Dec 052024
 
Katie Gavin

“Like a Prayer” is, narrowly, Madonna’s most covered song. Aside from its quality as a song, its popularity might have to do with how it was the first hit of hers to break with her ’80s sound, giving it a little bit more of an immediately apparent timeless quality than the synth-driven hits of the ’80s.

Katie Gavin is the lead singer of the American indie-pop trio MUNA. She recently released her debut solo album and went on SiriusXM to promote it with a live cover of “Like a Prayer.” Gavin sings and plays acoustic guitar but the cover is not technically acoustic as she is accompanied by another guitarist playing electric with pedal effects.

Because it’s just two people, the cover is much sparser than the original. Gavin is mostly very faithful to the song, though she performs it a slower tempo, giving the song a statelier feel than the original. Gavin plays her guitar arpeggio finger-style until about halfway through, when she starts strumming, given the performance a little more momentum.

The contrast from the original is all in what this cover lacks: the organ, the choir, the propulsive bass and percussion.  It feels a bit like a different song, as Gavin’s folky performance cuts out the gospel and funk and leaves just the vocal melody accompanied by minimal instrumentation.

Dec 042024
 
friko when you sleep cover

As the first single from the genre-defining Loveless, My Bloody Valentine‘s “When You Sleep” might be shoegaze’s representative song or close to it. Combining a hooky melody played on a sampler with dense, distorted guitars and so many different vocal takes that you can barely make out the words some of the time, it seems to embody everything about the genre in a brief little nutshell. Continue reading »

Dec 032024
 
Stephen Wilson Jr.

Sometimes a song is so iconic it’s better, or perhaps safer, to try rethinking it from the ground up, to try to find a new way to find something in it that will separate your cover out from under the shadow of the original.

Stephen Wilson Jr. showed this year that he has a knack for looking at a song differently – his recent cover of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” feels quite distinct from the original. And though the same aesthetic is present on his new cover of Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me,” it still doesn’t prepare us for how radically he reinvents the song on his battered, electrified acoustic guitar. Continue reading »

Dec 022024
 
franz ferdinand good luck babe

Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos described Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” as “an amazing song by an amazing artist.” The group recently performed “Good Luck” at a Sofa Session on BBC Radio 2, hosted by Jo Whiley. “It’s funny,” Kapranos told Whiley, “you get some artists that have a moment, often it’s kind of divisive. Some people absolutely love them and some people hate them. But I’ve not come across anybody I know, none of my friends, nobody I know, who doesn’t like this artist. They’re just so good.” Continue reading »

Dec 022024
 
julien baker belle and sebastian

The Red Hot Organization’s new TRANSA project may have started small, but it was probably always going to end as something epic. Intended as a “spiritual journey celebrating trans people” it features over 100 artists coming forward with new material (including the first new work from Sade in many years) and new interpretations. For a cover of Belle and Sebastian’s “Get Me Away from Here I Am Dying,” Julien Baker has assembled a genre and ocean-spanning group featuring Calvin Lauber, Northern Irish folk artist Soak and Alaskan singer-songwriter Quinn Christopherson. Continue reading »