Eva Cassidy Archives

Five Good Covers: “Time After Time” (Cyndi Lauper)

Posted by Tom McDonald at 9:00 am No Responses »

Nov 032025

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

Some songs have an adaptive trait that allows it to survive out in the musical wild. Trends come and go, stylistic sea changes surge and retreat, and tech revolutions rise and fall; they cause other great songs to fall to the wayside, while the truly classic song only gains luster as time goes by. For me, “Time After Time” is one of those songs.

I grumble every year at this time about the wrong artists getting into the Rock Hall of Fame. (What I really mean is that my favorite performer has once again been overlooked.) But this year I’m glad for Cyndi Lauper getting inducted. When you write and record a song like “Time After Time,” a song covered by Willie Nelson, Miles Davis, and over 400 other artists, you are richly deserving of the honor. (It should have happened in 2023, when Lauper was first nominated, but we’ll let that go.)

“Time After Time” (co-written with Rob Hyman) is just one of Lauper’s many achievements. In fact, the song is not even her best-seller–that’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Nor is it the song of hers I like best–that would be “All Through the Night.” But it’s “Time After Time” that looms largest in her catalog, and that’s because it has entered the American Songbook.

Now that’s a true honor. Sales figures and popularity polls don’t get you into the American Songbook. There’s no selection committee involved. A song like “Time After Time” becomes a standard only gradually, after thousands of musicians decide individually it’s a song they want to play. Jazz singers, folk artists, pop stars, rockers, even bluegrass banjo pickers have added the song to their set lists, and to their albums. Pros and semi-pros have played it at countless wedding parties, and amateurs have played it at countless more open mics and karaoke nights.

For a song that was recorded almost as an afterthought (the label insisted the album was one track short), “Time After Time” has done pretty well for itself. It was nominated for, but did not win, the Grammy award for Song of the Year. The winner that year was Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” and that was almost certainly the right call in 1985. But in all the decades since, “What’s Love Got to Do With It” has been covered only 40 times, compared to over 400 covers of “Time After Time.” Songs move through the culture in mysterious ways.

Here are five adaptations of Lauper’s signature song (or one of her signature songs). Each one is worth a second listen as we ponder what makes “Time After Time” impervious to time itself.
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The Best Buddy Holly Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 5:21 pm 16 Responses »

Feb 252019

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

The so-called “Day the Music Died” occurred 60 years ago this month. One night after an Iowa concert, that fateful plane crash took out a host of young pioneers of the first wave of rock and roll: Ritchie Valens, J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson (in a last minute seat-trade with Waylon Jennings), and, of course, Buddy Holly.

Over at 22, Holly’s career had barely begun. But in a few short years, he’d written and recorded some of the most foundational tracks of rock and roll. So, to remember him six decades on, we’re ranking the best covers of his songs – from “Rave On” to “Not Fade Away” to a host of deep-cut gems that deserve wider recognition.

We were going to include 22 covers to honor Holly’s age but – in a testament to how much he accomplished in such a short time – that turned out to be not nearly enough. So we expanded the list to 36, his birth year. And frankly, we could have easily doubled it. That’s how often his songs have been covered by his admirers of yesterday and today. So rave on, Buddy, with these 36 fantastic covers of your songs.

The Best Cover Songs of 1996

Posted by Ray Padgett at 12:00 pm 10 Responses »

Sep 302016

They say nostalgia works in 20-year cycles, and this year the music of 1996 has been in the media a lot. And if you believe the music blogs, it turns out 1996 was a truly groundbreaking year for every possible genre. Over at SPIN: “The 96 Best Alternative Rock Songs Of 1996.” Complex: “Best Rap Songs of 1996.” Junkee: “Ten reasons 1996 was a great year for dance music”. Loudwire: “10 Best Metal Albums of 1996.” Red Bull Music: “1996: Why it was a great year for pop”. Suck it, 1995! (Kidding; similar articles were of course written last year too.)

We’ll be honest: 1996 was not some magical, pioneering year for cover songs. It was also not a terrible year. It was just, you know, another year. There’s no overarching theorem of 1996’s cover songs that wasn’t true in ’95 or ’97. But even so, Cover Me wasn’t around in 1996, so we never made a Best Cover Songs of 1996 list (our first year-end list came in 2009, with the Kings of Convenience’s “It’s My Party” topping it, and you can catch up on all the lists here). So we decided, before the year ends and we take our look at the best covers songs this year, why not take a nostalgic rewind and do 1996 just for fun, twenty years too late. Continue reading »

Five Good Covers: Fever (Little Willie John)

Posted by Dan Cwirka at 5:00 pm 2 Responses »

May 022014

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

Little Willie John made a splash with “Fever.” It’s an ominous song that slinks along in a minor key. A hit in 1956, it certainly stood out amongst the rest of the R&B hits of the day, burning briefly but brightly. Two years later, Peggy Lee caught “Fever,” slowed it to a simmer, and added some heated lyrics. Once again, it became a hit – a process that would be repeated a couple years later, thanks to Elvis Presley. And there’s been no lack of covers since (an epidemic?). Seems few are immune, with two of the (single-named) queens of pop music, Madonna and Beyonce, having given it a go. But “Fever” has spread to many genres, and the best of the best bring something unique to the hot (and catchy) tune.
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Good, Better, Best: Over the Rainbow (Judy Garland)

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 3:00 pm 5 Responses »

Mar 122014

Some covers are more equal than others. Good, Better, Best looks at three covers and decides who takes home the gold, the silver, and the bronze.

In 1939, MGM was trying to edit The Wizard of Oz down from its near two-hour length, and one of the prime candidates for cutting was the song “Over the Rainbow.” The powers that be felt it slowed the picture down, went over the heads of the target audience of children, and was not a song suited for “a little girl singing in a barnyard.” Three-quarters of a century later, it was being sung by Pink at the Academy Awards ceremony. In between it had become Judy Garland’s signature song and was named the greatest movie song of all time by the American Film Institute.
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In Memoriam: Pete Seeger

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 9:15 pm 2 Responses »

Jan 282014

In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.

We would be remiss in our duty here at Cover Me if we didn’t take a moment to honor Pete Seeger, who passed away on January 27 at the age of 94.

Seeger was the twentieth century’s phosphorescent light of traditional folk music. Whether he was adapting works of unknown authors to strike tremendous chords (“Goodnight Irene,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!”), introducing modern songs to audiences who weren’t quite ready for them (he recorded “Black and White” sixteen years before Three Dog Night took it to number one), or writing everlasting classics of his own (“If I Had a Hammer,” “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?”), Seeger knew the importance of bringing music to the people. “I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation in life,” he testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. “I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers, and I am proud that I have never refused to sing for anybody.”

Seeger’s concerts inevitably turned to community singalongs, with audiences joining in on songs they may have known for seventy-five seconds or seventy-five years. Under his guidance, everybody who ever attended a Pete Seeger concert became a cover artist. Seeger taught us that it wasn’t the quality of our voices that mattered; it was the volume to which we raised them. He made millions of gardens grow, inch by inch and row by row, and America is the better for his having done so.
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