Dec 142018
 

Follow all our Best of 2018 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

best covers albums 2018

Two of the albums on this year’s list have similar titles: This Is Not Our Music and These Are Not Mine. Clever titles for collections of cover songs, sure, but misleading. Not your music? Why not? Songs are anyone’s for the singing. Even if a song’s lyrics or chord sequence didn’t first spring from a certain performer’s brain, that doesn’t mean he or she has any less claim. The great cover performers make the songs theirs, no matter whose they were before.

The twenty records below each contain numerous examples of artists doing just that. The songs may not have started out as these artists’ – but they are theirs now.

– Ray Padgett, Editor-in-Chief

Start the countdown on the next page…

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Apr 272016
 
TheLandBelow_Mohavemedia03

Last year, Alanis Morissette’s monster album Jagged Little Pill celebrated its 20th birthday and, as happens on such occasions, got its own big box set. For an even better tribute, though, check out The Land Below’s new cover of one of the album’s hit single, “Hand in My Pocket.” Over low synth drones and a slow crescendo, Sweden’s Erik Lindestad sings the haunting melody at about half the speed of the original. For even those of us who were not Alanis fans the first time around, this cover is revelatory. Continue reading »

Mar 302015
 

Eagle-Eye Cherry came on the scene in 1998.  I was working at a Top 40 station at the time and pretty much the only thing I knew about him was:

  1. His dad was famous jazz trumpeter, Don Cherry (who also co-wrote and performed on Lou Reed’s “All Through the Night”)
  2. His half-sister was Neneh Cherry, who had a huge hit in 1989 with the song “Buffalo Stance”

Still, his debut album, Desireless, went platinum and the first single, “Save Tonight”, went to #5 on the U.S. charts.  Not a bad way to start to a career.  Unfortunately, that was pretty much as far as it went for Eagle-Eye.  He has since released three more albums, but he is what we in radio call a “One Hit Wonder”. Continue reading »