Bill Withers Archives

One Great Cover: Club Nouveau’s “Lean on Me”

Posted by Eric Taylor at 11:30 am No Responses »

Jun 122026

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

Forgive me for getting a little personal, but when I first heard Club Nouveau’s cover “Lean on Me,” my reaction was simple: “What? Why?” I loved the Bill Withers original, mostly because it was released the year I was born. During my early mixtape years, I created one with the biggest songs from 1972. (Along with every year of my life up to that point.) As a side note, several other songs from that 1972 tape spawned covers within a few years, including “Without You,” “Oh Girl,” “I’ll Take You There,” “I Can See Clearly Now.”

Bill Withers wrote and recorded “Lean on Me” for his second album, Still Bill. He intentionally kept the lyrics simple. The song connected immediately, reaching #1 on both the Billboard Soul chart and the Hot 100. After its April 21, 1972 release, it earned Gold certification — more than a million copies sold — in less than two months. By year’s end, Billboard ranked it as the seventh-biggest song of 1972. Rolling Stone later included it among “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” and the song is part of the Grammy Hall of Fame.

So now you understand my initial reaction to a cover of this classic: “What? Why?”
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The Best Cover Songs of October 2025

Posted by Ray Padgett at 11:00 am 1 Response »

Oct 312025

The Dollyrots — You Don’t Own Me (Lesley Gore cover)

“It’s My Party” was the bigger hit, but these days it feels like “You Don’t Own Me” gets covered more. It’s become something of a feminist anthem (probably an unlikely future for “It’s My Party”…). Dollyrots singer Kelly Ogden said, in sharing her band’s new revved-up cover, “The song is an anthem for female empowerment, about willing to be defiant in the face of something that’s just plain wrong. Sadly, it’s still just as timely as when Lesley sang it over 60 years ago.”

Folk Bitch Trio — Sex on Fire (Kings of Leon cover)

Remember “Sex on Fire”? Gotta be one of the dumbest singles of the 21st century. Folk Bitch Trio covered it for Like a Version, and they, against all odds, manage to redeem it. “It’s an underrated song,” they said. “It rocks. It’s filthy without you really knowing. The Folk Bitch Trio twist is kind of easy: We just sing it in three-part harmony, lock in, look at each other and we’re there.” Continue reading »

Sam Smith Releases Acoustic Cover of “Ain’t No Sunshine”

Posted by Riley Haas at 9:00 am No Responses »

Oct 092025

“Ain’t No Sunshine” is not just Bill Withers‘ first hit, it has also become his biggest song, at least if Spotify streams are to be believed. It has hundreds of thousands of streams more than his next most popular song, “Lovely Day.” Rather incredibly, it has something like four times as many streams as “Lean on Me,” which was once his biggest song; “Lean on Me” topped the charts in the ’70s. So maybe, at this point, it’s his signature song. Continue reading »

The 30 Best Yacht Rock Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm 2 Responses »

May 302025

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

“Yacht rock” is a genre kinda like emo: No musician admits to making this style of music. Unlike emo, though (maybe more like “indie sleaze”), no one called it “yacht rock” at the time. Nevertheless, whether artists like the name or not, yacht rock exists now. It used to be considered something of a guilty pleasure, but these days, after a splashy (no pun intended) documentary about it got a lot of attention, it’s just a regular pleasure. Questlove loves yacht rock! So do Thundercat, Mac Demarco, Vampire Weekend, and many other musicians considered far “cooler” than Toto ever was. So, today, we salute the yacht rock catalog through covers.

This brings up a contentious question though: What counts as yacht rock? We didn’t want to get derailed debating that indefinitely, so we deferred to the experts. The guys who coined the term in a 2000s web series have a long-running website and podcasts called Yacht or Nyacht. They literally invented the phrase, so we followed their guidance. Any song that scored above 50 on their 100-point scale—more yacht than nyacht—counted. Any song that scored below did not. (You can read more about their criteria on their website, but one thing to note is they define yacht rock not just by the sound of a song, but also whether it emerged from that specific ’70s-LA studio-rat scene.)

Their rigorous ranking includes most of the songs you’d expect, by The Doobie Brothers (and McDonald solo), Christopher Cross, Toto, etc. It also helps deal with the thorny cases. Steely Dan is mostly not yacht-rock, but some songs, particularly in the Aja era, very much are. Fleetwood Mac, though, is definitively not yacht-rock. (Good news: We have an entire Fleetwood Mac list you can peruse.)

So, if you have any beef with what songs do or don’t count, take it up with them. We just want to celebrate the music. Sail away on these 30 covers that do just that.

Five Good Covers: “Ain’t No Sunshine” (Bill Withers)

Posted by Seuras Og at 8:30 am 3 Responses »

May 232025

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

Hard to believe we haven’t done this, given the myriad reprises and reinventions it has received over the years. I know, I know, I know, I know, I know*, you may think we have, but we haven’t, something to remedy right now. (*And in case you have never counted, the answer is 26 times…….)

The breakthrough hit for Bill Withers, “Ain’t No Sunshine” was originally the B-side of “Harlem,” the initial single drawn from his debut long player Just As I Am. DJs started playing the flip more; this led to a re-release and bingo, it hit #3 on the Billboard chart, in the summer of 1971. Quadruple platinum sales have accrued in the intervening years, in both the US and the UK, performing nearly as well in other markets, often getting a second surge of sales whenever some of the cover versions themselves cracked the charts, from Michael Jackson’s in 1972 to the one by American Idol‘s Kris Allen in 2009.
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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.
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