Tears for Fears Archives - Page 2 of 8

The Best Cover Songs of March 2023

Posted by Ray Padgett at 9:00 am No Responses »

Apr 032023

Bria – When You Know Why You’re Happy (Mary Margaret O’Hara’ cover)

Bria’s “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” made our list of the Best Covers of 2022. The track was a sneak peak at her covers EP Cuntry Covers Vol. 2, and the full thing dropped a few weeks ago. It includes a wonderful version of this much more obscure song. Bria explains: “Mary Margaret O’Hara is a creative force and one of my favorite Canadian artists. I have been a huge fan of hers for quite some time and really wanted to try my hand at one of her songs for Vol. 2. She is a real queen of vocal improvisation. It’s a trait of hers that I’ve always admired, so I really wanted to explore that when recording this cover. The video for this track is special to us, a sort of collage of memory; fragmented footage of summer taken over the last two years is dispersed throughout shots of a vast winter scene, filmed while we finished the record up North with our live band.” Continue reading »

Forty Feet Tall Turn Tears for Fears’ “Shout” into a Raucous Post-Punk Song

Posted by Riley Haas at 1:00 pm 1 Response »

Mar 022023

“Shout” is the hit that broke Tears for Fears in the US, as part of the “Second British Invasion,” and it remains one of their biggest songs. Like so much of Tears for Fears’ oeuvre, the song is really tied to its aesthetic, which saw the band mixing synthpop and rock music.

Forty Feet Tall are a Portland, OR-based post-punk-influenced rock band who have been putting out music for about a decade. So they’re into the music that was all over the UK underground a little bit before Tears for Fears made it big. Continue reading »

One Great Cover: Michael Andrews and Gary Jules’ “Mad World”

Posted by Adam Mason at 1:00 pm No Responses »

Dec 092022

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

You break something down to its most basic parts and people just react.–Michael Andrews, 2003

The Californian composer Michael Andrews and his childhood buddy Gary Jules scored the most unlikely UK Christmas #1 in history with their cover of “Mad World” in 2003. Listeners raised a lot more questions than glasses of eggnog. Where were the sleighbells, the snow allusions? Where was the Christian message of peace, à la Cliff Richard? The children’s choir? The cloying sentimentality? The song had none of these things. Instead, it had a stripped-back sound, a quiet mournfulness, and some distinctly unfestive lines laid bare. One was: “Went to school and I was very nervous / No one knew me, no one knew me.” Another was: “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.”

In fact, the song was basically about a depressed kid.

It wasn’t just about a depressed kid; it was even more about a depressed kid than the original. And this was likely the key to its greatness and, amazingly, its Yuletide success.
Continue reading »

The Best Cover Songs of October 2022

Posted by Ray Padgett at 10:13 am No Responses »

Oct 312022

Avril Lavigne & All Time Low – All the Small Things (Blink 182 cover)

One way you can tell millennials are getting old: There are now nostalgia-bait festivals catering to the music of their (our) youth. Such was the case with When We Were Young, the emo and pop-punk fest in Vegas a couple weeks ago with Paramore, My Chemical Romance, Bright Eyes, and dozens more. A video high point is this extremely fun and infectious cover of “All the Small Things” by All Time Low and Avril Lavigne, performed right after Blink 182 announced they were getting back together. Best part: When the entire crowd hollers alone to “Work sucks / I know”! Continue reading »

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

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm 3 Responses »

Jul 132022

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 your favorite instrumental cover?
Continue reading »

Cover Classics: Patti Smith’s ‘Twelve’

Posted by Seuras Og at 11:30 am No Responses »

May 052021

Cover Classics takes a closer look at all-cover albums of the past, their genesis, and their legacy.

Up until her release of Twelve in 2007, Patti Smith had not been much of one for studio covers, give or take her fabled extended riff on “Gloria,” which remains a live staple. Sure, she had the Byrds’ “So You Want to Be a Rock’n’Roll Star” on her third album, and Dylan’s John Wesley Harding deep cut “Wicked Messenger” on her sixth, but she otherwise largely wrote her own, with her friends and band members. Twelve surprised fans and critics alike, not only by being all other people’s songs, but also by the twelve songs Smith had chosen. Continue reading »