They Say It's Your Birthday Archives

They Say It’s Your Birthday: Aaron Neville

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 11:00 am 1 Response »

Jan 242025

They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with covers of his or her songs. Let someone else do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

Aaron Neville is 84 years old today and definitively retired. In a 2023 interview he explained that “my asthma doesn’t let me hold the notes like I used to. Like Linda [Ronstadt, also retired against her will by illness] says, I don’t want to cheat the fans. For them to be looking for this and not getting it. I tell them I’ve got a lot of records already recorded so they can still listen to my voice.”

Well, thank heaven for that. That voice – that creamy, silky, fluttery, angelic, blessed instrument – spent more than half a century bringing listeners peace, soul, and inspiration. Neville called it the God in him touching the God in the listener, and he has touched so many in so many different ways. He knew his way around funk music – as one of the Neville Brothers, how could he not? – but it was on the ballads that he truly soared.
Continue reading »

They Say It’s Your Birthday: Debbie Harry

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 10:00 am No Responses »

Jul 012022

They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with covers of his or her songs. Let someone else do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to Debbie Harry, who turns 77 today with all the tough beauty and street cool that she’s had for decades upon decades. While best known as the vocalist and focal point for Blondie, Harry has had a much fuller career, ranging from go-go dancer and Playboy Bunny to author, actor, and philanthropist. Rock and roll is lucky to have her as one of its elder stateswomen.

Blondie knew their way around covers–two of their biggest hits, “Denis” and “The Tide Is High,” were written and performed by others first–so it should come as no surprise that their own songs are strong enough to take on all comers of all genres. You’ll find no new wave in what follows; instead, get ready for rockabilly, Americana, folk, and even a little bit of rap.
Continue reading »

They Say It’s Your Birthday: Gillian Welch

Posted by Tom McDonald at 9:00 am No Responses »

Oct 022021

They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with other people singing his or her songs. Let others do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

Happy Birthday to Gillian Welch! She deserves an extra slice of cake this year, her 54th, because the past twelve months have been so surprisingly busy.

For one thing, she won a Grammy in the Best Folk Album category this year, for her all-covers collection All the Good Times, made with her ever-present partner David Rawlings. (We reviewed the album here.) The couple also collaborated with Barry Gibb, the Bee Gee with a taste for the kind of Americana and country music that Welch and Rawlings have helped to popularize. But most importantly, the duo spent the year releasing the 48-song, three volume Lost Songs project, rare bits of good news in those hard and uncertain times. Continue reading »

They Say It’s Your Birthday: Howlin’ Wolf

Posted by Tom McDonald at 4:30 pm 1 Response »

Jun 112021

They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with other people singing his or her songs. Let others do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

Born 111 years ago this week, Chester Burnett, better known as Howlin’ Wolf, was a blues musician who possessed one of the most distinctive voices in 20th century popular music, and who wrote some of his genre’s most enduring hits. With his rival Muddy Waters, Wolf defined the electric blues style that reverberated out of Chicago in the 1950s. This sound in turn altered the course of the nascent rock music genre, as youngsters like Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton absorbed Chicago blues, and brought their own trippy flavor of it to new and wider audiences. Wolf was among the first black musicians to capitalize on white youths’ love for the blues form.
Continue reading »

They Say It’s Your Birthday: Kesha

Posted by Sara Stoudt at 8:30 am 1 Response »

Mar 012021

They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with covers of his or her songs. Let someone else do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

Kesha turns 34 today, and she’s certainly been through a lot both personally and professionally since her first big break on Flo Rida’s “Right Round” in 2009. A series of legal battles have been ongoing since 2014, but let’s turn to happier things today. In 2014, Kesha also replaced the $ from her name, marking the end of the Animal/Warrior era and ushering in the new sound of Rainbow and High Road.

Beyond being a performer, she is also a prolific songwriter. She has at least co-writing credits on all of the songs on her first two albums and even some other hits from other artists, like Britney Spears’s “Till the World Ends” and The Veronicas’ “This Love”. Kesha has also been involved in animal rights and LGBTQ+ activism and even makes an appearance in Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” music video, who knew?

Today we throwback to and celebrate the “good old days,” when we could at least pretend like we’d be up for club-going on a Friday night. Since I unabashedly agree with this defense of “punk goes…” covers, why not mix guilty pleasures: Kesha’s party anthems plus pop-punk (with a dash of screamo… as a treat).

They Say It’s Your Birthday: Howard Jones

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 10:00 am 2 Responses »

Feb 232021

They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with covers of his or her songs. Let someone else do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

A happy birthday to Howard Jones, who turns 66 today, 59 years after he learned how to play the piano. He got his start on radio in college, taking care of the night shift on Piccadilly Radio. According to his website, “Every 20 minutes between Midnight and 6am he would play a selection of his own music, on a synthesizer. The sessions were supposed to be purely instrumental, but on occasions Howard could not resist singing, and as a result had several phone calls… to complain!!!”

Those complaints weren’t the last Jones would hear about his music, but it doesn’t seem to have affected him. In a 2006 interview he said, “I wasn’t fashionable. I never got good reviews. But I’m proud of the fact that I wasn’t liked by the media… Pop music is so reactionary and bigoted. And I found that what’s ‘cool’ is often very shallow and transient.”

“Uncool” Jones had hits worldwide, and they get attention from cover artists to this day. Let’s take a listen to some great covers from one of the key figures of ’80s synth-pop.