Fleetwood Mac Archives

Five Good Covers: “Don’t Stop” (Fleetwood Mac)

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 11:00 am No Responses »

Aug 022024

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

“It doesn’t sound that great when I’m singing it myself. Why don’t we make it a duet?”

According to Ken Caillat, producer of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, when Christine McVie said that to Lindsey Buckingham, it proved to be the key to making “Don’t Stop” the song it is today. With the two of them exchanging vocals, compressed so much they almost sounded alike, and McVie playing a jaunty tack piano, they make the song so uplifting you’d never know it was about the end of Christine’s relationship with bassist John McVie. The Guardian called it one of the band’s five best songs, saying that “its cantering rhythm and chorus are so impossibly, infectiously buoyant, the song so flawless, that it cancels out the unhappiness that provoked it.”
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Review: Dana Gillespie’s ‘First Love’

Posted by Seuras Og at 8:30 am No Responses »

Jun 182024

Dana Gillespie… Now, where do I know that name from…

If you cast your mind back (or possibly your father’s), you’ll remember the name, possibly even the album cover, with which Gillespie is arguably best known. That 1974 album, Weren’t Born A Man, which given her Bowie association, immediately had folk wondering whether she were, despite her pneumatic sleeve appearance. Remember, this was around the same time Amanda Lear was allowing the myth around she being born male to permeate, let alone all the claims Bowie fostered around his sexuality. Well, Gillespie wasn’t born a man, and her relationship with Bowie was understandably under wraps: they were teens at its inception, and remained friends and lovers for the next decade. Bowie’s song “Andy Warhol” was written for her, she including it on that album, it produced by Bowie and Mick Ronson. She also sang backing vocals on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. However, this was insufficient to have her then gain much personal chart traction.

In the intervening decades, blues has been Gillespie’s musical vehicle of choice. She’s recorded a huge stash of albums on a plethora of labels, with greater appeal to audiences of mainland Europe. She has also set up a still-running Blues Festival on the exclusive Caribbean island of Mustique, now nearing its 30th birthday. Her latest album First Love is, in part, a deliberate trip back in time, and reflects her own personal tastes, as well as those of her production team, two old friends, Tris Penna, the Abbey Road studios production and A&R man, and Marc Almond, of “Tainted Love” fame. All but one of the songs are covers, the artists as varied as Bob Dylan, Morrissey and Lana Del Rey.
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The 25 Best Goth Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 11:00 am 4 Responses »

May 312024

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

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 »

The 50 Best Cover Songs of 2023

Posted by Staff at 9:00 am 10 Responses »

Dec 152023

Follow all our Best of 2023 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

I like to think that badass lady in the artwork up there (done by our own Hope Silverman!) embodies the spirit of this year’s list. Not that they’re all CBGB-style punk songs—though there are a couple—but in her devil-may-care attitude. “Who says I shouldn’t do a hardcore cover of the Cranberries? A post-punk cover of Nick Drake? A hip-hop cover of The Highwaymen? Screw that!”

As with most good covers, the 50 covers we pulled out among the thousands we listened to bring a healthy blend of reverence and irreverence. Reverence because the artists love the source material. Irreverence because they’re not afraid to warp it, bend it, mold it in their own image. A few of the songs below are fairly obscure, but most you probably already know. Just not like this.

Cover Classics: The Pointer Sisters’ ‘Energy’ & ‘Priority’

Posted by Hope Silverman at 2:00 pm 4 Responses »

Nov 242023

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

When we think of The Pointer Sisters–June, Ruth, and Anita, L to R above–we tend to think of their fun, frothy, soul-pop ’80s mega-hits like “He’s So Shy,” “I’m So Excited,” “Jump (For My Love),” and “Automatic” (to name a handful). These deliriously happy 40-year-old (!) songs, with their “roller rink-aerobics class-cruise the strip in a neon pink convertible” vibes, still have the power to kickstart even the most jaded heart.

But those hits don’t tell the whole Pointer Sisters story. You see, in the late ’70s, just before the aforementioned hot fudge sundae of singles was unleashed, The Pointer Sisters released two bona fide, screaming, strutting, sexy ROCK albums in a row. This is the story of those rebellious years when The Pointer Sisters, beloved AM radio sweethearts, went totally FM. Let the fantastical and improbable tale begin…
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The Best Cover Songs of May 2023

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

May 312023

Beck – Hands on the Wheel (Willie Nelson cover)

Willie Nelson’s giant 90th birthday concert in Los Angeles featured a whole host of covers. Some of them featured the man himself. Admittedly, that makes those not really covers, so we’ll feature a couple Willie-less Willie tunes. First up, Beck tackles Willie’s Red Headed Stranger classic “Hands on the Wheel.” (Find another cover of this song in the Best of the Rest list.) Continue reading »