Jul 072023
 

Nick DrakeWhen tasked with covering a Nick Drake song, your first thought might very well be, are my finger-picking skills up to scratch? Then you’d likely be anxious that your acoustic guitar isn’t tuned in the strange and unorthodox way it should be, while under pressure to do justice to Drake’s deeply poetic lyrics. You might also be tempted to slur the occasional word for jazzy effect, as you basically try to honor a uniquely melancholy acoustic sound that’s become a sacred thing since the English singer’s death in 1974, aged just 26, from an overdose of antidepressants.

The message behind The Endless Coloured Ways – The Songs Of Nick Drake, however, is this: don’t sweat all that stuff.

The newest Drake tribute album curators are Cally Callomon, Manager of the Nick Drake Estate, and Jeremy Lascelles, co-founder of Blue Raincoat Music, who are both keen to popularize Nick Drake posthumously in major new ways. Indeed, now that the Estate has agreed to a global publishing deal with Blue Raincoat Music Publishing, why wouldn’t they be? Lascelles, therefore, claims to have issued “one simple brief to each of the artists” involved in paying tribute to the musician barely recognized in his lifetime, which was to “ignore the original recording of Nick’s, and reinvent the song in their own unique style.”
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Jun 292018
 

‘The Best Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

beyonce covers

We all know the reason everyone’s talking about Beyoncé this month: It’s the fifteenth anniversary of her debut solo album Dangerously in Love!

Okay, maybe that’s not the only Beyoncé news setting the internet aflutter these days – but it is the reason we initially decided to do this list. So it was extra nice of her to drop a surprise album with her husband, what’s-his-name, to give us something else to tie this into. In tribute, we’re writing this entire post from the Louvre.

There aren’t any Everything Is Love songs covered here, but we can’t imagine the first great “Apeshit” cover is far off. And every other facet of her career is represented, from the Destiny’s Child radio hits to her early solo pop jams to the more recent political tracks from Lemonade and beyond. Appropriately enough, the artists doing the covering represent an equally wide spectrum. I challenge you to find another list on the internet containing both serpentwithfeet and Reba McEntire.

So let’s start the countdown (heh) of the best B covers ever. All hail the Queen! Continue reading »