Jan 292021
 

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

pixies covers

In a 1994 interview with Rolling Stone, here’s how Kurt Cobain described the genesis of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

“I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily that I should have been in that band—or at least a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.”

Surprisingly, the Pixies’ most famous superfan – the man who said he should be in a Pixies cover band – never covered the Pixies. Nirvana were rarely shy about covering their influences, from the Vaselines to the Velvet Underground, but maybe the Pixies were just too obvious. Every Nirvana song, Kurt might have thought, was just a Pixies cover a few degrees removed.

That line of thinking didn’t stop many other artists, though. Pixies covers abound, both from obvious acolytes in the ’90s alt-rock scene to musician fans in other genres who found a way to make Pixies songs sound like bossa nova or doo-wop. We’ve narrowed it down to the best thirty for our list, below. We hope you la la love it.

PS. The artist for this month’s list was selected by our Patreon supporters. To have a say in who we tackle next, sign up for our Patreon here.

The list continues on Page 2.

Jan 132012
 

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

In the mid-’80s, a besotted Robert Smith decided to write a song about a trip he took to the seashore with his girlfriend. The girlfriend would later become his wife; the song would later become “Just Like Heaven” (hereinafter “JLH”), the Cure‘s signature song, the one that everybody knows and every band wants to play. The cascading guitar line, the ethereal synths, and the rush in Smith’s vocals, especially that opening “Show me show me show me,” combine to make the song as exciting and inevitable as a waterfall. It’s a remarkably malleable song as well, easily transformed to sound perfectly at home in any context – it’s as likely to show up on a metal tribute as it is to be redone as a lullaby for babies. The following five songs fall somewhere in between. Continue reading »