Patrick Robbins, Author at Cover Me

Patrick Robbins

Patrick Robbins lives in Maine, where he moves through life with the secure knowledge that, as Penn Jillette said, "In all of art, it's the singer, not the song," On Wednesdays he goes shopping, and has buttered scones for tea. He is the author of the novel The Warmer.

Cover Classics: Robyn Hitchcock’s ‘Robyn Sings’

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Sep 062024

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

[W]hen I sing other people’s songs… I’ve known them so long that they feel like they’re my songs, you know? Obviously, I don’t get the publishing for them, but I feel like they’re part of me, because they also formed the way I write songs. Those songs are like my parents or my elder brother, you know? [Laughs.] I may not possess them, but they’re certainly family. I don’t know if family is something you possess or something that possesses you. – Robyn Hitchcock

If Robyn Hitchcock sees Bob Dylan’s songs as family, then 2002’s Robyn Sings was him organizing a great family reunion. It was a two-CD collection of live Dylan covers; the second CD recreated the famed “Royal Albert Hall” concert. It’s got a bootleg sound and one clown who thinks it’s funny to yell “Judas!” after every song, but it gets the job done. The real treasure, though, is on the first disc, which is what we’ll focus on here today.

Five Good Covers: “Don’t Stop” (Fleetwood Mac)

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Aug 022024

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

“It doesn’t sound that great when I’m singing it myself. Why don’t we make it a duet?”

According to Ken Caillat, producer of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, when Christine McVie said that to Lindsey Buckingham, it proved to be the key to making “Don’t Stop” the song it is today. With the two of them exchanging vocals, compressed so much they almost sounded alike, and McVie playing a jaunty tack piano, they make the song so uplifting you’d never know it was about the end of Christine’s relationship with bassist John McVie. The Guardian called it one of the band’s five best songs, saying that “its cantering rhythm and chorus are so impossibly, infectiously buoyant, the song so flawless, that it cancels out the unhappiness that provoked it.”
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Five Good Covers: “Take Me to the River” (Al Green)

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Jun 142024

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

The Talking Heads cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” has a very solid place in the world of cover songs. Also in the world of Cover Me: the site’s founder and editor-in-chief devoted a chapter of his book Cover Me to it, and on our first Q&A post, when the staffers were asked to name their favorite cover song, that was the response from two of them.
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Five Good Covers: “Powderfinger” (Neil Young)

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May 242024

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

I just kind of stopped all over.
–The final sentence of After Dark, My Sweet by Jim Thompson

Writing a first-person singular postmortem is the sort of project writers take on as a challenge. How to tell a tale when the teller is no longer with us? Where are they talking from? Do they know more than they did? It’s a gimmick, but like all gimmicks it has enough winners to keep people trying it.

Songwriters have taken up the challenge repeatedly, and the best of them – “Long Black Veil,” “El Paso,” “I Come and Stand at Every Door” – have met the challenge with style and grace. Neil Young’s “Powderfinger” is absolutely one of the best of them. The song’s death scene is as brief and vivid as the death itself – “Then I saw black, and my face splash in the sky” stays with you forever after you understand it.

One reason for that: it’s one of the few definite things about the song. Fans have long debated where and when it takes place, and what the song is “really” about. Neil himself rarely lets anyone peek behind the curtain, but did reveal in a 1995 Spin interview that “You may not see the anger, or the angst, or whatever in me lay behind a song like ‘Powderfinger.’ But I’ve seen things in my life that I’ll never forget—and I see them every day. And I see strength that I can’t understand, and weaknesses that I can’t deal with.”
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In Memoriam: Eric Carmen

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Mar 132024

In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.

Eric Carmen, one of power-pop’s pioneers as the frontman for the Raspberries and a successful adult-contemporary solo artist, passed away over the weekend. He was 74 years old.

Carmen was forever a man out of time. Even as he accumulated hit records (did you know he cowrote the Footloose love theme “Almost Paradise”?), his music was scorned for being too wimpy, too poppy, too much not what was cool at the time. But time marched on, and people found themselves returning to the songs he wrote, because of their messages – what could be more direct than “I wanna be with you so bad”? – and the feelings they stirred up. Try as the critics did to shame him for his career, he had a lot to be proud of.

When it comes to covers of Eric Carmen songs, the veins are rich, but they’re tapped a lot more rarely than you might think. According to Secondhandsongs.com, the most-covered Raspberries song, “Go All the Way,” has fewer than a dozen versions. If anything good comes out of Carmen’s passing, maybe it’s that people will discover what a true artist he was. Here are five artists who have already made that discovery.

In the Spotlight: The Feelies

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Feb 092024

In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!

In 2023, the Feelies released Some Kinda Love: Performing the Music of the Velvet Underground, a live album recorded one night in 2018. Listeners heard a band that had clearly absorbed the VU into their DNA long ago, making their recreations sound almost effortless. They even play the brief instrumental burbling at the start of “Sweet Jane.” The audience cheers heard between songs are loud and enthusiastic, and no matter which band’s music they’re there to hear, you can tell they love the other band too.

For this night, the Feelies were more about being Velvet Underground fans than Feelies. Because because? Well, their version of “What Goes On” sounds more like the VU and less like the Feelies’ own studio-released version, from 1988’s Only Life. Now there was a band who set out to make a song their own. Not to knock the modern day Feelies, not at all, but that VU night really was designed to be more commemoration than innovation. It’s those earlier covers we’re focusing on today, the ones that saw the band out to, as Lou Reed called his own live album in 1978, take no prisoners.