Cowboy Junkies Archives

The 40 Best David Bowie Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 8:00 am 4 Responses »

Mar 282025

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting. – David Bowie

In March 1975, David Bowie released Young Americans, the album that saw him move from glam rock to Philly soul. It was his first top ten album in America, featuring his first number one song in “Fame.” Fifty years later, that golden anniversary is enough of a hook to hang a Cover Me Best Covers Ever feature on. But the remarkable thing about David Bowie is, this was little more than a blip in his career. He had other personas to invent, other forms to master, other brilliancies to create. And he wouldn’t rest until (long after) he did.

Bowie’s influence on popular culture cannot be overstated, and not just in the music world – I’m convinced that roughly one-third of Tilda Swinton is David Bowie. For millions of misfits worldwide, he himself was the freak flag, the one who made it okay to be other than. I’ll help you with the pain, he sang. You’re not alone. Give me your hands. ‘Cause you’re wonderful. It’s a message that still sings out today, in Bowie’s songs and in the work of those he influenced.

The 75 Best Beatles Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 9:00 am 23 Responses »

Feb 232024

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

Sixty years ago this month, The Beatles played on the Ed Sullivan Show. You don’t need us to tell you what a momentous occasion this was; entire books have been written on the subject. Suffice to say we’re using the anniversary as our excuse to finally devote a Best Covers Ever to perhaps the biggest band of them all. We’ve done Dylan. We’ve done the Stones. We’ve done Dolly and Springsteen and Prince. But there was one last giant remaining.

Though it’s difficult to measure this precisely, The Beatles are the most-covered artist of all time according to the two biggest covers databases on the internet (SecondHandSongs, WhoSampled). And that certainly feels right. “Yesterday” is often cited as the most-covered song of all time, though that needs qualifiers (a ton of Christmas standards would beat it). But, again, it feels right. The Beatles were ubiquitous in their day, and they’ve been ubiquitous ever since. They just had a chart-topping single last month, the A.I.-assisted “Now and Then,” which was duly covered widely. If “Carnival of Light” ever surfaces, no doubt a carnival of covers will soon follow. Continue reading »

The 35 Best Velvet Underground Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 10:30 am 8 Responses »

Oct 272023

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

On October 27, 2013, ten years ago today, Lou Reed died. I happened to be in New York City at the time, and his passing was a lead story on the 11 o’clock news. It was as though a part of the city itself had died. Which, inescapably, it had. Reed embodied NYC, from its seedy back rooms to its secret heart, in a way few other people, let alone musicians, ever did.

While Reed’s solo career is highly and deservingly accoladed, it still got overshadowed by the Velvet Underground. Reed’s first band featured Welsh musician John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, and drummer Maureen Tucker, with Nico singing on the first album and Doug Yule replacing Cale in 1968. The band’s four studio albums started ripples that turned into tsunamis; they went from secret-handshake status to Hall of Fame giants, their influence right up there with the Beatles.

We’re honoring Lou and Company with this collection of covers. Some covers couldn’t hold a candle to the original (you’ll find no “Heroin” here), but many of the originals were receptive to another artist’s distinctive stamp. Whether you prefer the first or what followed, you’ll hear the sound of immortality as it opens yet another path of discovery.

–Patrick Robbins, Features Editor

Five Good Covers: “Baby, Please Don’t Go”

Posted by Seuras Og at 12:00 pm 3 Responses »

Feb 242023

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

What makes the original artist of a cover? Does it depend on which you heard first? Me, I doubt even I could pretend my initial exposure to “Baby Please Don’t Go” was the original I held dearest and first to my heart. I’ll go further: I bet, that for many, the first notes of “Baby Please Don’t Go” they ever heard came from the whip-thin guitar of Billy Harrison (unless the rumors are true and it was actually session veteran Jimmy Page). He was part of Belfast’s finest, Them, with none other than Mr. Grumpyguts himself, Van Morrison, in moodily magnificent vocal form even then.

But no, Them’s take wasn’t the original, that being the domain of good old trad. arr., responsible for any number of ancient ditties that have transformed and transmogrified over the ages, across oceans and genres. But for the purposes of this piece, Them’s take is my original, even if their version was drawn from the twin wells of Big Joe Williams, the first recorded iteration, in 1935, and John Lee Hooker‘s 1949 version, which lopped the “please” off the title.
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Review: Cowboy Junkies’ ‘Songs of the Recollection’

Posted by Seuras Og at 10:00 am No Responses »

Mar 282022

That the venerable Canadian band Cowboy Junkies should preface their new album, Songs of the Recollection, with a comment that, long before they were musicians, they were music fans, should be no great surprise. Anyone in the least bit familiar with their work will be already aware of their erudite taste in that department, such is the body of covers work they have built up over the years, on their own recordings and their myriad contributions to innumerable tribute albums. Unsurprisingly, we here are big fans and have featured them, or of them, more than the once.

Songs of the Recollection brings together some obscure oldies recorded for other projects (just over half the album’s tracks being previously available), plus a few newly minted ones; as ever, the band extends across genres and styles in their own idiosyncratic way, making it feel the songs were specially written for their spare minimalism, all spiky guitars in slo-mo, and Margo Timmins’ haunting voice, a glimpse of Canada’s icy north.
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They Say It’s Your Birthday: Margo Timmins

Posted by Seuras Og at 9:30 am 3 Responses »

Jan 302021

They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with covers of his or her songs. Let someone else do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

There are few bands with such a way with covers as the Cowboy Junkies, that in no small part to the icy warmth of singer, Margo Timmins, an astonishing 60 this month. She was born in Montreal, 1/27/61, and I have long been a fan, maybe not from the very start, but certainly once ‘Trinity Sessions’ threw down the gauntlet, quietly and emphatically. Birmingham Town Hall, in the English midlands, used to be a dreadful venue, any sounds not completely muffled being left free to echo around the pillars, hopeless for any band with any degree of amplification. It has since had a refurb, and has lost, thankfully, that legacy, but the Junkies were perfection there then, every pin dropping with perfect clarity, the most important pin being that of Timmins, an ethereal shimmer filling the gap between the controlled calm of the instrumentation.

In the subsequent years the band, Timmins and her two brothers, Michael on guitar and Peter on drums, along with family friend Alan Anton playing bass, have strayed little from that template. Initially supplemented by the instrumentation of Jeff Bird and others, adding mandolin, harmonica, dobro, steel and fiddle, latterly it would become the core quartet, as blues became as much an influence as country had been before. The band had been started by Michael, a record-hungry youth who had been in bands since high school. Margo had never sung in public before he goaded her to add vocals, and she initially sang facing away from the stage, such was her crippling shyness, echoing the experiences of Michael Stipe and Jim Morrison, two other equally iconic vocalists.

Over a 35-plus-year career, the Cowboy Junkies have produced 18 studio albums, six live albums, and seven compilations, with innumerably more material courtesy their website. (Sadly it seems that much of that rare and archive material in currently unavailable.) Covers have always been a feature; most of their records containing one or two, and they’re staples on tribute projects, to artists as varied as Gram Parsons and Blind Willie Johnson. In 2009, Timmins also found the time to release an all-cover solo album, enticingly entitled Margo’s Corner: The Ty Tyrfu Sessions, Volume 1. She has also added her froideur to any number of other artists, as a backing or additional singer, usually to fellow Canadians.

Let’s drill down into some of the best examples of her transformative skills, starting with perhaps the best known and, arguably, the best example.
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