Twenty-Seven Points on "Burning Down The House" by The Cardigans and Tom Jones

I'm a big Talking Heads fan. Well, I say that, but Talking Heads are the kind of band that inspires weird levels of devotion, so let me walk that back. I like Talking Heads a lot.
I also like The Cardigans. And by "I like The Cardigans," I mean what you'd expect me to mean--I love "Lovefool" and whenever it comes on I immediately turn into a drunk sorority girl, complete with leaning-in-to-belt-out-the-chorus and the "WOOHOO" with your drink hand in the air. But I don't know any of the Swedish mid-90s pop giants' other work. I assume they're the historical bridge between ABBA and Robyn, and nobody's ever going to tell me different.
So imagine my shock when I discovered this:

I wasn't even expecting to find this. It came up on my sidebar while I was watching the video for Willy Moon's "Get Up (What You Need)," which, while being a very cool song that makes me want to go run up a mountain like I'm in a Nike commercial, has next to nothing to do with Talking Heads, Tom Jones or The Cardigans.
But find it I did. And my heart made the noise that a jar of pickles makes when you open it for the first time and break the seal. Given my adoration not only for the principals involved in this...thing...but for cover versions of familiar songs, here are 27 points on "Burning Down The House" by The Cardigans and Tom Jones.

1. Given that this is a live performance and I'd never heard this version of the song before, I'd assumed that this was a one-off tribute performance of some kind, like CHVRCHES' Janelle Monae cover. Not so. This was on an album, back in 1999. Reload s...holy crap. This might be the least absurd cover on the whole album.
2. No, seriously. Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy," by Tom Jones and something called Zucchero. This is like Mark Ronson's Version, except it's the direct-to-video remake starring Eric Balfour and James Remar. We are down the rabbit hole, my friends.
3.  I wonder if, since this was released as a radio single, there's a music video.
4. There is. It takes place on a holodeck with a bunch of backup dancers who are either computer-generated or wearing mylar bodysuits or both. 
5. An underrated weird part of this cover is that if you told me beforehand that if these two artists had covered this song in 1999, this is exactly how I'd expect it to sound.
6. That's what I'd expect after I slapped you in the face and called a witch doctor to cleanse my home of evil spirits, because I'm still not entirely comfortable living in a world where this song exists.
7. I've been listening to David Byrne sing these lyrics for more than a decade now, and it's impossible to overstate how much easier Nina Persson and Tom Jones are to understand than David Byrne. 
8. That's even more shocking when you consider that Persson's not a native English-speaker. Jones is Welsh, so he only kinda speaks English, you know what I mean?
9. Finding out Tom Jones is Welsh was more shocking than I'd expected it to be.
10. Tom Jones looks like Bruce Springsteen would if he went to Bruce Jenner's plastic surgeon.
11. I don't care how overproduced her voice is--I could listen to Nina Persson sing for ever and ever. I have a thing for smoky-eyed blondes with airy, vaguely nasally voices. I don't know why. I do know that I kept watching Glee for a full season and a half after it stopped being good, in large part because I am desperately and irretrievably in love with Dianna Agron. Like I almost went to see I Am Number Four in theaters. It's that bad.
12. Now for the real kicker. If you haven't watched the live video yet, do. Because I have never seen more brazen and embarrassing lip-syncing than I'm seeing out of Nina Persson.
13. A lot of the conspiratorially seductive appeal of "Lovefool" has to do with the effects on Persson's voice in that song, which are replicated in "Burning Down the House." Which is cool, but this is a live performance. And maybe they're running her mic through an effects board, but she sings this note-for-note the same way in the studio version, the Top of the Pops performance I embedded above and a third performance, which features the band playing in front of a set made to resemble an actual burning house, because subtlety isn't something the do in Europe, apparently.
14. Maybe she swallowed a Vocoder or something. But she's dancing around and the volume doesn't change at all based on how far her face is from the microphone. Nobody who has pitch control that good would record an album that makes her sound like a sexy robot.
15. Nina Persson is a robot.
16. That's gotta be at least moderately tough on the band, right? Knowing that they've got to be perfect, or else the vocal track's going to be off? Well done by The Cardigans there.
17. But seriously, she's smiling and shit. How can you smile when you're lip-syncing and Tom Jones is over there working his ass off? Seriously--that man's going balls-out on this song. Does she just not feel shame? 
18. This is like a two and a half minute song, in which she spends at least 60 seconds standing there head-bobbing and smirking. And not in the middle of a three-hour concert. One song. Can you not actually sing for 90 seconds? 
19. And this is like her one job. This isn't like Spacehog, where the one guy's singing and playing that awesome bass riff in "In the Meantime" at the same time. This is the opposite of that--she is doing none of the interesting things in this performance instead of all of the interesting things.
20. And look at Tom Jones, dancing himself into a flop sweat. There's a goddamn professional. That dude's old as hell, and you can't give even a noticeable fraction of the effort he's putting out?
21. I looked it up--Jones was 59 when this single came out. Persson was 25. 
22. Tom Jones is the one the women throw their underwear at, right? He deserves all the underwear. No underwear for you, Nina Persson. Not until you do your share of the work.
23. Maybe it's a good thing Tom Jones is putting all his energy into singing, because when he lip-syncs, he makes some terrifying faces. So much of that music video is right up in his face, and it's terrifying. 
24. He's got really scary blue eyes. Kris Bryant blue. Trent Cole eyes.
25. He looks the White Walker version of Bob Gunton.
26. You ever wonder how collaborations like this come together? I want a transcript of the conversation between Tom Jones' agent and The Cardigans' agent. Do you think he even knew who they were before they got to the studio?
27. What do you think David Byrne thinks of this? Eh, who cares. David Byrne is an asshole anyway.