In the Spotlight Archives - Page 2 of 26

In the Spotlight: Mary J. Blige

Posted by Hope Silverman at 4:00 pm No Responses »

Oct 172024

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!

Marrying the old school (Aretha, Chaka, Gladys and the soul of the ’80s, Anita Baker in particular) with the new school (hip hop), Mary J. Blige’s debut album, 1992’s What’s The 411, and her stone cold classic sophomore LP, 1994’s My Life, changed the sonic game in soul and pop forever. I was working in an HMV store in NYC when 411 was released, and I can tell you that the fever and excitement about the album back then was palpable as f*ck. Mary was from Yonkers. She grew up listening to the same radio stations as us all of us Gen X squirts at the store. She was tough, gorgeous, cool and vulnerable at the same time. It quickly got to the point where you didn’t even have to refer to her by her surname. When a customer came into the store and asked for the “new Mary album,” we all knew who they meant.

It’s hard to accurately express just what a big deal she was in the early ’90s and just how impactful her sound was and continues to be in the R&B and hip-hop universe. Mary’s magnificent, raw, coloring-over-the-edges, steamrolling voice has an air of believability and lived experience. Mary doesn’t pretend when she sings. She has been open and brutally honest about her childhood trauma, depression and substance abuse issues in multitudes of interviews. It’s all realness, all the time.

Like so many before her, Mary’s career was set into motion by singing a cover song. But her discovery story was gloriously human (a mall was involved) and completely fantastical ( “listen to my stepdaughter singing this song”). In 1988, she’d gone to the Galleria Mall in White Plains, NY and stepped into one of the fun-sized recording kiosks they had where you could tape yourself singing a popular song. The tune she chose was the then premier quiet storm queen Anita Baker’s “Caught Up In The Rapture.” She played the tape she’d recorded for her stepdad, who was so blown away he passed it to a friend he knew in the music biz. This seemingly whimsical moment at the mall resulted in her getting signed, for real, to Uptown Records. Years later she performed the song that launched her career with Baker herself, and couldn’t help but let the tears flow and remind everyone just how she got there (see here).

Here are a few of her finest covers from after she was discovered, not before.
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In the Spotlight: Peter Frampton

Posted by Seuras Og at 10:00 am 1 Response »

Oct 172024

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!

Peter Frampton has been everyone and everywhere at once, with that bloody thing in his mouth. He’s also been anonymous and relatively unknown. Neither pendulum peak has stopped this Brit having a career that’s lasted 50 years and counting. Me, I would say a (belated) induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a spotlight well worth acknowledging, in anyone’s book and by anyone’s reckoning. So, let’s have a look at that career.
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In the Spotlight: Foreigner

Posted by Sara Stoudt at 10:00 am No Responses »

Oct 162024

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!

Summer 2023 saw the kick-off of Foreigner’s farewell tour, and it rolls on through the end of this year, with a bonus few summer 2025 shows on the books. The performers are not the original members, and Mick Jones, the only original member still involved with the band, is no longer able to perform on this tour due to his Parkinson’s disease diagnosis, but the songs are still the ones we know and love.

Foreigner is one of the great bands of the arena rock era where everything was just big and in your face. If you think you don’t know any Foreigner songs, my guess is that by the end of this post you’ll have said “oh, I know that one” at least once. Their hits are myriad and ubiquitous, so much so that I couldn’t just pick a few to highlight in this post. In honor of the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, we present covers of the setlist of this farewell tour. This way we get to reminisce about hits across multiple albums and hear a fuller span of the band’s work.

These won’t be the only Foreigner covers to cross your path in the near future. During the induction ceremony itself, we’ll hear plenty more. The band is in luck getting Kelly Clarkson to be part of their induction. Clarkson is a whiz with covers and is sure to give us some new takes on the hits that will keep Foreigner in our heads in the weeks following the ceremony.

So without further ado, bring on the hits!

In the Spotlight: Dave Matthews Band

Posted by Mike Tobyn at 9:30 am No Responses »

Oct 152024

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!

For those that celebrate, the closing gigs to The Dave Matthews Band’s Summer Tour, titled Labor Dave Weekend, are an annual highlight. Three days of raucous fandom mark the transition to Fall in the Gorge, Washington State. Those in The Pit had an extra thing to celebrate this year. After a fan movement failed to get the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020, the band was elected this year and their enthronement takes place this weekend. Those fans will have had just enough time to recover from the weekend to get to Cleveland!

The Dave Matthews Band is an American phenomenon, in several ways. Across nearly 3500 live shows that the band and their spinoffs have played, not much more than 100 DMB events have occurred outside North America, and these shows are often populated by American fans on pilgrimage to the host country. Their seven consecutive number-one albums in the US includes records that never touched a single chart overseas. They have, of course, generated a billion dollars of concert ticket sales off the back of legendary, epic live shows. Their presence on the list of highest-grossing touring artists ever is a testament to the energy they can generate.

Almost everything in DMB’s world is vociferously debated somewhere. The role of cover music in the sets is one of those matters. They have included hundreds of cover versions in their sets over the years, demonstrating a vast knowledge and appreciation of popular and not-so-popular music. When you have a world-class, jazz-infused drummer, a rock bassist, a roots-minded guitarist and a vocalist born overseas, not to mention touring musicians with decades of experience, you are going to have a lot to draw on.

Still, there are a group of people who get agitated every time a cover is included in one of their sets. The argument seems to be that, with a vast back catalog of their own, why do they need to play the music of others? That is understandable in some ways. If you made out with someone hot in your college dorm to a DMB song back in the ’90s, and that song doesn’t get played in the set, you miss the chance to fully relive that moment, perhaps even if you are at that concert with the hot person. Every set is different, but your memories stay the same. The covers that the band have played over the years have a rich heritage and history, and the band are not going to stop playing them, and Matthews himself is going to announce and perform them with enthusiasm regardless.
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In the Spotlight: Kool & the Gang

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

Oct 142024

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!

On their 1985 hit “King of Rock,” the future Reverend Run declared: “As one def rapper, I know I can hang/I’m Run from Run-DMC, like Kool from Kool & the Gang.” In retrospect, it seems only fitting that the group that helped bring rap to the mainstream would namecheck Kool & the Gang on one of their biggest hits. Kool & the Gang’s multi-instrumental fusion of rock, pop, R&B, funk and disco, provided the backbone for modern rap. As of this writing, the website WhoSampled.com lists 2053 known samples of their music, and the number will only keep growing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. If you went to a party, dance or club in the ‘70s and ‘80s, odds are that Kool & the Gang was booming through the speakers. Whether you were from New York or Hollywood and wanted to “Celebrate and have a good time,” “Get down on it,” “Get up with the get down,” “Go dancin’,” or perhaps “Reggae dancin’,” they had a song for seemingly every type of occasion. Even today, it’s rare to attend any life milestone event (wedding, bar mitzvah, etc.) and not hear their good-time anthem “Celebration.”

Though the group has not recorded many covers throughout their long career, cover songs were an important part of the band’s origin story. The band was founded in the mid-‘60s in Jersey City, New Jersey by a group of child jazz prodigies that included brothers Ronald and Robert “Kool” Bell. Performing under various names, they got their start playing bars, clubs and events throughout New Jersey in the ‘60s as teenagers. In a 2023 interview with Questlove, drummer George Brown said that would often perform the hits of the day to win over the crowd. It’s a not-uncommon story for many of the world’s greatest rockers.

One can hear elements of these origins on their early albums. Singing with Dee-Lite Records in 1969, the band included a handful of covers on their first few releases. Listening to these songs now, on the eve of the band’s long-overdue induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, provides a fascinating glimpse into their virtuosity as musicians. One can hear elements of just about every style of popular music from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. It’s easy to imagine them as members of the house bands at Motown or Muscle Shoals.

In their early years, the band were masters at emulating other people’s music, even if they had not quite found the sound that would make them superstars. Listen to their past, and you’ll hear why their future was indeed a “celebration to last throughout the years.”

Author’s Note: The group would later release a Christmas album in 2013 that contained several covers, but we’ll save that for another time and instead focus solely on the early years.

(Back) In the Spotlight: The Feelies

Posted by Jordan Becker at 11:00 am No Responses »

Oct 082024

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 volunteered to write this piece a few years ago, but never got around to it. When I offered to actually finish it, our features editor reminded me that he had written a Spotlight piece on The Feelies back in February. But he was game to let me write this, if there was no overlap. Remarkably, no overlap was actually planned. So, here we go, with a second Spotlight piece in a year about a band of, at best, limited popularity. Or, if you prefer, a cult favorite.
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