Sep 222016
 
Miley Cyrus The Tonight Show

Last weekend Miley Cyrus appeared on the The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and covered Bob Dylan’s “Baby, I’m In The Mood For You”, backed by The Roots. Cyrus’ chops were on full display as she reminded many distracted by her antics that she is an incredibly talented and unique singer. Continue reading »

Sep 212016
 
wavves-weezer-split

If you were a certain type of kid in the ’90s, instead of baseball cards or postage stamps you might have collected Weezer b-sides. The Blue Album and Pinkerton were already canonized as classics, and if you really wanted to seem cool (in your presumably uncool circles), you’d tell your friends that the b-sides were better. “Jamie,” “Mykel and Carli”, “Teenage Victory Song, and – my personal favorite – “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams” circulated first on homemade cassettes, and then on Napster. Nowadays you can find any of them in seconds on YouTube, but at the time each song took some digging to find and was cherished. Continue reading »

Sep 212016
 

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: What’s your favorite Muppets cover song?
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Sep 202016
 
ChicagoFarmer

Other than his hit for Glen Campbell “Gentle On My Mind,” John Hartford songs don’t get covered as often as they should. The pioneering fiddle and banjo player sometimes gets pigeonholed as just a bluegrass guy (and none were better), but he could do so much more, from rockabilly covers to weird experimental stuff (where’s the hip indie cover of his heavy-breathing-and-fart-sounds “Boogie”?). The best recent cover of a Hartford tune has been Jones Street Station’s “In Tall Buildings,” but Chicago Farmer’s new version of “I’m Still Here” gives that one a run for its money. Continue reading »

Sep 162016
 

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

Marc-Bolan

Marc Bolan died in a car crash 39 years ago today, just short of his thirtieth birthday. Tragic as this was, it was a perfect cap to the legend of the former Marc Feld, a man determined to be a near-myth of a rock star; live-fast-die-young had to be the closing number. But as other would-be legends (hi, Jobriath!) might tell you, an image won’t last without talent to keep it up, and Bolan’s talent for writing simple, catchy glamthems has kept him in the front of public consciousness, even for the ever-growing segment of the public that was born after he moved on.
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