Apr 282023
 
most popular covers

At Cover Me, our goal is to share great covers, whether they comes from artists with ten fans or ten million. But I am always vaguely curious what cover songs break out, which among the thousands we hear each year become genuine hits.

I was reminded of this when a recent Country Now headline crossed my Google Alerts: “Luke Combs’ ‘Fast Car’ Cover Is A Streaming Giant.” After only a month, the country star’s fairly faithful take on Tracy Chapman’s 1988 classic has racked up 33 million streams in the U.S. alone. Covers by famous singers come and go, but this one clearly has staying power.

So I decided to try to figure out which other covers from the 21st century have reached this level of breakout success. I’m not privy to Billboard‘s deep-dive chart data, so I used an easy metric available to an amateur like myself: Seeing how many plays something has on Spotify. As good a measure for “a popular song” as you can probably get these days, albeit still imperfect.

I found twenty-four 21st-century covers with over 100 million U.S. streams as of this writing (April 2023). Some very popular covers didn’t quite make the 100m+ threshold: Weezer’s “Africa” (75 million), Iron & Wine’s “Such Great Heights” (76 million), Fall Out Boy and John Mayer’s “Beat It” (89 million). Ryan Adams’ “Wonderwall” only just crossed the 100 million streams mark in the past couple months. And while older covers obviously have an advantage in more time to rack up plays, number one — by a lot! — came out only a few years ago.

Here’s the list of 24. No commentary since, for once, we’re not unearthing buried treasures here. Let’s count down the 24 most-streamed covers on Spotify, with the year of release and number of streams as of this writing. (And it’s possible, even likely, I missed a few, so feel free to suggest additions in the comments — if they qualify, I’ll add ’em.)
Continue reading »

Mar 272019
 

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

landslide covers

It’s a powerhouse year of inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and as we witness the pinnacle of success for some of our favorite artists, it’s fascinating to look back at their humble beginnings. Stevie Nicks wasn’t always Fleetwood Mac or even her magical solo artist self. Before Fleetwood Mac, there was an everyday life as a waitress and…..the song “Landslide.” Read on for Nicks’ story of how the song came to be from an interview with Performing Songwriter in 2003. Continue reading »

Jul 072014
 

Mark Oliver Everett, sometimes known simply as E, always pulls off great covers. And he often does it best when he slows the song down wringing every last bit of emotion from the source material. Recently, the Eels frontman performed a version of ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ in Amsterdam, in tribute to Steve Perry, the ex-frontman of Journey. This tribute to Perry seemed in response to the ex-Journey man partially coming out of his self-imposed retirement to perform with the Eels at recent gigs in the US. Continue reading »

Oct 152012
 

Earlier this year we featured five of the best covers, so far, of Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”. Of course the first video that went uber-viral and helped ignite interest in this year-old song was the five-on-one guitar cover by Walk Off the Earth. Since then hundreds of covers, parodies and remixes of this hit have flooded the YouTubes. You are in luck, as I have spent far too much time listening to the already overexposed song to pull out a few covers that either rival or surpass the original. In no particular order, here are ten more versions for your enjoyment.

1) Karmin–  a Cover Me regular from YouTube that has gone on to appear on Saturday Night Live. Watch Amy and Nick do their pop thing on SiriusXM Hits.

 

2) Kelly Clarkson – The original American Idol performs live at Jones Beach, NY on August 21, 2012.

 

3) Netherlands Radio Choir – The 74 person ensemble does the song to raise funds to help save the choir.

 

4) fun. featuring Hayley Williams – fun, performs live on BBC 1 Radio’s Live Lounge alongside a recording of the Paramore singer.

 

5) Rita Ora – The UK singer, songwriter and actress drops an R&B take on Radio 1’s Live Lounge

 

6) Cast of Glee – “They did such a faithful arrangement of the instruments but the vocals were that pop ‘Glee’ style, ultra dry, sounded pretty tuned and the rock has no real sense, like it’s playing to you from a cardboard box,” Gotye told the Sunday Mail of Darren Criss and Matt Bomer’s rendition of his song.

 

7) Noah featuring Christina Grimmie – The incredibly talented, deep voiced Noah Guthrie keeps the YouTube cover hits coming.

 

8) Old School Computer Remix – With an HP Scanjet 3C as the vocals.  An Amiga 600 as Bass on left audio output and Guitar on right audio output. Harddrives as the drums and cymbal and a PIC16F84A microcontroller, this digital ditty is pretty amazing.

 

9) “The Star Wars That I Used To Know”  – A Parody with new music and original lyrics. It’s a story of heartbreak to which Star Wars fans everywhere can relate. A shot at the movie remakes, new CGi effects and George Lucas. Easily the best video.

 

10) Two Kids in a Car – I know this isn’t a cover, but these two six year old friends who love this song are serious stars in the making. How can you not love this?


Check out more from Gotye on his website
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Dec 142011
 

Every Wednesday, our resident Gleek Eric Garneau gives his take on last night’s Glee covers.

In “Extraordinary Merry Christmas,” Artie (Kevin McHale) is offered the chance to direct McKinley’s glee club in a televised Christmas special. Little do the other club members know he takes his Christmas inspiration from some bizarre sources.

“Extraordinary Merry Christmas” is not the first Christmas special to air on television this year. It’s not even the first Glee Christmas special to air, thanks to the irreverent, genius and criminally unpopular NBC sitcom Community, which last Thursday dedicated its entire Christmas episode (entitled “Regional Holiday Music”) to spoofing the Fox musical juggernaut. The staff behind Community probably couldn’t have predicted that they’d get payback for spending a half hour in Glee‘s shoes; this week, Glee decided to live in Community‘s world with an episode you’d expect to see on that show or, really, anywhere but Glee. The Christmas special Artie ends up producing is a (directly referred-to) mash-up of the much-maligned 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, Judy Garland’s classic 1963 Christmas special, and at the end some Charlie Brown Christmas for good measure. The result basically ends up a cover of a TV show. Though Glee certainly likes to allude to existing pop culture, even going so far as to recreate certain music videos shot-for-shot, it has never lived in another universe for two acts before. That’s Community territory, but Glee pulls it off marvelously. Continue reading »

Dec 072011
 

Every Wednesday, our resident Gleek Eric Garneau gives his take on last night’s Glee covers.

In “Hold on to Sixteen,” New Directions and their rival glee club the TroubleTones compete in the Sectionals competition. Meanwhile, Quinn (Dianna Agron) plots to get Shelby (Idina Menzel) fired and an old friend returns to McKinley High.

Just last week I was thinking about how, in the future, we’ll be able to look back and pinpoint lackluster Glee episodes with an alarming degree of certainty based solely on the presence of Sam Evans (Chord Overstreet), a character who appeared only in season two, which seems generally agreed-upon as the worst of Glee‘s output to date. It should be no surprise, then, that when Sam returns to the show this week he brings with him a very season two-styled episode that feels the need to rush through a whirlwind of plot points without really doing justice to any of them. Even though “Hold on to Sixteen” is one of those special “competition” episodes that brings plots to their culmination by design, everything about it feels so hurried that nothing really has a chance to land – it’s 20 minutes of plot, then 20 minutes of performances, then a tacked-on happy ending. Honestly, I did not enjoy it. Continue reading »