Full Albums Archives

Full Albums: Steely Dan’s ‘Katy Lied’

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 12:00 pm 2 Responses »

Mar 142025

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Usually an artist’s popularity wanes after fifty years go by. But nothing about Steely Dan counts as usual. Even in the seventies, their impossibly smooth sound, their obscure yet hyperliterate lyrics, and their focus on the studio in lieu of performing made them stick out like sore thumbs. But Walter Becker, Donald Fagen, and company du jour knew what they wanted, and now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, it turns out to be what people want, need, can’t get enough of. The book Quantum Criminals, portraying the characters in Steely Dan songs with words and paint, was a critical smash, and Rolling Stone just published a listicle ranking every Steely Dan song.

Katy Lied, released fifty years ago this month, saw Becker and Fagen giving up their road-tested bandmates in favor of the best studio musicians money could buy, including twenty-year-old drummer Jeff Porcaro and not-much-older Michael McDonald, whose Doobie Brother days had yet to come. It saw the band getting a little cooler, a little warmer, a little jazzier. Like every Steely Dan album (at least, every one from Steely Dan Mark I), it has champions who say it’s the best thing they ever did. In 1987 Rolling Stone named it to their list of the best 100 albums of the past 20 years, the sole Steely Dan album on that roster. (This, after calling it “exemplarily well-crafted and uncommonly intelligent schlock” in their review twelve years earlier.)

Steely Dan’s unique combination of iconoclasm and tasty licks make them a band that covering artists tend to approach tentatively, if at all. How many other bands see tribute artists be so eager to throw out the lyrics and take their best instrumental whack at it? You’ll find more than one instrumental in this Katy Lied cover collection, along with live covers and one cover that’s a tribute to another band altogether.

Full Albums: Warren Zevon’s ‘Excitable Boy’

Posted by Seuras Og at 10:30 am 5 Responses »

Jan 102025

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Warren Zevon was quite an excitable boy himself, it seems, if not necessarily in the league of the character described in the song of that name, a highpoint in his third album release. A maverick individual with a bag of demons, he cast a spiky flame across the AOR uplands of the ’70s and ’80s, falling in and out of favor, exasperating and alienating friends, family and fans alike. A couple late career upturns brought him back into focus as the century turned, before lung cancer scythed a swath through his renaissance. It also supplied him the means for some exceptional last gasp, literally, material, releasing The Wind just one month before his 2003 death.

Like many of that era, Zevon’s career began as a songwriter for hire/jingle composer. The Turtles were early recipients of his style. His 1970 debut Wanted Dead or Alive sank with little trace, sending him back to supper clubs and session work. Jackson Browne gave him a huge break, producing and promoting his second disc before taking him out on tour, as his support and gig-buddy. The Browne connection, and the prestigious Asylum label, contrived to bring attention earlier lacking, his quirky songs now available to a much larger audience. This eponymous 1976 album was duly hailed “a masterpiece” by Rolling Stone.

Bolstered by recognition, two years later saw the release of Excitable Boy, again helmed by Browne, together with guitarist Waddy Wachtel. This saw Zevon’s career-best sales, going platinum and attaining a Billboard Top 10 placing. Furthermore, the single from the album, “Werewolves Of London,” #21 on the US chart, prove also an unlikely critical hit in the U.K., at a time when punk rock was more the emergent flavor of the day, alerting this writer to his oeuvre, a love maintained immediately and thereafter.

So let’s see how it and rest of Excitable Boy has lasted, as inspiration and influence for the covers work of others.
Continue reading »

Full Albums: Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Electric Ladyland’

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

Dec 132024

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Jimi Hendrix released Electric Ladyland in 1968, the last of his three lifetime studio releases. Produced by the guitarist himself, it was a double set and featured a veritable panoply of guests, over and above the core trio of Hendrix, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell. Notable amongst these were Steve Winwood, Jack Casady (Jefferson Airplane), and the drummer in his later band, Buddy Miles. This sometimes led to criticisms of the album being a chaotic overindulgent sprawl, and there are moments that touch upon that, but it did not stop Electric Ladyland‘s swift elevation to bestseller, almost from day one. It attained the number one album slot in the US within a month of release. In the UK, where he had made his name, it fared less well, if still attaining a credible number six. Time has expanded and widened the appeal, winning over many of the initially sniffy critics, who saw it as overlong and muddled. In the year 2000 Rolling Stone ranked it at #53 in their Best 500 Records of All Time, a full 32 years after release. And we haven’t even mentioned the album artwork, which has a whole backstory of its own. Hint: there was a reason the UK cover was different from the US cover. Well, nineteen reasons. (Would you believe thirty-eight?)

But that’s another story for another time. Here we are interested more in covers than covers. We found sixteen of them, one for each song, even the ones where calling it a song is a stretch. You might not like them all – there’s one here that we think is an absolute clinker – but hopefully they evoke the best of Electric Ladyland when you hear them.
Continue reading »

Full Albums: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’

Posted by Seuras Og at 3:00 pm 7 Responses »

Jul 122024

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

A Full Album post of covers of Nebraska? Surely, you say, Cover Me has done this before. Well, I have checked, and whilst we have published posts about officially released full album versions of Born in the U.S.A., Darkness on the Edge of Town, and Tunnel of Love, as well as our Best Ever of Bruce covers piece, and even reviews of Nebraska tribute albums here and there and here again, we actually haven’t. So then, cometh the day, and this man’s job is to find ten Nebraska covers, one of each song, while avoiding as much duplication as is possible. You up for that?
Continue reading »

Full Albums: Kraftwerk’s ‘The Catalogue’

Posted by Seuras Og at 1:00 pm No Responses »

Mar 222024

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Sometimes only a greatest hits will do, a necessity to hit those spots and scratch those itches. For me, Kraftwerk’s The Catalogue is one of those times.

I guess that sort of reveals me as the dilettante I try so hard to pretend I am not. But dilettante or no, I bow to no one in my like of some of Kraftwerk’s MO–which, I guess, gives it all away. It’s true, I confess to not having the traction for the band’s entire oeuvre, but the ones I know, I love. More importantly, I recognize their pivotal position, as popular music discovered the absence of a need for guitars. Tougher call than it sounds, but these guys stuck steadfastly to this template throughout various permutations for over half a century, whilst their minions and acolytes all started slyly adding guitars and, horrors, live drums. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Depeche Mode.)

The Catalogue is one of many Kraftwerk kompilations that exist, and probably the best one for the attention of Kraftwerk civilians like me, primarily as it has the highest headcount of hits. Before all start shouting at the screen, The Catalogue, as in the commercially released version, was indeed an eight-disc remastering of the original existing catalogue. But a promo single-disc compilation was also made available (and, according to Discogs, is able to buy, pre-loved, for a very reasonable outgoing). That’s the one I’m basing this Full Album post on. Is this a slightly deceitful ploy? Maybe, but this is my post and, given I actually have a copy, I can. Besides, let’s be honest–who can even remember the original of “Der Stimme De Energie”? (Go on, then, hum it!)
Continue reading »

Full Albums: Love’s ‘Forever Changes’

Posted by Seuras Og at 2:00 pm 1 Response »

Jan 192024

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Love was definitively a band of and for the ’60s. Formed in 1965, their incandescent flame shone bright only until the turn of the decade, their legacy thereafter diminishing, not least as founder Arthur Lee became last man standing. Indeed, such was Lee’s imprint that he was able to trade on the name and past glories for the rest of his career and the rest of his life, even if it was mainly the first three albums – Love, Da Capo and Forever Changes – audiences wished and needed to hear.

The extravagant meshwork of styles and influences Love’s original lineup brought collectively into the mix, defied any one attempt to restrict the resultant style to any one genre. There were elements of almost raw garage rock, cheek by jowl with pastoral and orchestral interludes, with folk influences and whiffs of psychedelia elsewhere.

Lee kept the b(r)and going, on and off, more or less until his death, in 2006. Bryan MacLean, who had parted from the band acrimoniously, died in 1998, a few months after Ken Forssi did the same. Snoopy Pfisterer has long since retreated to idyllic rural isolation, with little lasting involvement in the music industry, but Johnny Echols has continued to hold a candle for the band, re-igniting the name and touring a version of the band since 2009, the show usually reliant on playing the material from those first three albums.

As for Forever Changes, it’s become a staple in the best-of lists pumped out by your Rolling Stones, your Pastes and others of that ilk. Along with a select few, such as Pet Sounds, Blonde On Blonde, Astral Weeks and Revolver, Forever Changes has become of and beyond its time, a beautiful bad trip seeing off many of the newcomers begging for comparison and subsequent attention.
Continue reading »