Singer-songwriter Laura Marling uses some of the same tools as Bob Dylan in her music: a knack for complex storytelling and acoustic guitar playing that rarely distracts from the vocals. But in her new cover of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” featured on the show Peaky Blinders, the differences between the two artists become immediately clear. Continue reading »
As you might imagine, quite a few Bob Dylan covers come across our desk. So many that I often don’t get to listen to them all. So when I had the opportunity to press play on “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” by Tom Russell with Lucinda Williams and Calexico, I was surprised to find myself listening over and over. With his catchy tex-mex country sound, Russell is no stranger to covering Dylan. Back in April, when we brought you 33 discs of live Dylan covers, we included his performance of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” as a standout. Continue reading »
Bill Frisell, a legend of jazz and guitar and the creator of one of our favorite cover albums of last year, sat down with Fretboard Journal to play a cover of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. But if you weren’t reading this on a website with a focus on cover songs, I think Bill’s almost unrecognizable version could have fooled you. Continue reading »
Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.
Many if not most of Burt Bacharach’s big hits were first released by other artists, usually Dionne Warwick. One big exception was “Trains and Boats and Planes,” a tale of transcontinental love which Bacharach thought was “too country” for Warwick; Bacharach and his writing partner Hal David had written the song for Gene Pitney to sing. Pitney, however, had other ideas; he rejected it and told Bacharach, “It’s not one of your better ones.”
Never one to sulk when insult was added to injury, Bacharach went to London and recorded the song with an orchestra. No lead vocalist, Bacharach assigned the lyrics to the Breakaways, a girl group who also sang backing vocals on Petula Clark’s “Downtown” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe.” Their cool, detached voices suited the impassive song perfectly, but the bridge (“You are from another part of the world…”) proved to be too tricky, and Bacharach covered for them by making it an instrumental passage.
Today the song has earned its reputation as one of Bacharach’s better ones, Pitney notwithstanding. His version was a hit, and so was Warwick’s well-nigh-inevitable cover. The dozens of other covers that followed proved the song was strong enough to thrive under any approach, either with or without the bridge. Here are five of them.
The Mayflower Hotel was located at Central Park West between 61st and 62nd street in New York City. It was constructed in 1926 and stood for over seven decades before being demolished in 2004. It was not a fancy place (the New York Times called it “drab and brown”) and its sad, singular claim to fame was that Pat Sullivan, producer of the Felix the Cat cartoon lived there in the ’30s.
Even though it stood for nearly 80 years, the only acknowledgment of the hotel’s existence is a tiny plaque on a nearby bench on Broadway featuring this clinical and decidedly unromantic inscription:
The funding for these benches was provided in 1996 by The Mayflower Hotel
Whatever New York City office was responsible for the text on that plaque blew it. They opted for cold acknowledgment when they could have imbued that bench with magical, magnetic pop power forever. Here is what the plaque should have said:
In 1983, Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox, the musicians collectively known as “Eurythmics” composed “Here Comes The Rain Again” during a stay at The Mayflower Hotel.” Continue reading »
Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!
After watching all eight hours of Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, and another three hours of interviews with Jackson about the making of Get Back I had to put on A Hard Day’s Night to restore balance. I had to get back to a time when John Lennon was firing on all creative cylinders and Paul McCartney was slacking.
In early-to-mid 1964, Lennon was engaged, prolific, and self-confident enough that the Beatles finally released a full album with all original material: AHDN. No covers! All 13 tracks are Lennon–McCartney compositions, officially, but 10 of them are really Lennon’s. And they are all good to really good Lennon songs, too, except for the ones that are great, like “If I Fell” and the title track.
If McCartney’s contributions were few in number, two of them loom large in the catalog: “Can’t Buy Me Love” became the album’s first #1 single, while his ballad “And I Love Her” stands with McCartney’s best songs of any period. Mostly, though, Paul was not quite finding his stride in ‘64, much like John in the Get Back period.
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