Oct 042019
 

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

friends theme song covers

The television show Friends debuted on September 22, 1994. Twenty-five years later, the memorable theme song with its iconic four claps is still an adulting anthem. Could the song be any more catchy?

Friends enjoyed ten seasons of popularity and collected over 60 Emmy nominations throughout the course of its run. Netflix viewers are currently wailing and gnashing teeth, as the show is slated to leave the platform in 2020, bringing to an end its five-year reign as one of Netflix’s most streamed shows. Whether you relate more to Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel, or (heaven forbid) Ross, we can all unite in appreciation of the life lessons and hearty laughs that the show has brought us.

The Rembrandts, made up of Danny Wilde and Phil Solem, formed in 1989. Prior to teaming up as The Rembrandts, Wilde had worked on solo albums, and the two of them had collaborated in another group, Great Buildings. Their new band released two albums and had minor success before “I’ll Be There For You” kicked off their third, and Friends brought them into the spotlight. The song started as a minute-long theme, but the duo later re-recorded and expanded it into a full length song.

From mellow to punk, these five covers are here for you “when it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.”
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Oct 262018
 

“Covering the Hits” looks at covers of a randomly-selected #1 hit from the past sixty years.

Ben

It says something about Michael Jackson, and I’m not sure what, that his first solo number-one record being a love song to a rat is one of the less strange things about him. Just fourteen years old, Michael was recording solo work at the behest of Motown Records, who wanted to have Jackson 5-related product to sell without necessarily having all five Jacksons. Meanwhile, a movie was coming out that featured young Lee Montgomery performing a sweet song, but the producers wanted a bigger name to rerecord the song for the movie’s theme, and Donny Osmond, the original choice, was on tour with his brothers. That’s how “Ben,” the title track to the sequel to Willard, found its way into Jackson’s hands and onto the airwaves in 1972.

Ben was the tale of an ailing young boy who befriended a rat colony that had been trained to kill in the previous film, led by the dashing young varmint Ben. The critics weren’t kind – Roger Ebert called it “a geek movie” back in the day when that couldn’t be anything but an insult – but the theme song, a gentle oasis amidst the horror that surrounded it, caught the public’s fancy, and they flocked to it like a rat to cheese. “Ben” wound up selling 1.7 million copies in the US alone.
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