Dec 202024
 

Follow all our Best of 2024 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

best cover songs of 2024

Welcome to the 50 Best Tom Petty Covers of 2024!

We kid, of course. But for whatever reason, this year’s big trend in covers was: Tom Petty. At one point there were something like 20 Petty covers on our longlist. Many came from two all-star tribute albums that dropped, entirely coincidentally, the same year (they both made our Best Albums list). We narrowed it down, of course. Three Petty covers ended up in this Top 50, one not even from those albums. Then, just this week, another high-profile Petty cover dropped: Snoop and Jelly Roll reworking “Last Dance for Mary Jane”! Suffice to say that one wouldn’t have been a contender even if it hadn’t arrived too late.

That was the big surprise trend in 2024 covers. The less-surprising trend you could have called from a mile out: The new wave of young pop divas—Chappell, Sabrina, Charli—got covered a lot. We could have done an entire 50-song list of their covers, too (the “Good Luck Babe”s alone!). But, if we had, we would have missed out on gospel R.E.M. and country The Weeknd and electropop Mott the Hoople and soul Green Day and… you know what, just read the list.

(Moo-chas gracias and Deng-ke schoen to Hope Silverman for this year’s tiny-hippo art.)

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Jul 252024
 

Weird Al Yankovic has been quiet on the new music front for about a decade after Mandatory Fun, his last studio album, was released in 2014. So his newest single “Polkamania!” has smashed together some of the last decade’s biggest hits, all in the style of his signature medley genre, a polka.

But which songs are covered in Weird Al’s “Polkamania”?

There’s not much to say about this song sonically – all the covers are straightforward, but done in a polka style, with the exception of “WAP,” which cleverly utilizes sound effects to get the same message across.

Definitely one the Weird Al fans will love, but there’s enough silliness in here for everyone else as well.

Apr 282023
 
most popular covers

At Cover Me, our goal is to share great covers, whether they comes from artists with ten fans or ten million. But I am always vaguely curious what cover songs break out, which among the thousands we hear each year become genuine hits.

I was reminded of this when a recent Country Now headline crossed my Google Alerts: “Luke Combs’ ‘Fast Car’ Cover Is A Streaming Giant.” After only a month, the country star’s fairly faithful take on Tracy Chapman’s 1988 classic has racked up 33 million streams in the U.S. alone. Covers by famous singers come and go, but this one clearly has staying power.

So I decided to try to figure out which other covers from the 21st century have reached this level of breakout success. I’m not privy to Billboard‘s deep-dive chart data, so I used an easy metric available to an amateur like myself: Seeing how many plays something has on Spotify. As good a measure for “a popular song” as you can probably get these days, albeit still imperfect.

I found twenty-four 21st-century covers with over 100 million U.S. streams as of this writing (April 2023). Some very popular covers didn’t quite make the 100m+ threshold: Weezer’s “Africa” (75 million), Iron & Wine’s “Such Great Heights” (76 million), Fall Out Boy and John Mayer’s “Beat It” (89 million). Ryan Adams’ “Wonderwall” only just crossed the 100 million streams mark in the past couple months. And while older covers obviously have an advantage in more time to rack up plays, number one — by a lot! — came out only a few years ago.

Here’s the list of 24. No commentary since, for once, we’re not unearthing buried treasures here. Let’s count down the 24 most-streamed covers on Spotify, with the year of release and number of streams as of this writing. (And it’s possible, even likely, I missed a few, so feel free to suggest additions in the comments — if they qualify, I’ll add ’em.)
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Feb 282023
 
adam lambert
Adam Lambert – Getting Older (Billie Eilish cover)

On his new covers album High Drama, Adam Lambert didn’t pick one of the obvious Billie Eilish songs to cover (“Bad Guy,” “Everything I Wanted,” etc). He goes for relative deep cut “Getting Older,” off her 2021 album Happier Than Ever. Eilish’s original was fairly minimalist. Lambert doesn’t do “minimalist.” His “glam” version, as he describes it, makes the song sound like a much bigger hit than it was. Continue reading »

Aug 292022
 
halestorm hello

After the recent release of their new album Back from the Dead and ahead of festival performances later in the year, hard-rockers Halestorm jumped back into the studio to cover Adele‘s massive hit “Hello” at the request of a fan. The fan requested they cover the track as they were “curious to as to how yall [sic] can put a metal spin on it.” While the band only uploaded a 50 second clip of their cover, it’s safe to say they nailed the brief.
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Nov 032021
 
Adele Lloyiso Gijana Easy On Me

Its only been a few weeks since its release, but Adele’s latest piano ballad “Easy On Me” has already achieved something close to global ubiquity. Like many of Adele’s previous hits, the disparity between “Easy On Me”’s intimacy and the outsized way it has been received is striking. Most artists on this massive of scale specialize in mega-strokes and synchronized choreography, not broken personal pleas set to sparse solo piano accompaniment. In Adele’s case though, it’s the little things that count — millions of individual connections, all drawn to the same torch. Continue reading »