Jun 262018
 

In Pick Five, great artists pick five cover songs that matter to them.

lena hall cover songs

Broadway star Lena Hall (Kinky Boots, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) has been releasing an ambitious series of EPs this year. Every month, she covers a handful of tracks by a favorite artist. In what she’s dubbed the Obsessed series, she’s already tackled Elton John, Peter Gabriel, and The Cranberries. June’s installment say her bringing her Broadway belt to five Radiohead songs; here’s a highlight:

Jack White is next month’s featured artist, and I’m quite excited for that one. As the covers Hall selected for us demonstrate, she’s something of a White Stripes superfan. She’ll hopefully preview one or two of her upcoming Stripes covers at her New York concert tomorrow night, “Six Months of Obsessions: From Radiohead to Hedwig” at Public Arts (tickets here).

Check out Hall’s cover-song picks below. Sure hope Dolly Parton and Soundgarden are on her Obsessed docket… Continue reading »

Jun 222018
 
westworld covers

As season two of the incredible HBO series Westworld wraps this Sunday, we’re taking a look back at the cover songs that have played an important role in setting the tone for this new and frightening world. Ramin Djawadi is the genius behind the scores for both seasons, relying heavily on unlikely covers of pop hits with lyrics that (subconsciously, given that the covers are instrumental) mirror the goings-on in the park.

Here are our five favorite Westworld covers: Continue reading »

Mar 222017
 

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

bringing it all back home covers

Bob Dylan’s 1965 Newport Folk Festival concerts is one of the most famous – or infamous – performances of all time, subject to numerous books, documentaries, and debates over why Pete Seeger threatened to cut the power cable with an axe. But the fact is, by the time he stepped on that stage, Dylan had already gone electric, four months prior. The first half of his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home – which turns 52 today – is all electric. And not the sort of light electric augmentation other folk singers were experimenting with either. The first track “Subterranean Homesick Blues” may still be the loudest, hardest track of Dylan’s entire career. He’d already drawn his line in the sand; the folk-music crowd had just chosen to ignore it.

To celebrate this landmark album’s 52nd birthday, we’re giving it the full-album treatment. Our recent tributes to Dylan albums have covered underrated works like 1978’s Street Legal and 1985’s Empire Burlesque, but today we return to the classics. Such classics, in fact, that in addition to our main cover picks we list some honorable-mention bonus covers for each song. Continue reading »

Sep 022015
 

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, from Cover Me staffer Jordan Becker: What’s a cover that made a significant, annoying, and/or unforgivable change to the original lyrics?
Continue reading »

Nov 172014
 

Despite the fact that the White Stripes stopped making new music back at the beginning of 2011, their influence on the rock stratosphere is still alive and strong. Case in point: Jessica Martindale’s fleshed out, sultry cover of the band’s mainstream breakout hit “Seven Nation Army.” Continue reading »

Jun 182012
 

Sometimes doing something new with a song can mean doing nothing new with the song at all – or, at least, nothing new with the song being covered. That’s precisely the case with Katie Herzig’s take on “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” The Eurythmics cover in question is fantastically faithful; where it becomes especially awesome, though, is when Katie and the band break – ever so briefly – into The White Stripes‘ “Seven Nation Army.” Continue reading »