Sly Stone died on June 9 at the age of 82. Two days later, Brian Wilson died, also 82. It was a rough week for eccentric musical geniuses years ahead of their time. We paid tribute to Wilson here, and a couple years ago did a full Best Beach Boys Covers Ever list that now serves as a de facto tribute too. After all, he wrote just about all of those songs.)
So today, the great Sly Stone gets the same treatment. Thirty covers of all the hits, and a few deeper cuts too. Hot fun begins on the next page. (And once you’re done with this, check out our new Five Good Covers piece on “Family Affair.”)
Jazz bassist Christian McBride has released a cover of The Police’s “Murder By Numbers.” McBride’s new album, Without Further Ado, Vol 1 features the track, which, perhaps more interestingly, brings together Police members Andy Summers and Sting. This is the first collaboration between any members of The Police since their reunion tour in 2008.
The album, credited to Christian McBride and his Big Band, titled Without Further Ado, Vol 1 also features collaborations with Samara Joy, Dianne Reeves and Jose James.
“I am absolutely thrilled to have Sting and Andy Summers — two-thirds of one of the most influential bands in history, The Police — join me for one of their songs,” said McBride in a press release. “Sting continues to evolve gracefully as an artist, and Andy still plays with the sophisticated fire and grit he has always possessed.”
McBride’s take dials up the horns and builds on the original’s jazz version. The new version’s addition of horns really plays up the more traditional elements of the track.
Without Further Ado, Vol 1 is due for release later this summer.
“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.
It’s been 15 years since the last Al Green album. Does “Perfect Day” signal the beginning of his comeback? Unclear — I thought so after his last single, another cover, and that was five years ago. But we can hope. “I loved Lou’s original ‘Perfect Day’—the song immediately puts you in a good mood,” Green explained. “We wanted to preserve that spirit, while adding our own sauce and style.”Continue reading »
