Evanescence’s lead singer Amy Lee has teamed up with Eurythmics lead Dave Stewart to release a cover of the Everly Brothers 1960 song, ‘Love Hurts’, released as part of the Hey Doll Baby online festival that celebrates the life and work of the Everly Brothers. Continue reading »
Tenacious D is widely known for rocking your socks off, sometimes with the help of Dave Grohl on drums (or as a demon). However, many of the songs from their debut album had first drafts that fell within the rare subgenre of acoustic-metal. “Kyle Quit the Band” is one of those songs, where the studio version has added plenty of electric guitars and frantic drumming but the original version was just Jack and Kyle and their acoustic guitars. Recently, Amy Lee (previously of Evanescence) decided to take this lesser-known track back to its acoustic roots. Continue reading »
Cover Classics takes a closer look at all-cover albums of the past, their genesis, and their legacy.
Is The Nightmare Before Christmas a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie? Regardless of which team you are on, the soundtrack of the movie is still a good way to get in the spooky spirit. The premise of the movie originated from a poem written by Tim Burton in 1982. Jack, the Pumpkin King, rules over Halloween Town, home to a variety of monsters. When he discovers Christmas Town, he wants to shake things up and try out the novel holiday in Halloween Town. Hijinks abound and go awry, with plenty of opportunities to sing along.
In 1990, Walt Disney Studios took the project on as a full-length movie. However, the stop-motion, animated movie was released in 1993 under the Touchstone Pictures moniker because Walt Disney doubted its kid-friendliness. The movie defied expectations and became popular, receiving positive reviews from critics and audiences alike. The music itself also received accolades. Danny Elfman, the singing voice of Jack, wrote the songs and score of the original movie. The soundtrack won the Saturn Award for Best Music, awarded by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films.
Upon the 15th anniversary of the movie, a cover album of the original soundtrack, Nightmare Revisited, was released in 2008. Studded with covers from a variety of alternative rock, punk, and (some may say) emo acts, the cover album reached the US Billboard 200. Listen to a few covers spanning the story line and then check the track list to see if your favorite angsty band of the aughts features.
Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!
There’s a cartoon circulating on social media mocking U2 for a penchant for nostalgia. And, on its face, it’s pretty funny:
It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, though. U2 is entirely the wrong group to pick for this joke. “World’s laziest band”? If anything, they have the opposite problem, endlessly hustling and trend-chasing in pursuit of their next hit. Their current Joshua Tree tour is just about the first nostalgia-trip moneygrab in a forty-year career. Unlike just about every other major band from the ’70s and ’80s, they generally avoid the greatest-hits summer tours and Oldchella combos the comic rightly lampoons.
The band is, however, indulging a rare back-pat on their current stadium tour by playing The Joshua Tree from start to finish. It’s one of the front-loaded albums of all time, an insane run of hits on side one followed by relative obscurities on the flip (including “Red Hill Mining Town,” which they’d never played live until this year). Which sounds like it might make for odd concert pacing, but early reviews have been great.
So if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us. As U2 celebrates thirty years of The Joshua Tree, we will too, with covers of every song on the album. Continue reading »
Though they’ve never really dropped off the map completely, Jim Henson’s lovable Muppets seem to be enjoying something of a cultural resurgence lately. A lot of that probably has to do with the upcoming Jason Segel/Amy Adams film simply called The Muppets, as well as the fact that many people who enjoyed the characters as kids are now coming to the age where it’s acceptable, even desirable, to embrace their childhood loves again.
You can add The Green Album to the list of cultural artifacts presaging the return of these creatures to full-on popularity. The record’s aimed exactly at the people described above, who in the years between their childhood and now have cultivated “cool” tastes, of which the Muppets have become a part. One look at the pedigree of bands and artists contributing to this compilation can’t help but impress — Weezer, My Morning Jacket, Andrew Bird and the rest all stand in the upper echelons of their respective fields, and it’s rare that any kind of tribute album could cull such noteworthy acts together. Continue reading »