Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.
A man with the voice of an angel sings of someone caught between the moon and New York City. It’s easy to imagine a liminal paradise between those two places; perhaps that’s where the angelic narrator resides, watching over the story he tells. He’s not just recounting events; he may be guiding them, placing redemption in the path of a lost soul, for potential entry into Heaven.
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‘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.
“Covering the Hits” looks at covers of a randomly-selected #1 hit from the past sixty-odd years.
Christopher Cross’s soft rock classic “Sailing” isn’t quite what it seems to be on its shimmery surface. For one thing, though it was technically related to actual sojourns on the water Cross took in his younger days, it wasn’t strictly about sailing. Back in 1995, in the midst of a manic (understatement) interview on The Howard Stern Show, of all places, he broke it down.
Cross said his standard explanation of the song’s inspiration ’til then was that it was about the transportive power of art. The song’s most famous line,”the canvas can do miracles” referred not to a boat sail, but to an actual painting (I admit that for years I thought he meant a freakin’ sail, don’t tell anyone). But when he thought about it later, he realized it was about combination of escaping a stressful home situation (his father’s alcoholism and subsequent emotional distance) as well as his gratefulness to a particular friend who would take him out sailing and as a result became something of a surrogate dad to Cross.
And so “Sailing” is not just for sailors but is in fact for all of us wistful humans, eloquently expressing musical thanks to everyone’s blessed escape hatches and guardian angels. “Sailing” is in fact a state of mind. I spent a fair amount of time with this thing as well as the album it came from, titled, uh, Christopher Cross, in my sad teenage bedroom back in the day. so I was warmed to hear Cross’s latter-day analysis. And surely I’m not the only living being who has succumbed to its mellow, melancholic charm and still voluntarily listens to it on a semi-regular basis forty-odd years later (yeah, okay, work with me here people).
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Under the Radar shines a light on lesser-known cover artists. If you’re not listening to these folks, you should. Catch up on past installments here.
An article about the shoegazing band Echodrone begins, “Echodrone are one of those bands that I want to be horribly embarrassed to have not been aware of ‘til their fifth album and tenth year…” The writer goes on to add, “Although, apparently many of the band members are yet to even meet each other… So I’m inclined to be slightly less embarrassed… ” Indeed, the band may be based in San Francisco, where it started out as a two-man operation (Eugene Suh and Brandon Dudley), but the addition of its newest members (Mike Funk, Jim Hrabak, and Rachel Lopez) has made them a quintet that records its songs virtually, passing the music files from one set of hands to the next via Dropbox. They may not play together, but you sure hope they’ll stay together.
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The second greatest thing to come out of the 1981 movie Arthur besides Dudley Moore (we’re not sure if any greatness came out of the recent remake) was Christopher Cross’s “Arthur’s Theme (The Best That You Can Do).” Although some cheese gets moldy with age, this cheesy classic only gets better. Perhaps Jukebox the Ghost knew this when deciding to cover Cross’s song in a failed bid to get their cover included on the recent remake soundtrack (the honors went to Fitz and the Tantrums). Continue reading »