Apr 012024
Mar 292024
‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.
Sheryl Crow is having a real moment. After years of being (unfairly) dismissed as music for moms in minivans, her cool credentials have been ratcheted up in recent years through praise by younger singers who grew up hearing her songs. Just last week, Olivia Rodrigo invited Crow onstage to sing “If It Makes You Happy.” Covers have flown in from Phoebe Bridgers, HAIM, Soccer Mommy, and any number of other hip young female singers. And—oh yeah—she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last fall.
For the Rock Hall induction, we did a feature on Crow, but devoted our big Best Covers Ever: Rock Hall Edition list to Kate Bush. But Crow’s got a new album out today, so we wanted to dedicate one to her now. A few of the covering artists we feature below are her contemporaries (and one is several generations older), but a large portion of the list comes from Millennials and Gen Z singers. That’s where the Sheryl energy is coming from these days, and they’ve given us a ton more great Crow-vers (sorry) than existed even a few years ago.
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Oct 202023
In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.
Tom Petty (10/20/50 – 10/2/17) was clearly one of the good guys, with little but praise of and for him following his untimely death, 18 days shy of his 67th birthday. Possibly going a little too hard celebrating the end of the Heartbreakers’ 40th anniversary tour, he took that one toke over the line and died of an accidental drug overdose. What a waste, just say no, etc etc. (To be fair, intractable pain from a fractured hip and his emphysema were each also weighing heavy at the time.)
Petty was no stranger to cover versions, over his lengthy career, initially with the later revived Mudcrutch, but predominantly with his own band, 13 albums as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and 4 under his own name alone, there are a few, mainly across his myriad live albums. Today, though, we are to celebrate covers by others of his own songs, but it would be churlish not to take at least a nod at his rendition of Lucinda Williams’ “Change The Locks” or his version of the UK one hit wonder “Something In The Air,” originally by Thunderclap Newman.
A Tom Petty song was seldom comparable to the work of others, or transferable, that much, to other styles, mainly down to the idiosyncrasy of his vocal style, a high pitched nasal whine. My apologies to anyone put off by that overly clinical description of his voice, for, in full flight, it was a rousing and rallying instrument of power and promise. Still is. But it would somehow be remiss not to comment on the one very similar singing style, especially given the reception of the debut single from Petty and his team…
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Sep 292023
Al Green — Perfect Day (Lou Reed cover)
It’s been 15 years since the last Al Green album. Does “Perfect Day” signal the beginning of his comeback? Unclear — I thought so after his last single, another cover, and that was five years ago. But we can hope. “I loved Lou’s original ‘Perfect Day’—the song immediately puts you in a good mood,” Green explained. “We wanted to preserve that spirit, while adding our own sauce and style.” Continue reading »
Aug 042023
Cover Classics takes a closer look at all-cover albums of the past, their genesis, and their legacy.
Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska confounded a lot of people when he released it in 1982. Probably still does, especially among recently converted followers. I mean, how do you explain it someone who’s yet to hear it? I tried in my book Heart of Darkness: Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, writing this:
Nebraska is raw, primitive, ancient, otherworldly, spiritual, nihilistic, heartbreaking, horrifying and a whole bunch of other things that come to you like apparitions whenever you enter its province (ideally under cover of darkness)….And like the great films and the great novels, it holds up well. It holds up well because it still has something to teach us about ourselves and the world we live in, and maybe even the world beyond this one.
Just as Springsteen was inspired by Woody Guthrie and Flannery O’Connor and Night of the Hunter and Suicide and Terrence Malick and Martin Scorsese on Nebraska, so too has Nebraska become a touchstone for artists of myriad forms – Bruised Orange theatre company’s The Nebraska Project, Tennessee Jones’ short story collection Deliver Me from Nowhere, and Sean Penn’s directorial debut The Indian Runner, based on the song “Highway Patrolman.”
And then there is, of course, the tribute album, Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, helmed by producer and filmmaker Jim Sampas.
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Jul 282023
There are few more iconic openings to country songs than Johnny Cash saying “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” at the beginning of “Folsom Prison Blues” opening his live album At Folsom Prison and the prisoners just erupting. Any cover version of this song has to reckon with that moment, and probably the best thing to do is to utterly ignore it: either cover the original 1955 recording, years before the live album, or to be inspired by the energy in either prison version but omit the intro.
The String Revolution, who we last saw covering “Crazy Train,” solve this problem by recording an instrumental cover. For it, they’re joined by legendary Australian acoustic guitarist Tommy Emmanuel. And their solution to that intro is to create an all new instrumental intro that sounds utterly unlike “Folsom Prison Blues” or any other Johnny Cash song. Continue reading »