One Great Cover Archives

One Great Cover: Elvis Costello’s “She”

Posted by Mike Tobyn at 10:00 am No Responses »

Feb 202026

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

Nearly 50 years ago, Elvis Costello earned the temporary enmity of Lorne Michaels, and a healthy dose of publicity. During his performance on an episode of Saturday Night Live, he stopped playing “Less Than Zero,” a song about undue deference to a dangerous Fascist, and swung into “Radio Radio,” a song about unreasonable control of what could be said in broadcast media. Different times.

As Costello was only on the show because the Sex Pistols had made themselves unavailable by going through one of their breakups, people might have been tempted to consider him as another artless provocateur from the British punk scene. Costello, however, would contend that it was a reasonable musical decision to change the song. Americans, fortunately for them, would know little about British Fascist lickspittle Oswald Mosley, but could understand something about the marginalization of artists by broadcasters. For his cheek, Costello was then marginalized by SNL for the next decade.

Being led by the music has been the key to Costello’s career. Long-time fans could have seen him in Grand Concert Halls with leading-edge classical ensembles covering Kurt Weill, or in the less salubrious surroundings of a converted circus in Liverpool, playing his early hits, in a building that helped shape those hits. He has collaborated with hip-hop artists and New Orleans legends. His album with Burt Bacharach, 1998’s Painted from Memory, is a beautiful piece of work. His work with Paul McCartney was a career highlight, for at least one of them, and the emotion in every aspect of his performance for McCartney and the Obamas at the White House is touching.

These successful collaborations, which often last beyond the original nature of the project, do not suggest a man who provokes ire unnecessarily. Musical differences are a catalytic necessity, but one needn’t be difficult about it.
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One Great Cover: Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet”

Posted by Adam Mason at 11:00 am No Responses »

Dec 052025

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

I almost regret doing it.
— Bjork, 2002

Bjork‘s “It’s Oh So Quiet” is a rare example of a cover song being way more successful than the cover artist would have wished. The Icelandic singer-songwriter recorded the old Betty Hutton jazz hit in 1995, only as “sort of a joke.” She didn’t expect it to be her most successful single as a solo artist. She didn’t expect it to outperform her innovative Top 40 originals: “Venus as a Boy,” “Big Time Sensuality,” “Play Dead,” and “Army of Me.” She didn’t expect it to be a Christmas favorite, or to catapult her to a level of fame that involved physically attacking an invasive reporter at a Bangkok airport. And she almost certainly didn’t expect it to be considered “quintessential Bjork” in all its whimsicality, or to go down in history as the most recognizable showcasing of her acrobatic vocals.

“It’s ironic ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ became my biggest song,” Bjork said in 2002, the same year she agreed with her fans to omit it from her Greatest Hits album. She deemed it a track she’d put the least creative effort into, and one that didn’t represent her at all, as if its immense popularity was entirely out of her hands and an abomination in her catalog. She made perfectly clear that she was embarrassed by it; that she disowned it. She therefore left us asking the important question: Who or what is to, erm, blame for this One Great Cover?

Here are a few contenders, with reasons given.
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One Great Cover: The Third Mind’s “Sally Go ’Round the Roses”

Posted by Tom McDonald at 11:00 am 1 Response »

Nov 282025

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

For our “What’s your favorite cover of a traditional song” post from last November, I wanted to write about The Third Mind’s version of “Sally Go ’Round the Roses.” It seemed like the perfect chance to collect my thoughts about The Third Mind, a “supergroup” led by fiery guitarist Dave Alvin (formerly of The Blasters, The Knitters, and X). After all, The Third Mind featured the spell-binding singer Jesse Sykes, who had fallen into a mysterious silent since 2011.

Except I found out that “Sally Go ’Round the Roses” is not a traditional song. Not even close. It was written in 1963, and recorded by The Jaynetts that same year.

OK, so I was wrong. In my defense, Joan Baez misled me. In the Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, we see Baez in a hotel room singing “Sally Go ’Round the Roses.” Baez mostly played traditional ballads (when not playing Dylan covers), so I assumed this song too was “trad.” I also knew that the British folk band Pentangle–those revivers of traditional British Isles roots music–had covered the song on an early album.

But you know what they say about people who assume.
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One Great Cover: The White Stripes’ “John The Revelator”

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

Nov 052025

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

In the documentary It Might Get Loud, Jack White is shown putting a record on a turntable. He sits, listening intently, as we hear Son House’s “Grinnin’ in Your Face.” After a few bars the camera zooms in on the record cover and we hear Jack’s voiceover: “By the time I was about 18, somebody played me Son House. That was it for me.”

He elaborates that the song has been his favorite since the first time he heard it, and he was taken in by the simplicity of the music. “I didn’t know that you could do that, just singing and clapping.” Continue reading »

One Great Cover: Elton John’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”

Posted by Tom McDonald at 12:00 pm 1 Response »

Jul 292025

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

Elton John's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

Let’s get one thing out in the open at the start: Elton John’s version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” did not make our list of the 75 Best Beatles Covers Ever. The list favored fresh discoveries over the tried-and-true classics, so the omission is not too surprising. More surprising is that over twenty readers responded to that post, and not one mentions Elton’s version either, though many of the comments included suggestions as to which covers should have made the grade.

But make no mistake, this is clearly one great cover. It is the only Beatles cover to reach #1 in the US, which must count for something. It’s a little ironic that the original “Lucy” was never released as a single–in fact no track from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released as a single.

One Great Cover: Fine Young Cannibals’ “Suspicious Minds”

Posted by Adam Mason at 9:00 am 2 Responses »

Jun 202025

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

When Fine Young Cannibals covered “Suspicious Minds” in 1985, they covered more than just a song made famous by Elvis Presley in 1969. They covered a song that was iconic of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll in his post-“’68 Comeback Special” pomp at the globally televised “Aloha from Hawaii” show in 1973. Sweaty, lavishly sideburned, and spangled in white American-eagle jumpsuit. Colorful lei around neck. Huge band behind him. Thirty-piece orchestra. Choir. Enraptured fans. Frenetic dancing during the extended drum fills. And acrobatic shapes that came with the immortal line: “I hope this suit don’t tear up, baby.”

Brave, then, for Fine Young Cannibals to even attempt such a song, and hugely unlikely that they should proceed to have an international smash hit with it in early 1986. They were, lest we forget, a decidedly unstarlike three-piece from Birmingham, UK, two of whom had only recently emerged from the ashes of punk-influenced, inner-city ska band The (English) Beat. They’d further stripped the song of the flamboyance, grandeur, and melodrama we’d come to associate with it, and pretty much de-Elvised it, making sure it fit, instead, with the gritty, socially conscious, and virulently anti-Margaret Thatcher vibe of their debut album.

FYC also made the song sound fresh, more urgent, and more relevant to a new—largely unemployed—generation, gaining for themselves an immortal signature tune in the process, one which would more than hold its own against “She Drives Me Crazy,” “Good Thing,” and anything off their all-conquering second album, The Raw and the Cooked. They’d clearly given the world… One Great Cover.