The 50 Best Cover Songs of 2024

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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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Aloe Blacc Delivers Upbeat Funk Soul Cover of “Seven Nation Army”

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Jun 222024
 
Aloe Blacc

Fresh off his psychedelic soul cover of grunge standard “Black Hole Sun,” Aloe Blacc is back with another transformative cover of a massive hit. This time he’s taking on one of the biggest songs of the aughts, The White Stripes‘ “Seven Nation Army” – a song so big it has joined the canon of sports arena staples along with “Sandstorm” and that dance remix of “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” Continue reading »

Aloe Blacc Records Psychedelic Soul Cover of “Black Hole Sun”

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May 302024
 
aloe blacc black hole sun cover

“Black Hole Sun” is the most popular Soundgarden song to cover by an order of magnitude. With something like 150 covers, it can feel like there aren’t too many fresh versions. And, to be perfectly honest, when I heard the opening of the first verse of Aloe Blacc‘s new cover of “Black Hole Sun,” I assumed I was in for another straight-ahead cover of the song that follows the vocal line and just replaces the guitars with something a little more contemporary. To be fair to Blacc, the opening sounds nothing like the original, with some ethereal vocals and faint percussion instead of the iconic guitar. But when Blacc starts singing that first verse, it initially sounds like he’s just going to sing the song over some 21st century beats. Ho hum. Continue reading »

The 35 Best Velvet Underground Covers Ever

 Posted by at 10:30 am  8 Responses »
Oct 272023
 

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

Velvet Underground and Nico

On October 27, 2013, ten years ago today, Lou Reed died. I happened to be in New York City at the time, and his passing was a lead story on the 11 o’clock news. It was as though a part of the city itself had died. Which, inescapably, it had. Reed embodied NYC, from its seedy back rooms to its secret heart, in a way few other people, let alone musicians, ever did.

While Reed’s solo career is highly and deservingly accoladed, it still got overshadowed by the Velvet Underground. Reed’s first band featured Welsh musician John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, and drummer Maureen Tucker, with Nico singing on the first album and Doug Yule replacing Cale in 1968. The band’s four studio albums started ripples that turned into tsunamis; they went from secret-handshake status to Hall of Fame giants, their influence right up there with the Beatles.

We’re honoring Lou and Company with this collection of covers. Some covers couldn’t hold a candle to the original (you’ll find no “Heroin” here), but many of the originals were receptive to another artist’s distinctive stamp. Whether you prefer the first or what followed, you’ll hear the sound of immortality as it opens yet another path of discovery.

–Patrick Robbins, Features Editor

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Covering the Hits: “All Night Long (All Night)” (Lionel Richie)

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Nov 022022
 

“Covering the Hits” looks at covers of a randomly-selected #1 hit from the past sixty-odd years.

all night long covers

“All Night Long (All Night)” is the fifth of seven chart-topping singles in Lionel Richie’s career, two with the Commodores (“Three Times a Lady,” “Still”) followed by five under its own name. The extremely goofy parenthetical in the title clearly did not impact the song’s journey towards the top. Nor its legacy either; some of these chart-toppers we look at in Covering the Hits did not, in fact, get covered much. “All Night Long (All Night)” – that’s the last time I’m writing that parenthetical – still gets covered constantly. I mean, have you ever been to a wedding?

But below we’ll dig a little deeper into the most notable and most interesting covers, from the ‘80s through just last month. Continue reading »

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