Donovan, a Halifax expat now working out of Los Angeles, has spent a career refusing to sit still: stage hypnotist, improv comic, classically trained pianist with a weakness for the seedier corners of showbiz history. That restlessness serves him well here. He treats "No More Tears" less as a song to be covered than a text to be interrogated, teasing out the paranoia and menace buried under Osbourne's original swagger and letting it curdle into something closer to noir. The multi-part structure that made the 1991 original such an odd, sprawling beast becomes, in Donovan's hands, a series of connected rooms — each one a little stranger than the last, each one lit differently, none of them quite trustworthy.

Producer Emerson Dameron deserves equal billing. The pairing is a genuinely symbiotic one: two eccentric sensibilities rubbing against each other until sparks fly rather than cancel out. The arrangement favours space over volume, letting piano and brushed percussion do the work that distorted guitar once did, and the effect is unnerving in the best possible sense — a song famous for its bombast reimagined as something that creeps rather than crashes.

What could easily have curdled into novelty or pastiche instead reads as genuine homage. Donovan clearly reveres Osbourne's original — you can hear it in the care taken over the melodic bones, in the way the vocal phrasing nods to the source without aping it — and his stated hope, that listeners might discover the 1991 track through this detour, rings true rather than merely diplomatic. This is not deconstruction for its own sake. It is a love letter written in a foreign alphabet.

The timing carries its own quiet gravity, too. Recorded before Osbourne's death and released after it, the single now plays as something closer to elegy than experiment, though nothing in the performance leans on that fact for sentiment. Donovan is far too wry an artist to go looking for easy poignancy; he simply lets the song's inherent strangeness do the emotional heavy lifting, and it does.

Donovan has spoken of building his own "weird little Musical Neighbourhood of Make Believe," populated by the ghosts of Brecht, Brel, Hammerstein, and Oscar Levant, and "No More Tears" feels like a fully furnished room within it — draughty, theatrical, faintly haunted. It is a cover that trusts its listener to follow it somewhere unfamiliar, and rewards that trust handsomely. Not every reimagining of a metal classic needs a string section and a smoky room to justify itself, but this one earns both, and then some.