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

OK, so Cover Me has found five good covers of “Get Lucky” before, a decade-plus ago, but given it was then appended “So Far,” I felt it allowable to repeat and reprise, with all new songs.

I absolutely love “Get Lucky,” popping up forever on radio and on shop playlists. I loved it in 2013, the year Daft Punk released it, and I’ve loved it ever since. But the difficulty, for me, was always in the tracking it down. Even with good old Shazam I was suspicious. I couldn’t believe it was actually by some weird helmeted French electronic duo. Shazam must be wrong, I thought, convinced it was more akin to the sound of Nile Rogers and the extended Chic diaspora he created, courtesy the inescapable scrub of guitar that he has made his own. It took me actually buying Random Access Memory to get to grips with the truth, and to confirm that, yes, it was Rogers on guitar, along with Pharrell Williams on vocals, half of the pre-eminent music production team, the Neptunes.

A number one single across most of the world, surprisingly “Get Lucky” only ever made #2 in the US, albeit for 5 consecutive weeks (damn you, “Blurred Lines”!). Multiple awards came as a deserved matter of course, including Best Song and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, at the Grammys. Lyrical scrutiny was less a concern in those days, with the chorus so damn catchy that all were happy to sing along, whether or not there was much realization about what the “Get Lucky” may be addressed toward. Mind you, with the singer suggesting the content innocent and relating more to the good fortune of meeting with and immediately connecting to someone, who was going to argue. With the slightly changing repetitions, many may have never actually latched on to the full lyrical, if you will, thrust, only learning the truth via so many karaoke machines.
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