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

When Cheap Trick were getting ready to record In Color, their second album, they had a backlog of great material to choose from. One song had just missed the cut on their first album (which was a shame, as it blistered), and now they were ready to bring it to the world. But producer Tom Werman wanted to emphasize Cheap Trick’s melodicism, and while In Color won a lot of well-deserved plaudits, their rerecording of that great gem twinkled more than it stomped, and it lost all its muscle in the process. Then they traveled halfway around the world to an arena in downtown Tokyo, where Robin Zander pointed at thousands of screaming Japanese girls and informed them, “I want… YOU… to want… ME.” The song blasted back across the ocean and into Billboard‘s top ten, and ever since then “I Want You To Want Me” has been a part of the world’s immortal soundtrack, a song that you’ve somehow always known. Continue reading »