Feb 242017
 

Welcome to Cover Me Q&A, where we take your questions about cover songs and answer them to the best of our ability.

Ray Padgett

Ray Padgett founded Cover Me in 2007. He has a book about cover songs coming out in October (see #9 below) which you can preorder at Amazon.

For the past two weeks, our writers have been writing about the ten cover songs that matter the most to them (catch up here). I will be doing the same, but for me, the list is slightly different. I founded this site ten years ago this year, and the covers that are the most important to me double as the covers that are most important to Cover Me.

Any cover I’ve loved for the past decade has made its way to Cover Me, and many of Cover Me’s milestones became important covers to me – even ones that are basically coincidences. I don’t know how well I’d remember Lucinda Williams’ Shel Silverstein cover otherwise (though it’s worth remembering), but because premiering it was our first post of months of work re-designing and re-launching the site from scratch (RIP covermesongs.blogspot.com), it holds a special place in my heart.

So here are the songs that matter the most to me, which double as a history of this website from its inception to today. Whether you started reading us last week or last decade, thanks for you support all these years. See you in another ten.

– Ray Padgett
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Oct 082010
 

Download This! scours the web’s dark corners for cool cover freebies. View past installments.

The way an audience responds to any artistic venture varies from pumped-up praise to, well, downright harsh criticism. The comment section over at Aquarium Drunkard – where you can hear J. Tillman covering Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night album in its entirety – is a pretty clear example.

Let’s face it, when covering an artist that is so revered, there is going to be a lot of flack. Amongst the negative naysayers, the top post burns: “Way to castrate it, Tillman.” Yet, skimming the comments further, you see a redemptive post from the Fleet Foxes drummer himself. He valiantly defends this cover album as “an expression of affection for the source material” and asserts that his renditions were what “felt honest.” Continue reading »