Mar 012021
 
best cover songs february 2021
Black Country, New Road – Time to Pretend (MGMT cover)

If you’re expecting the “Time to Pretend” you knew and loved a decade ago, think again. UK post-punkers Black Country, New Road, one of the buzziest bands of the new year, deconstruct the song entirely. It starts pretty sane, then gradually veers off the tracks into chaos. By the end there’s a free-jazz sax solo leading a wall of noise only barely identifiable as this, or any, song. Continue reading »

May 302018
 

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

pink floyd covers

Coming in at 40 tracks, our third ‘Best Ever’ countdown is our longest yet. This feels appropriate; Pink Floyd’s songs tend to be a whole lot longer than Talking Heads’ or Fleetwood Mac’s. A band whose default length was set at “epic” deserves a list just as winding.

Luckily, the covers community has obliged, allowing us a list as discursive as Pink Floyd itself. A band that, for better or worse, can get pigeonholed into a specific sound and era, gets transformed into a whole host of other genres and moods. Psychedelic rock is represented here, of course, but so is bluegrass, soul, and disco. One cover even includes a “featuring Tupac Shakur” credit, which is probably not what Gilmour or Waters envisioned. Though the latter would certainly appreciate the walls being torn down.

Twenty-minute tracks that might seem intimidating to some don’t phase these artists. Some turn them into tight four-minute pop songs. Others, if you can believe it, extend the songs further. So strap in, and set the controls for the heart of the cover… Continue reading »

Apr 282017
 

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

dark side of the moon

On April 28, 1973 – forty-four years ago today – Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon reached number one in the Billboard Top 200 Bestselling Album charts. Fifteen years later, it was still on those charts. Impeccably produced and beautifully played, Moon deservedly served as the band’s breakthrough. This was an album that worked best as a whole, even if it did contain a top 20 single in “Money,” and it’s an album that’s been covered in its entirety by multiple single artists. Among them: Phish, the Flaming Lips, Dream Theater, and the Easy Star All-Stars, whose Dub Side of the Moon was so successful they released an album of remixes, Dubber Side of the Moon, seven years later.

Let’s just say that when it came time to put together our own Full Album collection, the pickings were anything but slim. Consider the following just one of many, many Moons.
Continue reading »

Dec 212012
 

Adele dominated the cover song landscape in 2011, but Two-Aught-Twelve saw no similar galvanizing figure. Yes Lana Del Rey got covered a lot, but Leonard Cohen and Arcade Fire also seemed to garner an unexpected landslide of great covers (and speaking of landslides, so did Fleetwood Mac). “Call Me Maybe” was a huge hit that didn’t lead to much in the way of classic covers, and few seem to have even bothered attempting the Korean raps on “Gangnam Style.”

Which means that cover songs in 2012 were more diverse, ambitious, and left-field than ever before. A given YouTube search or Hype Machine browse would be as likely to turn up forgotten hits or underappreciated songwriters as it would the latest Top 40 smash. Find a sampling of all the diversity in Cover Me’s official Best Cover Songs of 2012 countdown. Start with #40-31 on the next page, and check back daily as we’ll be adding more til we hit #1.

Feb 032012
 

For a ludicrous amount of time after his 1996 shooting death, Tupac Shakur‘s label continued to release new material from the record-breaking rap pioneer (check out comedian Dave Chapelle and Roots drummer ?uestlove lampooning this here). That time has come and gone, but L.A.’s Capital Cities found a way to sneak some old Tupac stuff into their cover of Pink Floyd‘s classic track “Breathe.” Continue reading »

Jun 132011
 

The phrase “MTV Unplugged” may evoke classic stripped-down sets from Nirvana and Eric Clapton, but the new, revamped version of Unplugged discards all that. The latest performer, Lil Wayne, offers nothing remotely “unplugged.” That doesn’t mean it wasn’t special though. Amidst a career-spanning look at his classic tracks, Weezy paid tribute to a hero: Tupac Shakur, covering part of the latter’s “Hail Mary.”

“I knew because this is my ‘Unplugged,’ I said, ‘I want to do some kind of tribute to one of those great artists,'” Wayne told MTV. “It’s just something about ‘Pac and I.” Continue reading »