she says.

Before the pandemic hit, Kaye was starting to land frequent gigs at area venues such as Lestat's, as well as playing the San Diego County Fair in Del Mar and the Orange County Fair, the Adams Avenue Street Fair, Adams Avenue Unplugged, Fiesta Del Sol in Solana Beach, and elsewhere. Performance clips posted online indicate an engaging, if somewhat understated, stage presence, with a flair for guitar melodies that approaches Joni Mitchell-level counterpoint, offering far more aural texture than one might think possible of a young soloist mainly trained as a vocalist.

Her next single is what really caught my attention, an unexpected cover of the Turtles' classic 1960s track "Happy Together." "I wanted to create a musical arrangement that was dark and somber, bringing out an emotion of longing and desire that wasn’t in the original," she says of the single.

I was impressed that she caught onto and expanded upon the actual (and almost always unnoticed) undercurrent of "Happy Together," which is really told from the POV of someone who is NOT happy together with the object of their obsession, but rather wishes they were. What the lyrics really say is "IMAGINE me and you. I do. I think about you day and night. Maybe you don't. But I do. Maybe that's why you got that restraining order against me. But I can't see me loving nobody but you, for all my life, imagine how the world could be...wait, don't hang up..."

However, to finish what might have been a unique and even revelatory take on such a well-known and beloved classic "feelgood" track by then drenching it in this year's favored Lana Del Rey-style floating-on-waves-o-Xanax overproduction just buries the intriguingly dark POV beneath the newest, sparkliest, generic candy gloss, rendering it no different than any other sweet from the cookie cutter. Who's really going to care or even notice if it's hiding a dark chocolate center?

As a result, her version of "Happy Together" comes off like someone who handcrafted a one-of-a-kind birthday present for her lover with a special gift of her own inspiration and construction, but then wrapped that gift in paper and ribbon from a previous - and demonstrably better looking - ex.

I also found myself wondering if the lyrics should have been at least mildly updated, other than blurring the POV's gender. I mean, how much of her intended audience will have a clue what the hell she means by "If I should call you up, invest a dime..." You probably need to have been born in the Stone's age to even know that's a reference to old coin-operated payphones. Someone a good bit older than her probably had to explain the line to Miss Kaye. It's kind of hard to remake a song as your own circa 2020 when you so clearly flag it as springing from the middle of the previous century.

Out of curiosity, I posted Kaye's cover of the Turtles' "Happy Together" to a very active Facebook group of Turtles fans called The Turtles featuring Flo & Eddie, where many posts get 50 to 100 or more comments.

Only two group members posted their reaction. One typed "Not worth the bother," while the other was merely a gif of a bugeyed angry man pointing out at me with quivering rage.

Another Bella Kaye single called “Empty Promises” dropped this month.