Ray Padgett

Ray Padgett founded the blog Cover Me in 2007 and has run it ever since, growing it into the largest blog devoted to cover songs on the web. His music writing has appeared in the New Yorker, SPIN, MTV, Vice, Mojo, and more and he’s been interviewed as an expert on cover songs by NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and SiriusXM. He lives in Burlington, Vermont and also works as a publicist for Shore Fire Media. His book Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time is out now. His 33 1/3 book on tribute albums and Leonard Cohen is out September 3, 2020. Find more info on him and the books here.

Feb 032025
 
best cover songs
abazaba ft. Eugene Hütz — Isolation (Joy Division cover)

Adam Granduciel, Sharon Van Etten — Abandoned Love (Bob Dylan cover)

Continue reading »

Jan 172025
 

“Covering the Hits” looks at covers of a randomly-selected #1 hit from the past sixty-odd years.

laffy daffy

When I spun the hit randomizer, I pulled up a song I’d never heard of. So I Googled it. Google spat out these lyrics:

Girl, shake dat laffy taffy
That laffy taffy
Shake that laffy taffy
That laffy taffy
Girl, shake that laffy taffy
That laffy taffy
That laffy taffy (candy girl)
That laffy taffy

It didn’t get better from there. Continue reading »

Nov 042024
 
dresden dolls gogol bordello

At their two co-headlining shows in Boston this weekend, The Dresden Dolls and Gogol Bordello collaborated on a dark and ominous cover of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand.” It came as the encore to Gogol Bordello’s set, and featured their full band joined by masked Dolls Amanda Palmer on vocals and Brian Viglione on tubular bell (a key instrument on this song). Well, we assume it was them; “Who that was we may never know,” Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hutz joked as the masked duo left the stage. Continue reading »

Oct 312024
 
best covers of october 2024
Farmer’s Wife — Season of the Witch (Donovan cover)

Austin rockers Farmer’s Wife go full shoegaze-psych on this Donovan cover just in time for Halloween. They write: “Our cover of ‘Season of the Witch’ materialized out of a drum beat and pedal feedback two Halloweens ago. This creepy classic opened us to more experimentation and allowed us to dive into an eerier side of our sound.”

Fiona Apple — Lately (Don Heffington cover)

The late Don Heffington was an acclaimed drummer, so, naturally, his new tribute album includes drum greats like Jim Keltner. But he was also a singer-songwriter, so friends and collaborators like Jackson Browne, Victoria Williams, and Fiona Apple cover his songs. Apple selected “Lately,” the closing song on the final solo studio album of his lifetime, 2016’s Contemporary Abstractions in Folk Song and Dance. Continue reading »

Oct 152024
 

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

a tribute called quest covers
a tribute called quest covers

Not many people have covered A Tribe Called Quest. That’s not entirely surprising. You see that a lot in hip-hop—a genre where the coin of the realm is the remixes and sample more than the cover—and especially so in lyrically and musically dense acts like Tribe, without big crossover hits and giant pop hooks. The Tribe entries in the various cover-song database look pretty barren.

But the few artists that do cover Tribe go deep. There have been two full-length Tribe tribute albums, and both are excellent. True to the sampling spirit of the original group, they take the source material as fodder to build on, veering far afield from the originals in some cases. Continue reading »

Oct 012024
 
Andrew Bird & Madison Cunningham – Crying In The Night (Buckingham/Nicks cover)

Armored Saint — One Chain (Don’t Make No Prison) (The Four Tops cover)

Continue reading »