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The Best Cover and Tribute Albums of 2021

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm No Responses »

Dec 102021

Follow all our Best of 2021 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

It feels like a cliché these days to start one of these year-end lists writing about “the times we live in,” but, as you read and listen to our picks, you’ll find the specter of the coronavirus and lockdown pretty unavoidable.

One of these albums is titled Songs from Isolation; another is Awesome Quarantine Mix-Tape. Even on some albums where it’s so blindingly obvious, it’s there. Aoife Plays Nebraska is a recording of a quarantine livestream she gave. Los Lobos envisioned Native Sons as a balm for being stuck at home, unable to tour. And then there’s the tribute to John Prine, the long-awaited sequel to 2010’s Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows, inspired by his death from the coronavirus last year.

But many of these albums recall better times too. Two are belated releases of in-real-life, pre-pandemic tribute concerts, one to Leonard Cohen and the other to Eric Clapton’s Derek and the Dominoes (well, I guess both of those subject are kind of bummers, in different ways…). Tributes abound to other recent deaths – Andy Gibb, Justin Townes Earle, Roky Erickson – but we have plenty to artists still with us too, like Nick Cave, Peter Gabriel, and a host of underground psych-rock bands you’ve never heard of.

Then there are those that don’t fit any narrative. An artist felt inspired by an unconnected bunch of songs, decided to cover ’em, and brought them all together into a cohesive record. What do Vampire Weekend and The Supremes have in common? Lauren O’Connell’s beatifully intimate imaginings. How about Allen Toussaint and Calexico? Robert Plant and Alison Krauss harmonizing all over ’em. Whether it’s a quote-unquote “lockdown record” or just someone saying, “hell, why not get a bunch of folkie weirdos to play Phish tunes?,” every album on this list brought something meaningful to – ugh – the times we live in.

– Ray Padgett, Editor-in-Chief

The list starts on the next page…

A Look at Phish’s Many Halloween 2021 Covers

Posted by Ben Easton at 9:00 am No Responses »

Nov 082021

For nearly three decades, Halloween has been one of the biggest occasions of each year for Phish. The jam titans have presented a handful of legendary sets on October 31st in
“musical costume,” performing classic records in sequence: The Who’s Quadrophenia, The Beatles’ White Album and Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, among others. In recent years, the band have seemingly moved on from just covering existing records for the occasion, instead using the vaunted Halloween night for some even more mischievous musical stunts — sewing together their own fully original “musical costumes.” The band have, in essence, gone from reliving the classics to “covering” bands that… don’t exist. The ramped-up theatrics have only grown more exhilarating with each year. Feast your eyes, for example, on this Halloween’s Dune-meets-Power Rangers space suits (pictured above), which the band donned for ninety minutes in the guise of their 2021 costume: a “band” called Sci-Fi Soldier, who performed their “album” Get More Down from the year… 4680.

The particulars of whether Phish’s maximalist musical stunt as Sci-Fi Soldier constitutes a Full Album Cover are, for the purposes of our publication, a bit murky. Thankfully though, the band built up to this year’s Halloween show with plenty of “regular” covers in the mix too. Across their four-night run, including Halloween itself, at MGM Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Phish littered their sets on October 28th, 29th and 30th with some epic a la carte tributes (and dropped a few subtle musical hints about the Halloween hijinx that were to follow). Continue reading »

Review: Cluster Flies (Phish Tribute Album)

Posted by Curtis Zimmermann at 10:00 am No Responses »

May 262021

I have always considered myself a casual Phish fan. Though I owned multiple CDs, including the six-disk box set Hampton Comes Alive, I only saw them play live once. I am not an authority on Phish history, such as the best live versions “Tweezer.” Still, I have always wondered on some level why their music inspires such derision from detractors. They’ve been a hardworking band for decades. Even though they’ve never scored a conventional hit, the group has a batch of solid original songs.

While listening to the new Phish tribute album Cluster Flies, I had an epiphany about why they have such a tough time attracting outside listeners. The band and its collaborators are great at writing catchy, interesting and thought-provoking songs. They’re just not that good at coming up with song titles. This may also explain why despite decades of listening, I have trouble keeping their song names straight in my head.

Cluster Flies was released by the website JamBase as a fundraiser for the site during the pandemic. It contains covers of all the tracks from Phish’s 2000 album Farmhouse, several songs from a bonus edition, and a few deeper cuts. Seven of the 12 songs from Farmhouse have one-word titles, with names like “Twist,” “Bug,” “Dirt,” “Piper,” “Sleep.” One can find multiple examples throughout Phish’s catalog: “Waste,” “Fee,” or “Free,” to name but a few. With names like these, the band undersells its greatest asset, making their music inaccessible for the uninitiated. Alas, I’m sure that’s just the way Phish fans like it. Fortunately, the songs, both on Farmhouse and Cluster Flies, show far more creativity than their titles.
Continue reading »

Cover Me Q&A: What’s your favorite a cappella cover?

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm 9 Responses »

Aug 052020

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

Here at Cover Me Q&A, we’ll be taking questions about cover songs and giving as many different answers as we can. This will give us a chance to hold forth on covers we might not otherwise get to talk about, to give Cover Me readers a chance to learn more about individual staffers’ tastes and writing styles, and to provide an opportunity for some back-and-forth, as we’ll be taking requests (learn how to do so at feature’s end).

Today’s question: What’s a favorite a cappella cover?
Continue reading »

Covering the Hits: “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” (Will Smith)

Posted by Ray Padgett at 3:00 pm No Responses »

Nov 162018

“Covering the Hits” looks at covers of a randomly-selected #1 hit from the past sixty years.

Will Smith’s 1998 number-one hit “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” would have been perfect for our current era of YouTube covers.

First and foremost, the song was massive. It topped the charts for three weeks and won Smith his second-consecutive Grammy Award for Best Rap Solo Performance. But more specifically, the simple novelty number boasts an instantly-identifiable hook (“Na na na na na na na…”) that would remain recognizable transposed into any genre. Google searches of “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It metal” and “”Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It bluegrass” would likely turn up a dozen options apiece.

But “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” came out in 1997, eight years before YouTube’s founding. Though a massive, inescapable hit – if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t fit this feature – almost no one covered it. We’ll get to the few who did below, but what strikes me most is how this dearth of “Jiggy” covers opens an interesting window into how drastically YouTube has changed the cover-song landscape. Continue reading »

The Best Talking Heads Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 8:00 am 8 Responses »

Mar 292018

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

Let’s start by defining our terms: This list concerns the best covers of the Talking Heads. Because the best covers by the Talking Heads is a very short list.

Here is that list, in its entirety: Continue reading »