Mar 152024
 
teenage joans call me maybe cover

2012’s song of the summer, “Call Me Maybe,” launched Carly Rae Jepson’s career with a little thanks to Justin Bieber. If you were a tween when it came out, it likely made as much of an impression as it did on the members of Australian duo Teenage Joans.

Teenage Joans, whose name echoes no wave legends Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, are an Adelaide-based punk-ish guitar-and-drums pair that have received considerable acclaim in their native state. But they grew up with pop like “Call Me Maybe” and decided to honour that heritage for Triple J’s legendary cover program “Like a Version.” Continue reading »

Mar 132024
 
alex melton jump cover

There’s been a trend for a quite a while now on YouTube for transposing a particular song into a new genre. One prominent purveyor of this, um, genre of internet cover is Alex Melton. Melton is perhaps most famous for his pandemic-era cover of Third Eye Blind’s “Semi Charmed Life”…as if Blink 182 were the original artist. Melton has been at it for over a decade, most often in this similar style, a pop punk cover of a major hit from now or the recent past.

“Jump” was Van Halen‘s first number 1 hit. Infamously, it was their first single driven by a synthesizer, which proved divisive among fans. Though Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth had both played synthesizers on Van Halen tracks before, this song appeared, “Jump” does really feel like a change in kind compared to their previous material. Continue reading »

Mar 062024
 
patrick watson perfect day

“Komorebi” is a Japanese word meaning “sunlight leaking through the trees,” or so the internet tells me. It seems to conjure up images of a particular kind of autumnal, pastoral sunlight for Japanese speakers. It has found it’s way into English lately as English does not have its own word for this particular image or feeling.

Canadian singer-songwriter Patrick Watson has dubbed his new piano instrumental cover of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” the “komorebi version” and has even taken pains to give it artwork featuring a Japanese man lying on the floor in this particular type of sunlight. He’s leaning hard into the imagery. And that’s appropriate because his new cover is very much the right music for “komorebi” if I understand the word correctly. Continue reading »

Feb 132024
 
runnner driver 8 cover

The End of the Road Festival is an annual festival at Larmer Tree Gardens in southern England. As part of the promotion for the festival, magazine Best Fit does “secret sessions.” For one of this year’s, Runnner, aka Noah Weinman performed a solo show. During the show he covered “Driver 8.”

“Driver 8” was REM‘s seventh single and second biggest hit when it was released in 1985. Very much a classic ’80s REM song, it’s about a train and fully embodies their jangly, folk-tinged college rock aesthetic from that period of their career.

Weinman plays the opening riff pretty much as written, though on a regular 6-string acoustic it sounds considerably less jangly. It sounds to me like he’s playing it slightly slower than the original. He otherwise sticks to the form and pace of the song. Stripped of all the original’s ornamentation though – including the harmonica that echoes a train whistle – the song sounds considerably more traditional. The original has a classic college rock sound and Weinman has stripped all of that away. His delivery feels more plaintive even if it may not be, just because it’s him and his guitar alone on stage.

It’s faithful and earnest and a nice version of the song. Check it out below.

Feb 082024
 
the scratch Sally MacLennane cover

The Scratch hail from Ireland. Like so many Irish musicians, they were greatly affected by Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan’s death in November. The band had been playing around with a cover of “Sally MacLennane,” an upbeat celtic punk song that was the second single from The Pogues‘ second album. The song’s title is the name of a stout and the song is a celebration of the Irishmen who had to work outside of Ireland. Once The Scratch heard of MacGowan’s death, they decided to start performing the cover live and now they have released a video. Continue reading »

Dec 012023
 

“Ladies of the Road” is the raunchiest, most sexist song in King Crimson‘s catalogue; an atypical celebration of groupies from their fourth album Islands. It’s atypical due to its sex-centric, innuendo-stuffed lyrics but it’s also somewhat atypical musically, with its bluesy saxophone solos and the backing vocals in the bridge and group vocals in the coda. The song is one of those relics of the ’70s that unabashedly celebrates the sex in “sex, drugs and rock and roll.”

Former Solemn Novena lead singer Louise Patricia Crane knows her way around prog rock. Her 2020 solo debut was acclaimed by the prog music press (yes, that’s a thing) and even featured guest appearances by members of Jethro Tull and King Crimson (not an Islands-vintage member of Crimson, but rather the band’s final lead singer Jakko Jaksyk). Continue reading »