Five Good Covers: Mr. Tambourine Man (Bob Dylan)

 Posted by at 5:00 pm  4 Responses »
Oct 312014
 

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

After listening to the rock & roll on side one of Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home for the first time, the folkie purists of 1965 who dared to flip the record over must have done so with no small measure of dread. To their relief, side two was made up of basically acoustic songs, and led off with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song that may not have had a single whiff of Protest to it, but whose light surreal flow felt as smooth and magical as a steady creek and defied its listeners to not feel uplifted. It was as if the Pied Piper had switched to percussion, only gaining in followers for many jingle jangle mornings to come.
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Escort Gets Disco-Heavy with St. Vincent’s “Actor Out Of Work”

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Oct 272014
 

Annie Clark, better known by her stage persona St. Vincent, has delved into a more glitch-infused music as of late. Prior to her latest eponymous release, she had singles such as “Actor Out Of Work,” that dealt with more of a shredding guitar than anything dance-oriented. Leave it up to New York disco outfit Escort to take this song to dazzling, contemporary dance heights. Continue reading »

In Memoriam: Ray Charles

 Posted by at 8:00 am  2 Responses »
Oct 252014
 

In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.

Were Ray Charles alive, he’d turn 84 today. Not a ridiculous conceit – Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, and Clint Eastwood all did the same earlier this year. Which only goes to show that it’s still hard sometimes to come to grips with a world without Ray. But it would be much, much harder to live in a world without his music.
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Cover Me Q&A: What’s a cover song you hate, and why?

 Posted by at 12:00 pm  6 Responses »
Oct 222014
 

Welcome to Cover Me Q&A, where we take your questions about cover songs and answer them to the best of our ability.

Here at Cover Me Q&A, we’ll be taking questions about cover songs and giving as many different answers as we can. This will give us a chance to hold forth on covers we might not otherwise get to talk about, to give Cover Me readers a chance to learn more about individual staffers’ tastes and writing styles, and to provide an opportunity for some back-and-forth, as we’ll be taking requests (learn how to do so at feature’s end).

Today’s question, courtesy of staffer Jordan Becker: What’s a cover song you hate, and why?
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Five Good Covers: Go Your Own Way (Fleetwood Mac)

 Posted by at 5:00 pm  6 Responses »
Oct 172014
 

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

B. Mitchel Reed, one of the most influential DJs in LA, had just played the first single off the new Fleetwood Mac album for the very first time. “I don’t know about that one,” he said dismissively to his millions of listeners. Within minutes he got a call from Lindsey Buckingham, the song’s author, demanding to know what the problem was. “I can’t find the beat,” he said. Suffice it to say that other listeners had a lot less of a problem with “Go Your Own Way” than Reed did.
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