The Best Cover Songs of 2017

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Dec 152017
 

Follow all our Best of 2017 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

best covers 2017

Year-end lists are a time to look back. That’s something we’ve been doing a lot of this year.

See, we turned ten years old in 2017 – practically ancient in internet-blog terms – so we’ve indulged in what we feel is well-earned nostalgia. At the beginning of the year, each of our writers picked the ten most important covers in their life (see them here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). We even listed the ten most important covers in Cover Me‘s life, from the song that inspired the site to our very first Best of the Year winner.

Then, to cap things off, in October we commissioned a 25-track tribute to the cover song itself – which you can still download for free. We love the covers everyone contributed so much, incidentally, that we didn’t consider them for this list. It’d be like picking favorite children – if you had 25 of ’em.

Oh, and have I mentioned I wrote a book? … What’s that you say? I mentioned that constantly? Well, I’m quite proud of it. It’s called Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time and it makes a great Christmas gift and – ok, ok, I’ll stop. You can find plenty more about it elsewhere.

Suffice to say, there’s been a lot of looking back this year. And we hope you’ll indulge us this one last glance rearward before we leap into 2018. Because if it’s been a hell of a year for us, it’s certainly also been a hell of a year for the cover song in general. Some of this year’s list ranks among the best covers we’ve ever heard, period. So dig in, and thanks for your support this past decade.

– Ray Padgett
Editor-in-Chief

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  22 Responses to “The Best Cover Songs of 2017”

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  1. […] I don’t think there’s a bad track on the album, but “If We Were Vampires” stands out, and “Hope the High Road” and “White Man’s World” aren’t far behind (and if I were writing this on a different day, I might pick different songs).  My write up of the band’s live cover of “Whipping Post,” as the 50th best cover of 2017 can be found here. […]

  2. […] be no stranger to readers of Cover Me; her work has landed on our Top 50 lists in both 2015 and 2017. Japanese Breakfast recently took a page from Mitski’s playbook and expanded her electro-pop […]

  3. […] the end of every year, we work for weeks curating our annual Best of the Year list (here’s last year’s). We’re monitoring what comes out all year though, so this month I thought: why wait? […]

  4. […] Check out the Best Cover Songs of 2017 here. […]

  5. […] Check out the Best Cover Songs of 2017 here. […]

  6. […] Drop’s derservedly-lauded 2017 album Freedom Highway. Other than the title track (one of the year’s best covers), most songs on the album were her own compositions. Not so her equally great solo debut, […]

  7. […] Eilish follows another Billy – Corgan – in Jimmy Fallon’s “Cover Room” video series. She rescues “Call Me […]

  8. […] Obama’s favorite Philly garage-revivalists Low Cut Connie placed pretty damn high on our Best Covers of 2017 list. The choice cover, a rollicking roar through Prince’s “Controversy,” came out on […]

  9. […] Cover Me’s top-ten covers of 2017 featured everyone from Chance the Rapper to Bob Weir. But scroll all the way down the #1 and you’ll see an unexpected combo: Lucinda Williams and jazz sax virtuoso Charles Lloyd, covering “Masters of War.” Now they’ve collaborated on an entire album – and the first single is another cover. […]

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