Water From Your Eyes are a fairly unclassifiable (100 Gecs meets post-punk maybe?) duo who released their debut album on Matador last year. Their sound is nothing but left turns, so it figures that their new cover is a wildly unexpected choice too too. They covered Chumbawamba…but not the one Chumbawamba song everyone covers. Instead, they covered a different song from Tubthumper. Not even one of the failed “Tubthumping” follow-up singles either. They went even deeper, to one of the album’s many unknown gems (it was my first CD so maybe I’m biased, but it’s a good album!): “The Good Ship Lifestyle.”Continue reading »
Some covers are more equal than others. Good, Better, Best looks at three covers and decides who takes home the gold, the silver, and the bronze.
It can be hard work being in a band for 30 years. Not everyone survives with their friendships and dignity intact. The Anarcho-Punk outfit Chumbawamba originated in the North of England in 1982, and survived as a band until 2012. A marvelous recent documentary showed that they still get on with each other, on the whole. In addition to the precarious living that is common in the early stages (and other) of being a musical combo outside the mainstream, they had principles that restricted their ability to grow and make money. They gave their time and music to a lot of unpaid causes. They encouraged their fans to record their concerts and circulate them as cassettes, even though they didn’t have as many people at their gigs, and buying merchandise, as the Grateful Dead. Each member of their fan club had an entirely individual interpretation of their mission and how to fulfil it, and were vocal with their opinions, and quick to boycott. And yet they thrived.
What does a One Hit Wonder add to that mix? Chumbawamba’s career is neatly divided around 1997: the period before they had one of the biggest singles in the world, and the period after. Having already alienated a section of their fanbase (as usual) by “selling out” by signing with a “Big” label, they then produced an overtly “pop” single, “Tubthumping,” and everything changed. They appeared in media throughout the world and played concerts across the globe. They generated a lot of cash from sales and licensing the hit, which they could direct to their causes if they wanted. They humiliated a bloviating politician in a way that they could not have before. If one of the band encouraged fans, on national television in the US, to steal their record if they cannot afford, what was it? Loose, unthinking talk? A dada-ist prank? Evidence of an excellent eye for PR? All three? Whatever the reason, it did not harm sales. Continue reading »
Anyone who was paying attention to cover songs a decade ago will remember The A.V. Club’s “Undercover” series. In the vein of the BBC Live Lounge and Triple J Like a Version, the entertainment web site would bring bands into their Chicago offices to cover a song. The concept, though, was the site started with a masters list of songs and the band had to pick one. The later they came in, the fewer song choices remained. It went on for years and the covers were ubiquitous (we must have posted a million of ’em). Practically every indie band of the era stopped by (many several times), and they often delivered something great.Continue reading »
Every year, I do a big anniversary post tackling the best covers of a year before Cover Me was born. So far we’ve done 1969 (in 2019), 1978 (in 2018), 1987 (in 2017), and 1996 (in 2016). And in 2020 we circle back to the not-so-distant past with the most recent year yet: 2000.
Cover Me began in 2007 and we did our first year-end list in 2008, so 2000 isn’t that long before we were following this stuff in real time. But, in music eras, 2007 and 2000 seem eons apart. 2000 was nü-metal and Napster, Smash Mouth and the ska revival. Beyoncé was in the quartet Destiny’s Child; Justin Timberlake only had a one-in-five chance of being your favorite member of N’Sync (or maybe one-in-four…sorry Joey). By the time this site started seven years later, all this seemed like ancient history.
There were a lot of extremely prominent covers in 2000. “Prominent,” of course, doesn’t necessarily meaning “good.” This was the year that Madonna covered “American Pie” (not to be outdone, Britney Spears then took a stab at “Satisfaction”). It was the year a Jim Carrey movie soundtrack inexplicably asked bands like Smash Mouth and Brian Setzer Orchestra to cover Steely Dan. It was the year of “Who Let the Dogs Out?” Bet you didn’t even know that one was a cover (unless you’re a faithful Cover Me reader).
None of those are on this list (though, if you want more dated trainwrecks like those, stay tuned Monday for a bonus list I’m calling the “The Most Extremely ‘2000’ Covers of the Year 2000”). But 2000 offered a wealth of wonderful covers, often flying just under the mainstream radar. Some of them still seem of the time – anything ska, basically – but most could have come out decades earlier. Or yesterday.
YouTube was still a few years away, as was streaming more generally, so covers still mostly came out through “traditional” avenues: on albums, as the b-sides to singles, etc. As I wrote in my new book, tribute albums were big business by this time too, which means that many 2000 covers emerged through that format. Even narrowing this list down to 50 was hard, which is why Cover Me’s Patreon supporters will get a batch of 150 Honorable Mentions.
Check out the list starting on Page 2, and stay tuned for the best covers of this year coming in December.
Welcome to Cover Me Q&A, where we take your questions about cover songs and answer them to the best of our ability.
Here at Cover Me Q&A, we’ll be taking questions about cover songs and giving as many different answers as we can. This will give us a chance to hold forth on covers we might not otherwise get to talk about, to give Cover Me readers a chance to learn more about individual staffers’ tastes and writing styles, and to provide an opportunity for some back-and-forth, as we’ll be taking requests (learn how to do so at feature’s end).
Today’s question: What’s a favorite a cappella cover? Continue reading »
Despite the fact that Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb have sold upwards of 120 million records, they can sometimes seem oddly underrated. They aren’t regarded with the reverence afforded to other artists that emerged during roughly the same era, like The Rolling Stones or The Who. They haven’t generated the same level of dramatic intrigue as Elton John or Queen. And discovering their music was never part of some traditional teenage rite of passage like Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin. But while they don’t seem to receive near the same level of acclaim as the aforementioned artists, their music has remained as utterly ubiquitous as just about all of them. There are few other artists as essential to documenting the sound of an era as The Bee Gees were to the late ’70s.
Throw the Here At Last…Bee Gees… Live album from 1977 on the turntable or queue up the stream. You will be confronted with a veritable assembly line of perfectly constructed, exquisitely performed pop songs. Take a step back and really listen. The outlandish songwriting gift on display is nothing short of mind-blowing, You might think, how is it even possible to have written this many incredible songs? And those are just 20 or so selected tracks Barry, Robin, and Maurice had done up to that point – before Saturday Night Fever! There were dozens more to come.
We were overwhelmed by the number of incredible covers of both Bee Gees classics and deep cuts and their glorious diversity. But we really shouldn’t have been surprised. Despite the band itself not always getting its due, the Bee Gees’ songs remain for everyone and forever.