Feature Archives - Page 2 of 218

The Best Covers of 1960s One Hit Wonders

Posted by Staff at 9:00 am 3 Responses »

May 082023

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

Last week we kicked off our new One Hit Wonders series with ten covers of big 1950s hits, and today we continue it with 20 covers of 1960s smashes.

Some classic songs getting covered in here, in some cases by artists that should have had many more hits just as big. So it goes in pop music. We’ll probably never be able to do a The 40 Best Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs Covers Ever list, though, so we celebrate them here with a few fun reimaginings of their early 1960 chart-topper “Stay.” Continue reading »

The Best Covers of 1950s One Hit Wonders

Posted by Staff at 9:00 am 2 Responses »

May 052023

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

As regular readers know, every month we put together a giant list we call Best Covers Ever. We take a household-name artist and count down the best covers of their songs. We’ve done Bob Dylan and Beyoncé and Billy Joel and Bee Gees and Britney Spears and Beach Boys and Bruce Springsteen and Buddy Holly and those are just the B’s.

What do all of those “B” artists have in common? Not much, except for this: They all have a lot of different songs that get covered by a lot of different people.

But there are some artists who will likely never get their own list here. Why not? Maybe they just don’t get covered enough. Or maybe they get covered often — but people mostly just cover a single song. These are the artists we colloquially call One Hit Wonders. And in a special series starting today, we’re celebrating covers of their songs. Continue reading »

Review: Matthews Southern Comfort’s ‘The Woodstock Album’

Posted by Seuras Og at 4:00 pm No Responses »

May 022023

Well, there’s a title for you. “Woodstock” was the song Iain Matthews, post-Fairport Convention, took to the top of the UK charts 53 years ago. Neither he nor his band, Matthews Southern Comfort, actually played at Yasgur’s Farm the year before, but, this side of the pond, it became the best-known version of Joni Mitchell’s song. The band actually fell apart within a year; Matthews was uncomfortable with the fame and bored with the pedal-steel-drenched country tropes now expected of him. Instead, he plowed on with a solo career and with another band, Plainsong.

Plainsong broke up and later reformed, and in 2010, Matthews decided to do the same for Matthews Southern Comfort. He’s since flitted between the three versions of himself, pursuing whatever suits him, under the brand it might suit best. (You might recall he, as Plainsong, covered the songs of Richard Farina with Andy Roberts on 2015’s Re-inventing Richard.) For The Woodstock Album, he has chosen the Matthews Southern Comfort moniker.

The idea behind The Woodstock Album was to pick a selection of artists who played at Woodstock, and some of the iconic songs they played there. Given that Matthews’ metier is very much of a folk-tinged country/country-tinged folk, these would neither ape nor echo the originals, but would hopefully give a fresh new spin on the material. Given many of the songs are not without some considerable covers history, this might be conceived a brave idea, especially as the tracklist becomes apparent. Let’s see.
Continue reading »

Review: ‘I Am a Pilgrim: Doc Watson at 100’

Posted by Seuras Og at 8:00 am No Responses »

May 012023

There are few more frictions than when folk start discussing who is the best guitarist ever. It’s guaranteed to produce a bevy of opinions, as ever more effusive hyperbole gets trotted out, ever more fierce grudges dusted down, and ever more unlikely proponents pushed forward. So we won’t go there, other than to comment that Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson was probably in the top few, certainly if you remove the anathema of electricity. (To be fair, he probably had way more electricity than many a blues-rock road warrior, but remained resolutely unplugged the length of his days, 1923 – 2012.) He merited a tribute long ago, and now, with I Am a Pilgrim: Doc Watson at 100, he’s got a fairly worthy one.

I Am a Pilgrim is crammed with musicians great and the good, partly drawn from the country/bluegrass/Americana palette he made his home, coming together to salute his playing, his singing and his all round good-eggness. Quite what Watson might have made of such a shindig is anyone guess, the fuss possibly embarrassing the quietly spoken and mild-mannered dude all parties suggest he was.

I first came across Watson’s superlative talent when I was a teenaged schoolboy. A new boy in class was an expatriate Yank, with a precocious talent for fiddle, or violin, as I then thought it was called. He drew my attention to the now and rightly fabled triple album set, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken. My Deep Purpled and Pink Floyded mind was blown, possibly never again grouping back together again in the same way, such was the richness of the material across those discs, as a plethora of country royalty got to spar with some longhair hippies, burying prejudices and forging alliances aplenty.

Doc Watson was a key part of that. His mellifluous picking seemed just so impossibly relaxed and, at the same time, impossible to grasp. Add in his down-homey back porch dialogue, one of the delights of the project, and he just seems the coolest man on earth. Seriously, if you haven’t heard him at full pelt, raising nary a bead of sweat, try to search him out. With all the recordings containing his name–solo, with his son, with his grandson, collaborations aplenty–you can’t go wrong.
Continue reading »

The Most Popular Covers of the 21st Century (on Spotify)

Posted by Ray Padgett at 11:00 am 2 Responses »

Apr 282023

At Cover Me, our goal is to share great covers, whether they comes from artists with ten fans or ten million. But I am always vaguely curious what cover songs break out, which among the thousands we hear each year become genuine hits.

I was reminded of this when a recent Country Now headline crossed my Google Alerts: “Luke Combs’ ‘Fast Car’ Cover Is A Streaming Giant.” After only a month, the country star’s fairly faithful take on Tracy Chapman’s 1988 classic has racked up 33 million streams in the U.S. alone. Covers by famous singers come and go, but this one clearly has staying power.

So I decided to try to figure out which other covers from the 21st century have reached this level of breakout success. I’m not privy to Billboard‘s deep-dive chart data, so I used an easy metric available to an amateur like myself: Seeing how many plays something has on Spotify. As good a measure for “a popular song” as you can probably get these days, albeit still imperfect.

I found twenty-four 21st-century covers with over 100 million U.S. streams as of this writing (April 2023). Some very popular covers didn’t quite make the 100m+ threshold: Weezer’s “Africa” (75 million), Iron & Wine’s “Such Great Heights” (76 million), Fall Out Boy and John Mayer’s “Beat It” (89 million). Ryan Adams’ “Wonderwall” only just crossed the 100 million streams mark in the past couple months. And while older covers obviously have an advantage in more time to rack up plays, number one — by a lot! — came out only a few years ago.

Here’s the list of 24. No commentary since, for once, we’re not unearthing buried treasures here. Let’s count down the 24 most-streamed covers on Spotify, with the year of release and number of streams as of this writing. (And it’s possible, even likely, I missed a few, so feel free to suggest additions in the comments — if they qualify, I’ll add ’em.)
Continue reading »

Cover Genres: Banjo

Posted by Seuras Og at 12:00 pm No Responses »

Apr 212023

Cover Genres takes a look at cover songs in a very specific musical style.

Yes, it’s true–banjo isn’t really a genre, per se, as it encompasses more than one musical style. Way more. But this category could use a kickstart, and what better instrument to provide the kick with?

Now, I love the banjo, but I know full well how many don’t. Indeed, only the bagpipes and the accordion have been the butt of more jokes. My goal, then, is to take you the reader beyond the backwoods and blue grass, and to show you the other vistas where a banjo can not only play, it can also rule.

So then, banjo, do yer worst!
Continue reading »