Oct 312025
 
The Dollyrots — You Don’t Own Me (Lesley Gore cover)

“It’s My Party” was the bigger hit, but these days it feels like “You Don’t Own Me” gets covered more. It’s become something of a feminist anthem (probably an unlikely future for “It’s My Party”…). Dollyrots singer Kelly Ogden said, in sharing her band’s new revved-up cover, “The song is an anthem for female empowerment, about willing to be defiant in the face of something that’s just plain wrong. Sadly, it’s still just as timely as when Lesley sang it over 60 years ago.”

Folk Bitch Trio — Sex on Fire (Kings of Leon cover)

Remember “Sex on Fire”? Gotta be one of the dumbest singles of the 21st century. Folk Bitch Trio covered it for Like a Version, and they, against all odds, manage to redeem it. “It’s an underrated song,” they said. “It rocks. It’s filthy without you really knowing. The Folk Bitch Trio twist is kind of easy: We just sing it in three-part harmony, lock in, look at each other and we’re there.” Continue reading »

Oct 132025
 
parlor greens jolene cover

Much of the appeal of Dolly Parton‘s biggest hit, “Jolene,” is its lyrics. The fear that someone “better” will come along and lure away the person we love is a pretty universal fear, regardless of the gender roles in the song. The universality of the insecurity is likely one reason it remains her biggest song 50 years after she first recorded it. Well, there’s also her vocal performance. Continue reading »

Aug 212025
 
Molly Gordon and Blake Mills

Molly Gordon, the co-star of the hit TV show The Bear will be seen next in the upcoming film Oh, hi!. Gordon stars, and also co-wrote the screenplay. And she’s also on the soundtrack.

Gordon has teamed up with Blake Mills for a cover of the Dolly Parton/Kenny Rogers classic, Islands in the Stream. She takes the vocals for the song, and Mills provides back-up, consisting mostly of an acoustic guitar, drawing an immediate difference from the original’s duet between Parton and Rogers. Mills has collaborated with an impressive number of other musicians, including Fiona Apple, Alabama Shakes and Bob Dylan. Continue reading »

Dec 202024
 

Follow all our Best of 2024 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

best cover songs of 2024

Welcome to the 50 Best Tom Petty Covers of 2024!

We kid, of course. But for whatever reason, this year’s big trend in covers was: Tom Petty. At one point there were something like 20 Petty covers on our longlist. Many came from two all-star tribute albums that dropped, entirely coincidentally, the same year (they both made our Best Albums list). We narrowed it down, of course. Three Petty covers ended up in this Top 50, one not even from those albums. Then, just this week, another high-profile Petty cover dropped: Snoop and Jelly Roll reworking “Last Dance for Mary Jane”! Suffice to say that one wouldn’t have been a contender even if it hadn’t arrived too late.

That was the big surprise trend in 2024 covers. The less-surprising trend you could have called from a mile out: The new wave of young pop divas—Chappell, Sabrina, Charli—got covered a lot. We could have done an entire 50-song list of their covers, too (the “Good Luck Babe”s alone!). But, if we had, we would have missed out on gospel R.E.M. and country The Weeknd and electropop Mott the Hoople and soul Green Day and… you know what, just read the list.

(Moo-chas gracias and Deng-ke schoen to Hope Silverman for this year’s tiny-hippo art.)

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Jun 252024
 

Tom Petty was always open in his love and respect for country music. Debt, even, with many of his songs a mere pedal steel away from sounding that way. So the new tribute album Petty Country: A Country Music Celebration of Tom Petty is not remotely any leap into uncharted territory. And, go figure the number of existing covers of his songs, effortlessly traversing into the full Nashville, Bakersfield or wherever you want to be the center of the genre. And then go figure who is lined up here, with Dolly and Willie, to start with, they who need no surname, right through Steve Earle and Margo Price and to more conventional hat acts like Chris Stapleton and George Strait.

Made with the full co-operation of the Petty estate, and, particularly, the oversight of his daughter, Adria, Petty Country unsurprisingly contains a Heartbreaker or two to beef up the instrumental chops. The songs contained herein also take a good walk through the catalog, unafraid of both picking the obvious candidates and digging deeper.
Continue reading »

May 312024
 

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

Sisters of Mercy

As regular readers know, here at Cover Me we put together a Best Covers Ever list every month for a celebrated artist. We’ve recently done the Pet Shop Boys and Sheryl Crow. And before them we did the biggie – The Beatles – and before them, Bob Dylan! But every now and again, there’s a particular genre that’s crying out for the Best Covers Ever treatment – and this month it’s the Dark Genre. It’s goth!

So why now, you ask? Are goth covers really a thing? And why don’t Alien Sex Fiend or Fields of the Nephilim have their own Best Covers Ever features?

Fair questions, all. First off, goth music is everywhere right now. It may have emerged out of the UK post-punk scene and enjoyed its most innovative period from 1980 to 1982, but it’s now the reason we have Whitby Goth Weekends in April and November (well, that and Count Dracula), World Goth Day on May 22, and goth nights down the Hatchet Inn in Bristol most nights, particularly Thursday. It’s also why we have heaps of goth books on the market right now, from John Robb’s The Art of Darkness to Lol Tolhurst’s Goth: A History and Cathi Unsworth’s Season of the Witch, all trying to explain goth’s lasting influence as a musical subculture: the fixation with death, the dark theatricality, the Victorian melodrama, the leather, the thick black eyeliner, the fishnet tights, the deviance, the sex, the deviant sex, and, of course, spiders. Continue reading »