Brent is a Connecticut native, now based in Boston. His eclectic music taste comes from his mom’s love of the Rat Pack, his dad’s love of CCR and Blood, Sweat, and Tears, his high school friends’ love of Elliott Smith and Wilco, and his old roommate’s unhealthy obsessions with 50 Cent and Celine Dion. He does a fair amount of writing for and is also on the Twitter. When not writing or listening to music, he is either reading, watching television, or playing terrible ukulele covers of his own.
They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with other people singing his or her songs. Let others do the work for a while. Happy birthday!
Paul David Hewson was born in Dublin on this day in 1960. It was in his teens, however, that he was given the moniker that would become an immediately recognizable name the world over, the name by which he would be known as for both his musical fame and his international influence – Bono. (The shades would come later.) Bono is many things, but it is important not to forget that, along with being a philanthropist and entrepreneur, he is (as U2 frontman) a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and 22-time Grammy winner.Continue reading »
It may seem like an odd juxtaposition to hear of The Tallest Man on Earth covering Frank Sinatra. After all, the Swedish musician, né Kristian Matsson, has a distinct folk-rock sound pervading his solo career. It becomes less of a surprise, however, in light of the fact that the cover is of the tune “Cycles” (which, for Sinatra, is rather folksy) and that his performance is a guest spot at an Idiot Wind show – that is, Matsson’s wife Amanda Bergman.
Despite having styled her stage name after a Dylan song, Bergman’s sound is much more imbued with piano and crooning vocals than Matsson’s, and expectations of a Sinatra cover would hardly seem off the mark.
The team-up on “Cycles” is a beautiful one, and it seems almost as though the tune was written solely for Matsson’s dreamlike strumming and for the duo’s harmonizing. It’s a down-and-out kind of song, yes, but it’s a hopeful one and an uplifting one. What’s more, the duet hits just the right balance of Matsson’s raspy folk and Bergman’s gorgeous vocals and any lyrical slip-ups toward the end serve only to add to the song’s charm. Enjoy.
Idiot Wind and The Tallest Man on Earth – Cycles (Frank Sinatra Cover)
Check out more Idiot Wind at her website and from The Tallest Man on Earth on Myspace.
Covers of the Talking Heads classic “Naive Melody (This Must Be the Place)” abound. Even just recently, we saw Sewing Machines bring some Asian-influenced instrumentation to the tune. Where that may have been a beautiful work of production, however, the band Matteo has now delivered a performance of the song on Chinese instruments (along with an upright bass).Continue reading »
Best (So Far) finds the finest first-round covers of the latest pop hits.
To American fans of pop music, Carly Rae Jepsen may seem to have come out of nowhere with her hit “Call Me Maybe.” For Canadian listeners, however, Jepsen has been on the pop radar since placing third on the fifth season of Canadian Idol, and she’s been releasing music there since 2008. It was “Call Me Maybe,” though, that launched her to international stardom.Continue reading »
One can never know what kind of covers to expect from the band YACHT, nor can we predict what direction they’ll go in. That isn’t such a bad thing, though; half of the beauty of writing and reading about music is that, every so often, something will come entirely out of left field in ways that you can’t even understand.Continue reading »
Any cover of a beloved song is sure to be met with a bit of suspicion and wariness. Sometimes it’s deserved and sometimes it isn’t, but sometimes it’s hard to even know how to react or how to feel. Some covers need to face the test of time before they can be judged. This, it seems, is the fate of the Flaming Lips cover of the Beach Boys classic, “God Only Knows.”
Released on MOJO Magazine’s fiftieth anniversary tribute to the Beach Boys, the cover is undeniably simplistic and chock-full of reverb, but it is also perfectly melodic and beautifully sung by Wayne Coyne. The base level of instrumentation is chiptunesy and dreamlike, and Coyne’s vocals are spot-on with Brian Wilson’s.
It’s hard to say what makes the song work or not work, but it seems that the only real distracting factor is the reverb. Then again, the fact of the matter is that the rest of the track stays remarkably close to the original. Granted, there are different instruments and a slightly slower tempo, but there aren’t the kind of changes one might expect on a high-profile indie cover of an undeniable pop classic.
Maybe that’s the point. Perhaps we’re digging too much into this, but maybe the discord created by the ever-present reverb is that major changing factor that the Flaming Lips wanted to bring to this cover. Even with the technical aspects of the original held intact, the reverb creates an entirely different mood for the song. Maybe that’s the point, maybe it’s not; regardless, the track is certainly worth a listen. It’s worth a bunch of listens, if you’ve got the time. Enjoy.
The Flaming Lips – God Only Knows (Beach Boys cover)
Check out more from The Flaming Lips at their website.
When artists take on a cover, one can truly never know what to expect. The temperaments of musicians and their strongly-held notions of what is classic and what is terrible can be like the precisely correct atoms in a chemical reaction – get something just slightly out of balance and the whole thing will explode and kill everyone.Continue reading »
It’s a tried but true statement that there are certain artists who create solid gold from everything they touch. It is undeniable that this is the case with country legend Willie Nelson, as we’ve seen from his six-decade-plus career and, most recently, his unexpected take on Coldplay’s “The Scientist” for a Chipotle ad.Continue reading »
