Echo and the Bunnymen Archives

Review: Thea Gilmore’s ‘These Quiet Friends’

Posted by Seuras Og at 7:00 am No Responses »

Feb 282025

Thea Gilmore has been on quite a journey these past few years, and, against the odds, has shown herself to be a survivor, when the odds were more she may barely wash up. One of those artists seemingly around for ever, it is a shock to realize she is still only in her mid-40s, despite a staggering catalog of over 20 albums, starting in 1998.

Whilst her own writing is sharp and incisive, she is neither a stranger to covering the work of other artists. That’s how we know her here, with her 2011 track-by-track recreation of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding meeting with no small approval. Prior to that she had issued 2004’s Loft Music, a diverse set that ranged from Creedence Clearwater Revival through to Phil Ochs, via the Ramones and Neil Young. On Don’t Stop Singing (also in 2011), she was gifted the opportunity to put music to a set of posthumous orphan lyrics written by Sandy Denny. (The fact that UK Denny tributers the Sandy Denny Project have covered one such song, “London,” is a wry testament.)

Anyhoo, here we are in 2025, and here is These Quiet Friends, a second set of disparate covers. The mood is here more consistent than the earlier set, that mood being generally low key and pensive, perhaps given away by the album title. An impression is that these songs helped sustain her over the brick wall her personal life crashed into, back in 2021. The details aren’t for here, but rather than a career-put-on-hold stalling release, this set provides a companion to Gilmore’s new material, which continues, her muse anything other than consumed by circumstance.
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The National and War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel Collaborate on Echo and the Bunnymen Cover

Posted by Mike Tobyn at 11:20 am No Responses »

Oct 072024

The War on Drugs and The National have spent the early part of the Fall on their Zen Diagram tour, freely confessing that their fan bases overlap significantly. In addition to frontmen Adam Granduciel and Matt Berninger doing joint publicity events, this has also allowed some musical crossovers during the evening. In Toronto, Granduciel joined his co-headliners on Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Bring on the Dancing Horses.” Continue reading »

Cover Classics: Ian McNabb’s ‘Respectfully Yours’

Posted by Seuras Og at 1:00 pm 4 Responses »

Aug 052022

Cover Classics takes a closer look at all-cover albums of the past, their genesis, and their legacy.

At last, via Bandcamp, it is once again possible to get hold of Ian McNabb’s 2016 album Respectfully Yours. For a while it seemed well nigh untraceable, with neither McNabb nor his manager able to lay a hand on or a link for a copy as little as a year or so ago. The original release was in hard copy only, and only at live shows or direct from the artist’s website. No downloading malarkey in those days, which now threatens to become the only way for many releases to meet the light of day. I’ll pretend it was my request last year that had McNabb put this up for re-evaluation, but I suspect it was more the harsh economics of lockdown logistics, pumping all hands to deck in the pursuit of making ends meet. Be that as it may, Respectfully Yours is a welcome presence, virtual or otherwise.
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The Best Cover Songs of 2000

Posted by Ray Padgett at 12:00 pm No Responses »

Oct 302020

Every year, I do a big anniversary post tackling the best covers of a year before Cover Me was born. So far we’ve done 1969 (in 2019), 1978 (in 2018), 1987 (in 2017), and 1996 (in 2016). And in 2020 we circle back to the not-so-distant past with the most recent year yet: 2000.

Cover Me began in 2007 and we did our first year-end list in 2008, so 2000 isn’t that long before we were following this stuff in real time. But, in music eras, 2007 and 2000 seem eons apart. 2000 was nü-metal and Napster, Smash Mouth and the ska revival. Beyoncé was in the quartet Destiny’s Child; Justin Timberlake only had a one-in-five chance of being your favorite member of N’Sync (or maybe one-in-four…sorry Joey). By the time this site started seven years later, all this seemed like ancient history.

There were a lot of extremely prominent covers in 2000. “Prominent,” of course, doesn’t necessarily meaning “good.” This was the year that Madonna covered “American Pie” (not to be outdone, Britney Spears then took a stab at “Satisfaction”). It was the year a Jim Carrey movie soundtrack inexplicably asked bands like Smash Mouth and Brian Setzer Orchestra to cover Steely Dan. It was the year of “Who Let the Dogs Out?” Bet you didn’t even know that one was a cover (unless you’re a faithful Cover Me reader).

None of those are on this list (though, if you want more dated trainwrecks like those, stay tuned Monday for a bonus list I’m calling the “The Most Extremely ‘2000’ Covers of the Year 2000”). But 2000 offered a wealth of wonderful covers, often flying just under the mainstream radar. Some of them still seem of the time – anything ska, basically – but most could have come out decades earlier. Or yesterday.

YouTube was still a few years away, as was streaming more generally, so covers still mostly came out through “traditional” avenues: on albums, as the b-sides to singles, etc. As I wrote in my new book, tribute albums were big business by this time too, which means that many 2000 covers emerged through that format. Even narrowing this list down to 50 was hard, which is why Cover Me’s Patreon supporters will get a batch of 150 Honorable Mentions.

Check out the list starting on Page 2, and stay tuned for the best covers of this year coming in December.

The list begins on Page 2.

Review: ‘Tanya Donelly and the Parkington Sisters’

Posted by Adam Mason at 11:00 am No Responses »

Aug 142020

Tanya Donelly has a long history, as both singer-songwriter of Belly and solo artist, of interweaving emotionally charged originals with covers similarly forged from despair, heartbreak, and loneliness. The results have frequently been sublime, as when she complemented “Gepetto” with a heartfelt version of Gram Parsons’ “Hot Burrito #1” on the Gepetto EP of 1992, or when she accompanied “New England” and “Days of Grace” with an equally fervent rendition of the Beatles’ “Long, Long, Long” on 2006’s This Hungry Life. The covers have usually taken the backseat as B-sides and deep cuts, or as contributions to tribute albums to the likes of The Smiths or Elliott Smith. Yet now, in this topsy-turvy year of 2020, they are the main event; Donelly has not only released a series of quarantine covers for charity (featuring Labi Siffre’s “Bless the Telephone,” and the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man”), but has also polished off a covers album in collaboration with the Parkington Sisters, Tanya Donelly and the Parkington Sisters.

It’s Donelly’s first all-covers album, therefore, that stands before us, but it’s clearly no ordinary covers album. The Belly, Breeders, and Throwing Muses star initiated it out of a desire to do something different with the format in the wake of Juliana Hatfield’s recent successes with Sings Olivia Newton-John (2018), and Sings The Police (2019). She might well have followed in the steps of her sometime collaborator and fellow doyen of New England alt-rock by making, effectively, a tribute album to one of her musical heroes: Kate Bush, say, or Echo and the Bunnymen. But instead, Donelly has attempted to bring a sense of unity to nine reinterpretations of songs that have been hugely meaningful to her, by way of the moody string arrangements and somber vocal harmonies that the classically trained, Massachusetts-based Parkington Sisters are known for.
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Cover Me Q&A: What’s a favorite use of a cover song in a movie/TV show?

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm Comments Off

Apr 012020

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, from staffer Sara Stoudt: What’s a favorite use of a cover song in a movie/TV show?
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