Mar 282025
 

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

best david bowie covers

If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting. – David Bowie

In March 1975, David Bowie released Young Americans, the album that saw him move from glam rock to Philly soul. It was his first top ten album in America, featuring his first number one song in “Fame.” Fifty years later, that golden anniversary is enough of a hook to hang a Cover Me Best Covers Ever feature on. But the remarkable thing about David Bowie is, this was little more than a blip in his career. He had other personas to invent, other forms to master, other brilliancies to create. And he wouldn’t rest until (long after) he did.

Bowie’s influence on popular culture cannot be overstated, and not just in the music world – I’m convinced that roughly one-third of Tilda Swinton is David Bowie. For millions of misfits worldwide, he himself was the freak flag, the one who made it okay to be other than. I’ll help you with the pain, he sang. You’re not alone. Give me your hands. ‘Cause you’re wonderful. It’s a message that still sings out today, in Bowie’s songs and in the work of those he influenced.

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Aug 112019
 

Karine Polwart is a not a folk singer. Yes, she performs, arguably, in the folk tradition, but by and large, she sings her own material, covering weighty topics such as sex trafficking and depression, somehow contriving an upbeat mood to these often gloomy subjects. Fiercely intelligent, she is fit to stand alongside other Scottish songwriters, such as Dick Gaughan and Michael Marra. Apart from her own material, it has been from the canon of trad.arr. that she has drawn most inspiration, as well as a hefty number of the songs of Rabbie Burns. So I would say that Polwart’s new album Karine Polwart’s Scottish Songbook has come as a bit of a surprise to most. And it is the modern Scottish songbook she applies herself to, not broadsheets and bothy ballads. Indeed, apart from John Martyn’s 1973 song “Don’t Want to Know,” the earliest song on the album, Songbook draws nothing from any conspicuously folkie background. The catholic selection ranges through the Waterboys and the Blue Nile to current electro-poppers Chvrches and the eccentric oddball poet Ivor Cutler. No Rod Stewart, some may be pleased to recognize.
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Dec 172018
 
best cover songs of 2018

Two things strike me as I scan through our list this year. This first is that many of the highest-ranking covers are tributes to recently-deceased icons. No surprise there, I suppose. But none actually pay tribute to artists that died in 2018. They honor those we’ve been honoring for two or three years now – your Pettys, your Princes, your Bowies. Hundreds of covers of each of these legends appeared in the first days after their deaths, but many of the best posthumous covers took longer to emerge.

Good covers take time. That principle – the cover-song equivalent of the slow food movement, perhaps – holds true throughout the list. Sure, a few here appear to have arisen from sudden moments of brilliance, flash-arranged for some concert or radio promo session. But many more reveal months or even years of painstaking work to nail every element. Making someone else’s song one’s own isn’t easy. These 50 covers took the time to get it right.

– Ray Padgett, Editor-in-Chief

Start the countdown on the next page…

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Feb 282018
 
best cover songs february

Today we continue the tradition we started way back one month ago. Since we’re still new at this, I’ll reiterate that our picks are unranked and semi-impulsive. Even the un-blurbed “Honorable Mentions” at the bottom aren’t necessarily worse than the rest; in many cases, we’ve just already written about them at length and have little else to say.

Okay, disclaimers behind us, let’s dive in. Continue reading »

Feb 122018
 
david bowie howard stern covers

Over the weekend, Howard Stern’s SiriusXM show aired a massive set of 25 new David Bowie covers by big names across classic rock (Peter Frampton, Todd Rundgren, Daryl Hall), 1990s alternative (Garbage, Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, Slipknot’s Corey Taylor), and current indie favorites (Dawes, Car Seat Headrest, Sun Kil Moon). Gems abounded, but we’ve picked out the best eight covers of the bunch.

They are, not coincidentally, the songs that changed the most from the originals. David Bowie was constantly reinventing his sound, so it seems wrong to cover his songs too faithfully. Continue reading »

Aug 282013
 

Vampire Weekend‘s first single off Vampires of the Modern City, “Diane Young,” is a high-octane, blast-it-with-your-windows-rolled-down sort of song. While visiting Radio One Live Lounge, Scottish band Biffy Clyro still had some fun with the original upbeat tune but still managed to mellow it out in this acoustic cover. Continue reading »