Weird Al Yankovic has been quiet on the new music front for about a decade after Mandatory Fun, his last studio album, was released in 2014. So his newest single “Polkamania!” has smashed together some of the last decade’s biggest hits, all in the style of his signature medley genre, a polka.
But which songs are covered in Weird Al’s “Polkamania”?
There’s not much to say about this song sonically – all the covers are straightforward, but done in a polka style, with the exception of “WAP,” which cleverly utilizes sound effects to get the same message across.
Definitely one the Weird Al fans will love, but there’s enough silliness in here for everyone else as well.
Bob Dylan – I Can’t Seem to Say Goodbye (Jerry Lee Lewis cover)
Bob Dylan doesn’t change his setlists much anymore. In fact, on his recent UK and European tour, he played the exact same setlist every single night…except one. The day it was announced Jerry Lee Lewis passed away, Dylan returned to the stage after his usual finale “Every Grain of Sand.” As anyone who’s read his new book knows, Bob knows his music history. So he skipped the obvious picks and tackled the quite obscure Sun Records-era outtake “I Can’t Seem to Say Goodbye.”Continue reading »
Step aka Step On Newgrounds is a YouTuber and musician who is also an aspiring game developer. He goes by Stephan Wells IRL, and his talent as both a musician and arranger is undeniable in this 8-bit cover of Ed Sheeran “Celestial.”
The original “Celestial” was featured on the credits of the game Pokemon and Scarlet Violet. While Sheeran’s version of the tune feels more like something you might hear in the club, Step’s genre-blends chiptune with ’80s vibes, leading to an oddly satisfying sonic experience.
Step shows off his skills as an arranger in this iteration of “Celestial.” It starts out with 80s-feeling vocals, jagged held synth chords, multiple moving lines, and cheerful bleep-bloops. The underlying vocal harmonies, as well as Step’s diction, are absolutely impeccable. About halfway through, we get more of a dancey break before the B-section comes. The way that Step layers the two themes as we crescendo to the final choruses is chill-worthy. Not to mention, the accompanying video for his cover of “Celestial” is extremely cute and artistic, featuring watercolor-style depictions of Game Boys and Pokemon characters.
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, suggested by staffer Hope Silverman: What’s your favorite cover as performed by a choir? Continue reading »
When we began our Best Covers Ever series a little over three years ago, Bob Dylan was about the first artist who came to mind. But we held off. We needed to work our way up to it. So we started with smaller artists to get our feet wet. You know, up-and-comers like The Rolling Stones and Nirvana, Beyoncé and Pink Floyd, Madonna and Queen.
We kid, obviously, but there’s a kernel of truth there. All those artists have been covered a million times, but in none of their stories do cover songs loom quote as large as they do in Bob Dylan’s. Every time one of his songs has topped the charts, it’s been via a cover. Most of his best-known songs, from “All Along the Watchtower” to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” didn’t get that way because of his recordings. In some cases fans of the songs don’t even realize they are Bob Dylan songs. That’s been happening since Peter, Paul, and Mary sang “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and it’s still happening almost sixty years later – just look at the number of YouTube videos titled “Make You Feel My Love (cover of Adele)”.
So needless to say, there was a lot of competition for this list. We finally narrowed it down to 100 covers – our biggest list ever, but still only a drop in the bucket of rain. Many of the most famous Dylan covers are on here. Many of them aren’t. The only criteria for inclusion was, whether iconic or obscure, whether the cover reinvented, reimagined, and reinterpreted a Dylan song in a new voice.
With a list like this, and maybe especially with this list in particular, there’s an incentive to jump straight to number one. If you need to do that to assuage your curiosity, fine. But then come back to the start. Even the 100th best Dylan cover is superlative. Making it on this list at all marks a hell of a feat considering the competition. (In fact, Patreon supporters will get several hundred bonus covers, the honorable mentions it killed us to cut.)
In a 2006 interview with Jonathan Lethem, Dylan himself put it well: “My old songs, they’ve got something—I agree, they’ve got something! I think my songs have been covered—maybe not as much as ‘White Christmas’ or ‘Stardust,’ but there’s a list of over 5,000 recordings. That’s a lot of people covering your songs, they must have something. If I was me, I’d cover my songs too.”
They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with covers of his or her songs. Let someone else do the work for a while. Happy birthday!
Yesterday, as he was serenaded with a “Happy Birthday” song, Pharrell Williams turned 47 and clapped along, feeling like a room without a roof (or so I imagine).
Williams wears many hats (both literally and figuratively); he’s a songwriter, a record producer, a singer, a rapper, and even a fashion designer. His longest-running collaboration is with Chad Hugo, whom he met in middle school. The two were even childhood friends with Timbaland. (That will become relevant in other posts coming to Cover Me later this week.) Hugo and Williams formed the production team The Neptunes in 1994 and are still working together today. The duo were signed after a high-school talent show: the American dream!Continue reading »
