Cheating a little as we missed this one in July, but if you too haven’t heard the acoustic “We Belong” Brandi’s been playing on tour with The Twins, it will be worth the wait. “We belong together” takes on a whole new meaning as we (try to) come out of quarantine. Continue reading »
Childish Gambino has shared a cover of Britney Howard’s “Stay High.” The original track, drawn from Howard’s solo debut record Jaime, is a chilled-out cut that won this year’s Grammy for Best Rock Song. Childish Gambino amps things up a notch in his version, deploying some micro-sized, but bold, Technicolor gestures: string swells, warbly synths and, in a trippy comic moment at the 2:04 mark, an abrupt full-stop in the vocal take. The resulting cover feels joyful and heady — a higher version of “Stay High.” Continue reading »
The Country Music Hall of Fame recently presented a video series called Big Night at the Museum, getting modern country and Americana artists to cover Hall of Famers. Lucinda Williams did Johnny Cash, Miranda Lambert did John Prine, and a bunch more. Best by a blonde-streaked hair was Ashley McBryde, a performer who skirts the line between country, Americana, and brawny rock, proving her bona fides on Loretta Lynn’s “You’re Lookin’ at Country.” Continue reading »
“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is one of those songs that, when done right, sends chills up the spine. Originally from the Rogers and Hammerstein 1945 film Carousel, and famously covered by Gerry and the Pacemakers in 1963, the song is now often associated with crowds of over 40,000 football fans of Liverpool FC (or Celtic or Borussia Dortmund, among others) belting it out from the stands. Continue reading »
‘The Best Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.
2020 marks a number of twenty-year anniversaries in music, but perhaps nothing as much as the extremely turn-of-the-millenium phenomenon of the boy band. At the start of the year, NSYNC set a first-week sales record with No Strings Attached. At the end of it, Backstreet Boys set their own sales record with Black & Blue. No one before or since sold CDs like boy bands sold CDs. Even the year’s other huge artists seemed defined in reaction to boy bands; Eminem dissed boy bands in seemingly half of his songs, while Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst was constantly starting feuds with them. It was that kind of year.
Because boy bands had their detractors. Boy oh boy, did they have their detractors. I was a 13-year old in 2000, and I remember the arguments dominating middle school hallways. But whether you were a fanatic or a skeptic, it’s hard to argue that, stripped of the love-it-or-hate-it presentation, the songs were rock solid (melodically, if not always lyrically). I imagine every one of us has gotten some of these stuck in our head – even if we didn’t want them there.
So rather than picking just one artist, we decided to pay tribute to the entire genre. We didn’t limit it to songs from the year 2000, but we did limit it to the phenomenon that 2000 represents. Though you can make a fair argument that The Beatles and Jackson 5 were boy bands, including groups like that would render this list pretty meaningless. Every artist here fits a pretty strict definition of a boy band, even if they came just before the genre’s cultural peak (New Edition) or after it (One Direction).
So everybody, rock your body with the 25 best boy band covers ever.
– Ray Padgett
The list starts on Page 2.