Now that Soundgarden is officially in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, here’s a spotlight on great covers of their two of their most popular tunes. Continue reading »
Nov 062025
Nov 062025
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!
I still remember the first time I ever heard Salt-N-Pepa. It was in 1986 (!) and I was in my room drawing pictures when the boasty-brilliant “My Mic Sounds Nice” came on the radio. It was a ridiculously goofy line from the song that hooked me: “The room temperature reaches a hundred and four, you can scramble eggs on the floor.” Hear it here.
That was the song that introduced me to S and P and rocketed me to the record store to grab their seminal debut album Hot, Cool & Vicious. I was born in Queens, grew up on Long Island, and back then was going to school in Manhattan. To me, Salt-N-Pepa just plain sounded like New York City. They even mentioned Babylon in the song, a Long Island town a mere ten miles from mine, and turned it into an insult: “I know you come from Babylon, and you know why? Cause you’re a babble-on MC”!
That was the topper. Salt-N-Pepa freakin’ ruled.
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Jul 182025
Even during their absolute peak of popularity in the early ’70s, when I was kid living for AM radio, the gushy, on-bended-knee, soft-rocking romantic balladry of Bread held no allure for me. My musical palate at that time, was as unrefined as my daily afterschool snack of a single Devil Dog™ with a Hawaiian Punch™ chaser. Sammy Davis Jr.’s “The Candy Man” and The Aristocats soundtrack were unironically being spun in my blue shag carpeted bedroom on a daily basis. I thought the Bay City Rollers were amazing and as good as The Beatles. But even my sugar-pickled brain with its relentlessly questionable taste, was able to discern that softer-than-soft rocking Bread were not cool.
I knew this because their songs were all icky-lovey-dovey like you’d hear at a wedding. I knew because in my grade school music class, their song “If” was deemed unthreatening and un-rock ‘n’ roll enough for we innocent children to be taught to sing. I knew this because they weren’t like, you know, cute, or at least cute enough for a table of pop-worshipping little gals at a lunch table to ever gush over (never happened ever). I knew this because easy listening crooners Andy Williams and Perry Como seemed really into covering Bread songs on their lame, grandma-seducing TV specials.
Bread’s imperial years ran from 1969-1973, during which time they released five (!) studio albums and landed nine songs in the Top 20 of the U.S. pop chart, every one of which is now a massively-streamed, seventies pop-soft rock monster standard. “Everything I Own”. “Make It With You”. “If”. “Baby I’m-a Want You”. “The Guitar Man”. Hits, hits, hits! The band—David Gates, Jimmy Griffin, Mike Botts, Rob Royer (from ’69-’71) and Larry Knechtel (’71-73, ’76-78)—broke up and reunited twice (1976-78, 1997-98)…and, as the timeline hints, there was a fair amount of inter-band drama.
Gates and Griffin were both were gifted songwriters but the former’s compositions featuring his lead vocals were the ones consistently released as singles. This led to a fair amount of bad blood and resentment which later manifested in a lawsuit over use of the band name which Gates and Griffin co-owned. Along with this excess of alpha dogs, there were drugs. Yes, even the sonically gentle Bread weren’t immune to all the traditional band-related tropes.
So why am I writing about these sappy suckers? Well, because as the years have passed, I’ve come to realize that while Bread weren’t “cool,” they definitely didn’t suck. They were in fact really good. Bread were a bottomless pit of memorable, lovely windblown pop songs…and they’ve inspired a staggering number of covers.
I’ve written a couple of lengthy, nerdy love letters on Cover Me about R &B covers of soft rock (here) and hoary old regular rock (here). While researching those pieces, I was struck by just how many covers of Bread songs there were. Not only were there a whole lot of soulful reinterpretations but there were a ton of alternately fascinating, weird and impassioned pop-flavored takes of Bread songs…and we are gonna explore.
Welcome to the gorgeous and goofy world of Bread covers.
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May 202025
Consider the lowly harmonica. When was the last time the harmonica–aka the mouth organ, the mouth harp, or simply the harp–truly stirred an audience or moved any musical needle in anyway?
Was it the mid-’90s, when John Popper shredded on “Run-Around” and other Blues Traveler hits? Maybe, but that was decades ago. What’s the harp been up to since? And what were other highlights in its pop cultural history?
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Feb 142025
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!
Laura Cantrell is one of the best-known Country Music artists in the United Kingdom. Something about the purity of her voice and the clarity of her vision has a particular appeal to the British. For a quarter of a century, since her debut LP, she has been adopted by the small number of mainstream DJs that cover Country music in the UK, and she has cultivated that opportunity. Any musician who is managing to make a living from their art knows that any audience is something to be appreciated, and Cantrell has reciprocated the love. The crowdfunding for her last recording received disproportionate subscriptions from the UK, and the gratitude when it eventually came out was significant.
Born in Nashville and thus marinaded in America’s art form, Cantrell has spent much of her singing and alternate professional life in another city far from the country mainstream, New York. By choice or circumstance, she has established herself away from musical metropolises of her field, but that does not mean that she does not have a deep knowledge and appreciation of the genre. She also performs and records in Nashville. For many years she hosted a country music show on the radio, and she has a particular knowledge and appreciation of the role of women in country music, the well known pioneers and those whose stories were lost for whatever reason. Her song “Queen of the Coast” is an appreciation of Bonnie Owens, a considerable talent in her own right, but who spent much of her life backup singing and doing domestic duties for her husbands, Merle Haggard and Buck Owens.
Throughout her career, she has mixed her own songs with covers, covering similar stories, of universal themes with personal angles, often with the greats of the music accompanying her. The stories are familiar but the delivery is unique to her.
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Nov 222024
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!
As tradition has it, the jazz singer usually comes with piano accompaniment. Often, as with Diana Krall or Nina Simone or Norah Jones, the crooner is the keyboardist. The deep-voiced vocalist Cassandra Wilson broke this template back in the 90s. Her most successful music centers on the acoustic guitar, and features acoustic stringed instruments as main ingredients in the mix. If this unusual sonic palette makes Wilson’s music stand out, what makes it stick is her embrace of genres outside the jazz idiom.
Wilson first gained recognition in the mid-1980s as a founding member of the avant-garde M-Base collective. M-Base artists explored intricate rhythmic layering, free improvisation, and absorbing various African and African-American musical traditions, including newer branches like hip-hop. But Wilson soon struck off in her own direction, issuing several albums under her own name. Then she transformed her approach, and in 1992 she signed on with Blue Note Records (EMI).
It was at this point she expanded beyond jazz standards (and her own compositions) by covering folk, country, Delta blues, and pop material. From Hank Williams to U2, The Monkees to Van Morrison, Muddy Waters to Joni Mitchell, she was on it. At the same time, she began to feature instruments that were largely excluded from the jazz bandstand: classical guitars, octave guitars, resonators, banjos, a violin, a bouzouki, and a mandocello. Wilson redefined what jazz could sound like. She partnered with individualistic musicians (like Brandon Ross, Kevin Breit, and Charlie Burnham) all phenomenal artists who could play with imagination and with extended techniques. When Wilson herself played guitar it was usually in a “wack tuning” (to quote her own liner notes).
Not one to cling to a format or formula, she continued to evolve beyond her breakthrough Blue Note records (she left the label entirely in 2010). She even brought piano back into the mix, bringing to light some the best players of the next generation, including a young unknown named Jon Batiste. In some phases she focused on musical forms from Italy and from Brazil, or veered back into a more mainstream jazz approach, as on projects with Wynton Marsalis (the Pulitzer-prize winning Blood on the Fields production) and album-length tributes to Miles Davis and Billie Holiday. In the current decade Wilson’s been very quiet. She turns 70 in 2025, and if we are lucky she will re-emerge with more of her beguiling music to share. Continue reading »