Dec 152023
 

Follow all our Best of 2023 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

I like to think that badass lady in the artwork up there (done by our own Hope Silverman!) embodies the spirit of this year’s list. Not that they’re all CBGB-style punk songs—though there are a couple—but in her devil-may-care attitude. “Who says I shouldn’t do a hardcore cover of the Cranberries? A post-punk cover of Nick Drake? A hip-hop cover of The Highwaymen? Screw that!”

As with most good covers, the 50 covers we pulled out among the thousands we listened to bring a healthy blend of reverence and irreverence. Reverence because the artists love the source material. Irreverence because they’re not afraid to warp it, bend it, mold it in their own image. A few of the songs below are fairly obscure, but most you probably already know. Just not like this.

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Jan 302023
 
best cover songs january 2023
Brandi Carlile – If It Makes You Happy (Sheryl Crow cover)

This month, Austin City Limits held its eighth annual ACL Hall of Fame ceremony. The inductees were Joe Ely and Sheryl Crow. The latter was covered by, among others, Brandi Carlile, who also delivered Crow’s induction speech. It will surprise no one who’s ever seen Carlile perform on an award show before that she crushes it. (Find another Crow cover from the ceremony, by Jason Isbell, in the Best of the Rest below.) Continue reading »

Nov 102017
 
best covers 1987

Last year I did a roundup of the Best Cover Songs of 1996. It was a fun project to retroactively compile one of our year-end lists for a year before Cover Me was born. I wanted to do it again this year, but continuing the twentieth-anniversary theme with 1997 seemed a little boring. Turns out 1997 also featured a bunch of Afghan Whigs covers.

So to mix it up, I decided to go a decade further back and look at 1987. Needless to say, the landscape looked very different for covers. For one, far more of that year’s biggest hits were covers than we saw for 1996. The year had #1 cover hits in Heart’s “Alone,” the Bangles’ “Hazy Shade of Winter,” Los Lobos’ “La Bamba,” Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now,” Club Nouveau’s “Lean on Me,” and Kim Wilde’s “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” Plus ubiquitous hits that didn’t quite top the charts, but remain staples of the songs-you-didn’t-know-were-covers lists, Buster Poindexter’s “Hot Hot Hot” and George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set On You.” Continue reading »

Apr 012013
 

In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.

D. Boon was the energetic front man and guitarist for the highly influential Southern California punk band The Minutemen. If you watch videos of any of the Minutemen’s live shows, you’ll immediately notice the amount of energy that D. Boon exhibits as he bounces around the stage while belting out his politically infused lyrics. His funk- and blues-inspired guitar playing really opened up boundaries in an era of punk rock that was focused on two- and three-chord progressions. Unfortunately, he passed away at the too-young age of 27 in a tragic automobile accident, and the Minutemen called it quits immediately afterward. Continue reading »

Sep 212012
 

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

In 1970, with the Beatles broken up, Creedence Clearwater Revival was poised to take their place on the top of the musical world. But within the band, tension was coming to a head; John Fogerty had too tight a hold on the reins, as far as the others were concerned, and John’s brother Tom decided to leave the band and pursue a solo career. John’s response was to write “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” a song that obliquely addressed Tom’s departure (“the rain coming down”) at the group’s commercial apex (“on a sunny day”). Of course, you didn’t have to know the back story to love the song, and CCR found themselves with another top ten hit and FM radio staple. Continue reading »

Oct 052011
 

Last week, the Internet exploded when word began circulating that Radiohead would play a show at the Occupy Wall Street protests. That turned out to be a hoax, but last night all was redeemed when formerly-reclusive Neutral Milk Hotel songwriter Jeff Mangum popped up to play an acoustic show in support of the protesters. He opened with a thematically-appropriate cover of the Minutemen’s “Themselves.” Continue reading »