David Bowie Archives

The 40 Best John Lennon Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm 3 Responses »

Feb 282025

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

Fifty years ago this month, John Lennon released his covers album Rock ‘n’ Roll, in which he tackled a bunch of pre-Beatles rock and roll classics by folks like Gene Vincent and Fats Domino. Admittedly, the album isn’t all that good. It was done under legal pressure, and sounds like it. But the anniversary is a good enough is excuse to celebrate Lennon covers our own way: Not covers by John, but covers of John.

We should our one rule state up front: No Beatles songs! We did a giant 75-song Beatles covers list last year, which, naturally, included a bunch of John songs. So, for this list, as we did with Paul McCartney a few years back, we’re focusing entirely on his solo output. “Solo” loosely defined as anything post-Beatles: co-billed with Yoko, officially backed by Plastic Ono Band, etc.

If you think the no-Beatles rule adds a pretty strict limitation, think again. There was no shortage of solo-Lennon song covers to choose from. And it’s not 50% “Imagine” covers either; in fact, on our list of 40 covers, only two “Imagine”s make the cut. Most “Imagine” covers are pretty damn saccharine, not a word often associated with the most caustic Beatle. But just about every other mood and sound appears below.

Click to the next page to get started. All we are saying is give these a chance.

– Ray Padgett, Cover Me Founder/Editor

In the Spotlight: Seal

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 11:00 am No Responses »

Sep 272024

In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!

Seal Henry Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel’s list of awards and accolades go on nearly as long as his full name. He’s won Grammy Awards for Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance – all for “Kiss From a Rose,” his 1994 smash – and been nominated twelve more times. He’s sold twenty million records. And he’s earned all his success, thanks to a voice of soul, range, and power, both silky and sensual, lustrous and rich.

Hits, Seal’s 2009 best-of compilation, contains six covers: “Fly Like an Eagle,” “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” “I Am Your Man,” and “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again.” Naturally, we wanted to dig a little deeper. It was beyond certain that we wouldn’t have to dig too far down before we found gold. Here are just five of the worthy nuggets we unearthed.
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The Best Who Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 8:00 am 7 Responses »

Aug 302024

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

One of the things everyone enjoys about the Beatles is the band’s equality. Take John, Paul, George, or Ringo out of the equation, they say, and the magic is over. Well, the same is true for the Who (something they proved, sadly, after Keith Moon’s death). Only the Who were bigger. Louder. More proficient at their instruments of choice. They could be more powerful, but they could be more vulnerable too. They were one of the best studio bands of their time, and one of the best live bands of all time. And when they were at their peak, they could be the best band in the world.

Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle, and Keith Moon combined to form a force of nature. Starting as one of the great singles bands, they segued into being masters of the LP. Townshend led the way with pioneer guitar playing – both slashing power chords and controlled feedback were part of his palette before any other Guitar God – and a pen that produced not one but two full-length operas for the band (three, if you count the belatedly released Lifehouse), as well as three-minute expressions of defiant angst. Daltrey gave voice to that angst, developing a roar that could surf the wave of noise or blow through it. Entwistle may have looked stoic, but they called him Thunderfingers for a reason. His bass lines were nimble yet forceful, and his sense of the macabre in his songs gave the band even more colors. And what can be said about Moon and his drumming that hasn’t already been said?

The Who’s songs will remain long after they’re gone. Not just for the performances the Who gave them, but for the songs themselves. They conveyed anger, regret, humor, and more, searching low and high within their psyches. The stories they told were both theirs and ours. Here are thirty-five of those stories, telling those stories in ways that approach and occasionally surpass the band that created them.

– Patrick Robbins, Features Editor

Cover Me Q&A: What’s your cringiest cover song?

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm 4 Responses »

Jul 312024

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 comes from one of our readers, Micah Goldfus. He wants to know:

What’s your cringiest cover song?

You’ll find his answer below, along with plenty more from the Cover Me gang…
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The 50 Best Kinks Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 10:35 am 1 Response »

Jun 212024

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

If The Kinks had stopped after their first year, they’d still be legends. “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night,” two of the all-time-great sixties rock singles, were both released in 1964. That’s more classics in one year than most bands have in decades (and their year gets even better if you slide in January 1965’s “Tired of Waiting for You,” recorded before “All Day Etc”).

But if The Kinks had stopped after their first year, this list certainly wouldn’t run 50 covers deep. Because, of course, they didn’t stop. They kept releasing hits, including Top 10s in both the ’70s (“Lola,” “Apeman”) and ’80s (“Come Dancing”). Maybe even more importantly, they kept creating, kept innovating, kept pushing forward, not settling into retreading their early garage-rock sound. That wide breadth gets reflected in the Kinks songs that artists covered. The big hits, of course, are well represented. But so are plenty of album cuts and singles that “flopped” at the time but were rediscovered years later.

Ray Davies turns 80 today. So today, we celebrate his birthday—and his ability to withstand decades of interviews about whether he and brother Dave will ever reunite—with our countdown of the 50 Best Kinks Covers Ever.

Review: Dana Gillespie’s ‘First Love’

Posted by Seuras Og at 8:30 am No Responses »

Jun 182024

Dana Gillespie… Now, where do I know that name from…

If you cast your mind back (or possibly your father’s), you’ll remember the name, possibly even the album cover, with which Gillespie is arguably best known. That 1974 album, Weren’t Born A Man, which given her Bowie association, immediately had folk wondering whether she were, despite her pneumatic sleeve appearance. Remember, this was around the same time Amanda Lear was allowing the myth around she being born male to permeate, let alone all the claims Bowie fostered around his sexuality. Well, Gillespie wasn’t born a man, and her relationship with Bowie was understandably under wraps: they were teens at its inception, and remained friends and lovers for the next decade. Bowie’s song “Andy Warhol” was written for her, she including it on that album, it produced by Bowie and Mick Ronson. She also sang backing vocals on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. However, this was insufficient to have her then gain much personal chart traction.

In the intervening decades, blues has been Gillespie’s musical vehicle of choice. She’s recorded a huge stash of albums on a plethora of labels, with greater appeal to audiences of mainland Europe. She has also set up a still-running Blues Festival on the exclusive Caribbean island of Mustique, now nearing its 30th birthday. Her latest album First Love is, in part, a deliberate trip back in time, and reflects her own personal tastes, as well as those of her production team, two old friends, Tris Penna, the Abbey Road studios production and A&R man, and Marc Almond, of “Tainted Love” fame. All but one of the songs are covers, the artists as varied as Bob Dylan, Morrissey and Lana Del Rey.
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