Oct 192018
 

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

Stop Your Sobbing

Funny things, songs. Some don’t even get heard, never leaving their creators’ rooms (or their heads); others seem to spread like a special kind of virus, played at parties and bedrooms and bus stops and supermarkets everywhere until they’re inescapable, a global pandemic without cure. (Yes, “Despacito,” I’m talkin’ to you.)

Regardless of their popularity or lack thereof, all songs are an attempt to crystallize a feeling and then share it with the world. And every once in a while, having completed a sort of emotional circuit, a song returns to its owner, carrying back far more than it left with.

Here’s the story of one which did just that.
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Jan 292018
 

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

mark e smith covers

When it comes to musical taste, there’s a million shortcuts to figuring out which side of the tracks you stand on. Here’s one of the fastest: Do you like The Fall?

If the answer is “no,” you’re in good company. Of course, there’s no definitive way to tell how many people aren’t Fall fans, but statistically speaking, almost nobody likes the band’s clattering, repetitive, willfully out-of-tune, misanthropic, oblique and downright perplexing music.

But if the answer is “yes,” you’re in even better company. The Fall may represent the apex of the cult band, an aggressively obtuse art project spinning out over 40 years and a stunning number of ex-band members, mainly disgruntled ones at that. The only constant was the dark, twisted figure at its center: Mark E. Smith, who died January 24th, at the age of 60. Continue reading »

Jun 242011
 

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

“Waterloo Sunset” is not just any song…this Kinks song is revered. Millions of Cockneys identify with it like Philadelphia Flyer fans used to identify with Kate Smith’s “God Bless America.” The effect that hearing “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” has on a Marine is similar to the passions and memories stirred in many Brits when they hear,”As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, I am in paradise.” After all, this is the composition that critic Robert Christgau called “The most beautiful song in the English language.” It been voted the “Greatest Song About London” by London radio listeners. It’s the track that on its own would have cemented Ray Davies’ reputation as one of rock’s finest songwriters, even had he not written dozens of other exceptional songs. Continue reading »