Good Better Best Archives

Good, Better, Best: “Need You Tonight” (INXS)

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 1:00 pm 2 Responses »

Jan 232026

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.

As booty call songs go, INXS’s “Need You Tonight” is as hot, sweaty, and ’80s as it gets. Never rhyming once, Michael Hutchence seduces with words, breaths, and dance moves that I guarantee young men practiced in front of their MTV screens. Meanwhile, the rest of the band matches him with a groove that shows no mercy and no signs of stopping, even as it stops (twice!) before song’s end.

Can a song that’s fast approaching its 40th birthday still sound fresh? Absolutely yes – and it doesn’t need people covering it to sound that way. But as it so happens, people do cover it, and not infrequently. Most of the cover artists keep That Riff, so as to keep relentlessness as one of the song’s eternal perks. But some went further with it. Here are a few of them.

So who earns the bluest of blue ribbons? Well…

Good, Better, Best: “Bad Company” (Bad Company)

Posted by Curtis Zimmermann at 12:00 pm No Responses »

Nov 052025

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.

Bad Company were one of the great “Oh-they-played-that” rock bands of the 1970s. With their heavy blues-rock guitar licks, infinitely-catchy hooks, and bombastic frontman, Bad Company produced a number of the decade’s most anthemic, fist-pumping rock hits such as “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” “Shooting Star,” “Ready for Love,” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy.” However, since they came of age in an era before MTV or digital radio, countless listeners have lip-synced and air-guitared to their music on classic rock radio without having a clue who they were or what they even looked like.

Complicating matters even further, the band is a supergroup featuring members of several other great British rock bands of the era including Mott the Hoople, King Crimson and Free. With Free, Bad Company’s future lead singer Paul Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke scored the hit “All Right Now.” So, they’re easily confused with other bands from the era in sound and swagger. They’ve just got that ‘70s rock band quality about them, for better or for worse.

This year the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is inducting Bad Company, fifty-two years after the group’s founding. Earning this spot, they beat out artists like Phish, Oasis, Mariah Carey and the Black Crowes. The band’s selection is a testament to their longevity, but not necessarily rock fans’ ability to immediately identify the group when their songs hit the radio.

To honor their induction, Cover Me looks at three excellent covers of the one song that is most associated with the band, their eponymous track: “Bad Company.” It was the first song on side two of their self-titled 1974 debut record. It’s a power ballad, with a slow piano intro and a buildup to a climactic chorus. Throughout the decades, it has served as a showcase for singers, from rock to country to metal, all of whom want to live out their rock n’ roll fantasies and dreams.

Here are three covers that stand out.
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Good, Better, Best: Outkast Tribute Albums

Posted by Mike Tobyn at 9:00 am No Responses »

Nov 042025

When Andre 3000 appeared on Questlove’s podcast, the host noted that he was on a tour bus when he heard the album Aquemini for the first time. As soon as he heard “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” he knew that Outkast had conquered another musical genre, and that marching bands across the country would soon be playing the tune. He was right.

Outkast are a great hip-hop band, and they helped define a whole genre of Southern hip-hop, which survives and thrives today. But they also provided some of the great crossover pop songs of the past 30 years. One way of looking at success is how many musicians want to pay tribute to your canon. Covers, of course, and there are many of these for Atlanta’s finest, and the site has covered some of the greatest ones from Outkast here and here. Continue reading »

Good, Better, Best: Stephen Sondheim’s “Send In the Clowns” (Part 1)

Posted by Seuras Og at 12:01 pm 1 Response »

Sep 192025

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.

Is there a ghastlier song than “Send In the Clowns”? The epitome of musical thea-ter (dahling), a go-to for any and every luvvy guesting on a TV show, invited then to sing us a song. Unspeakably vile, it is a song that must surely have some redeeming feature, to be drawn out of its saccharine turgidity. I mean, the bible of cover songs, Second Hand Songs, lists five and a half hundred iterations of the damned song, so surely there must be a “5 Good Covers” amongst them? Surely? I fear the title of this piece reveals the sickly truth.

Let’s get the details out the way. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say: “‘Send In the Clowns’ is a song written by Stephen Sondheim for the 1973 musical A Little Night Music, an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles Of a Summer Night. It is a ballad from Act Two, in which the character Desirée reflects on the ironies and disappointments of her life.” Two shocks there. First: I thought it came out a lot longer ago than 1973. Second: Bergman? It seems impossible to imagine the dour Swede having much truck with such lightweight frippery. But that is merely my view, with untold experts subsequently citing the song’s magnificence. It took a while for it to transcend the stage musical, not broaching the Billboard charts until Judy Collins brought it to #36 in 1975, and to #19 in 1977.

Frank Sinatra, in the meantime, had released it on his comeback album, Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, setting the song along the road to it becoming a jazz standard. Sure, Sinatra tackles it with characteristic brio, and, vocally, it can’t faulted. It is just the wretched source material. Jazz, of course, in the context of standard does not generally equate with anything exciting or innovative, or indeed anything much to do with what I call jazz, it smacking more of big band MOR, easy listening for the easily pleased. Sure, otherwise reliable artists have given it a go, as an instrumental, but, even shorn of the pompously execrable lyrics, most come up short, shackled by the limitations of the melody. (Honorable exception is country maverick, Tyler Childers (here), who found a pearl within the snail shell.)

Disclaimer: I didn’t listen to every version. I couldn’t, on health grounds, and would challenge anyone of a normal disposition so to do. But I did take a look at the list, in no small detail, cherry picking names of those who might be able to step outside of expectations. Indeed, in particular, I had high hopes for Pete Burns and for Stan Ridgway. Burns, the flamboyant frontman of Dead and Alive, must be able, I thought, to buff it up into something idiosyncratic and memorable. Wrong. And Ridgway, the Wall of Voodoo man, turning then to oddball narrative songs, he’d give it some grit. Also wrong. So that’s my 5 gone for a burton.

Who’s left?
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Good, Better, Best: “Send In the Clowns” (Part 2)

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 12:00 pm 4 Responses »

Sep 192025

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.

After all, the whole idea of art is bringing order out of chaos. It’s the organization of material and that really is what making a puzzle is. – Stephen Sondheim

More than once, Stephen Sondheim said, “I have a puzzle mind.” He loved cryptic crossword puzzles, designing a few dozen for New York magazine in the late ’60s. He used to run murder-mystery games, and cowrote (with Anthony Perkins) a movie about one that turned real, 1973’s The Last of Sheila. (That was a big influence on the Knives Out movie Glass Onion, in which Sondheim has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo.) And he thought of his songs as puzzles, where he was given clues and worked toward solving them. “Send In the Clowns,” from his 1973 production of A Little Night Music, may well have been his greatest solution.

To begin with, Sondheim had to write for Glynis Johns, who had what Sondheim described as “a nice little silvery voice” and whom a less generous critic called “that cousin of bullfrogs.” He structured the song with Johns’ limits in mind – lots of space to breathe, short phrases, words ending in consonants so there would be little sustain. He gave it a very pretty melody, so a performer could sing the song or act it. He imbued the lyrics with rueful loss for missed opportunities that would strike the heart of any listener. And, like all the songs in A Little Night Music, he set it to waltz time.

“Send In the Clowns” became the unqualified hit of the show, thanks in no small part to Johns’ delivery of it. In The Book of Musicals, Arthur Jackson wrote, “Her odd little non-singing voice added the true heartbreak quality called for in the context of the story.” It remains a smash onstage – Judi Dench’s rendition approaches legendary. But it was out of the story’s context that “Send In the Clowns” truly began to soar, as artists fell over themselves rushing to cover it. Sondheim’s songs were often bound to the show by being plot-specific, but this was one song that made the leap from stages to studios and back again with unusual flair.

Seuras Og’s post found three quality covers from the more than half a thousand released versions out there. Without taking anything away from those excellent selections, I would like to add three more.
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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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