Tom McDonald, Author at Cover Me

Tom McDonald

I grew up and got schooled in New England, hitch-hiked on a whim to pre-Grunge-era Seattle, never left. Took to designing software for authors and publishers. Raised two kids and quite a few chickens on a island in Puget Sound. Taught myself guitar and banjo and formed a covers band. I help run a map store; here’s an issue of our newsletter. I favor British tv comedies and novels by Cormac McCarthy.

That’s a Cover?: “Love Buzz” (Nirvana / Shocking Blue)

Posted by Tom McDonald at 11:00 am No Responses »

Jan 092026

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

Anyone alive and actively listening to music in 1991 heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and felt its pull. Listeners by the millions dove into the tar-pit trap of Nirvana and the whole grunge thing. This is common knowledge today. But less well known is the fact the first Nirvana single to get international recognition (if very few listeners) came out a few years earlier, and that was “Love Buzz.”

Released in 1988, “Love Buzz” became the very first single issued by the band. It was also the very first single released by the newly-formed indie label Sub Pop Records, and it remains Sub Pop’s all-time best-selling single. (Of course, it only began to sell after Nirvana signed to a major label and released Nevermind.)

In retrospect, “Love Buzz” seems like a strange pick for a debut single. Bleach, Nirvana’s first LP, offered several better options. How about the album’s opening salvo, “Blew”? Or how about the song Nirvana performed more times than any other–“School”? Finally, the obvious question: Why not “About a Girl”? Buried in the middle of Bleach, “About a Girl” is an order of magnitude more popular than the sludgy and chaotic “Love Buzz.”

Each of these other tracks had the advantage of being original Kurt Cobain compositions. Seems like a songwriter would want their debut single to spotlight their songwriting talent, right?

But no, they went with “Love Buzz,” a cover, and an obscure cover at that.
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One Great Cover: The Third Mind’s “Sally Go ’Round the Roses”

Posted by Tom McDonald at 11:00 am 1 Response »

Nov 282025

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

For our “What’s your favorite cover of a traditional song” post from last November, I wanted to write about The Third Mind’s version of “Sally Go ’Round the Roses.” It seemed like the perfect chance to collect my thoughts about The Third Mind, a “supergroup” led by fiery guitarist Dave Alvin (formerly of The Blasters, The Knitters, and X). After all, The Third Mind featured the spell-binding singer Jesse Sykes, who had fallen into a mysterious silent since 2011.

Except I found out that “Sally Go ’Round the Roses” is not a traditional song. Not even close. It was written in 1963, and recorded by The Jaynetts that same year.

OK, so I was wrong. In my defense, Joan Baez misled me. In the Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, we see Baez in a hotel room singing “Sally Go ’Round the Roses.” Baez mostly played traditional ballads (when not playing Dylan covers), so I assumed this song too was “trad.” I also knew that the British folk band Pentangle–those revivers of traditional British Isles roots music–had covered the song on an early album.

But you know what they say about people who assume.
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Five Good Covers: “Time After Time” (Cyndi Lauper)

Posted by Tom McDonald at 9:00 am No Responses »

Nov 032025

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

Some songs have an adaptive trait that allows it to survive out in the musical wild. Trends come and go, stylistic sea changes surge and retreat, and tech revolutions rise and fall; they cause other great songs to fall to the wayside, while the truly classic song only gains luster as time goes by. For me, “Time After Time” is one of those songs.

I grumble every year at this time about the wrong artists getting into the Rock Hall of Fame. (What I really mean is that my favorite performer has once again been overlooked.) But this year I’m glad for Cyndi Lauper getting inducted. When you write and record a song like “Time After Time,” a song covered by Willie Nelson, Miles Davis, and over 400 other artists, you are richly deserving of the honor. (It should have happened in 2023, when Lauper was first nominated, but we’ll let that go.)

“Time After Time” (co-written with Rob Hyman) is just one of Lauper’s many achievements. In fact, the song is not even her best-seller–that’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Nor is it the song of hers I like best–that would be “All Through the Night.” But it’s “Time After Time” that looms largest in her catalog, and that’s because it has entered the American Songbook.

Now that’s a true honor. Sales figures and popularity polls don’t get you into the American Songbook. There’s no selection committee involved. A song like “Time After Time” becomes a standard only gradually, after thousands of musicians decide individually it’s a song they want to play. Jazz singers, folk artists, pop stars, rockers, even bluegrass banjo pickers have added the song to their set lists, and to their albums. Pros and semi-pros have played it at countless wedding parties, and amateurs have played it at countless more open mics and karaoke nights.

For a song that was recorded almost as an afterthought (the label insisted the album was one track short), “Time After Time” has done pretty well for itself. It was nominated for, but did not win, the Grammy award for Song of the Year. The winner that year was Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” and that was almost certainly the right call in 1985. But in all the decades since, “What’s Love Got to Do With It” has been covered only 40 times, compared to over 400 covers of “Time After Time.” Songs move through the culture in mysterious ways.

Here are five adaptations of Lauper’s signature song (or one of her signature songs). Each one is worth a second listen as we ponder what makes “Time After Time” impervious to time itself.
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That’s a Cover?: “All Through the Night” (Cyndi Lauper / Jules Shear)

Posted by Tom McDonald at 10:30 am No Responses »

Oct 142025

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

An unusual thing happened after Cyndi Lauper released her debut album, She’s So Unusual (an accurate title if ever there was one). Lauper became the first female artist ever to have four singles from one album reach the Billboard Top 5 in the U.S. (Michael Jackson accomplished the feat the year before with Thriller.) We are going to look at the last of those, “All Through the Night,” the sleeper hit, and the only one of the four singles that Lauper didn’t write or co-write herself.
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Good, Better, Best: “Zombie” (The Cranberries)

Posted by Tom McDonald at 1:00 pm No Responses »

Sep 122025

Some covers are more equal than others. Good, Better, Best looks at three covers and decides who takes home the gold, the silver, and the bronze.

Countless fans of ‘90s music love “Zombie,” many without actually having listened to it. Sure they heard it–it was inescapable in 1994–and could sing along on the chorus, but few understood it as a protest song. They wondered more about Dolores O’Riordan’s ululating vocal style than about her lyrics, her intent. (We are all a bit zombie-like in our listening habits–we respond at gut level to a singer’s emotions, rhythms, textures; the semantic processing comes later if it comes at all.) But make no mistake, “Zombie” is not only a protest song, it’s one of the great ones.

The triggering event for the Irish singer/songwriter was the killing of two young English boys by Irish paramilitary forces. Thus the mournful opening. But in the lines that feel most raw and personal O’Riordan is not protesting the violence itself, but the fact that she is so powerless against it. “But you see, it’s not me, it’s not my family.” She’s saying, in essence, “I didn’t vote for this, no one I know supports it, and yet here we are, with a select few hate-minded people preaching mindless violence.” A few extremists. Zombies.
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One Great Cover: Elton John’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”

Posted by Tom McDonald at 12:00 pm 1 Response »

Jul 292025

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

Elton John's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

Let’s get one thing out in the open at the start: Elton John’s version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” did not make our list of the 75 Best Beatles Covers Ever. The list favored fresh discoveries over the tried-and-true classics, so the omission is not too surprising. More surprising is that over twenty readers responded to that post, and not one mentions Elton’s version either, though many of the comments included suggestions as to which covers should have made the grade.

But make no mistake, this is clearly one great cover. It is the only Beatles cover to reach #1 in the US, which must count for something. It’s a little ironic that the original “Lucy” was never released as a single–in fact no track from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released as a single.