Garbage has released a new cover of the Psychedelic Furs’ ’80 classic “Love My Way.” The cover appears on a new compilation Copy/Paste, which was released as part of Record Store Day’s Black Friday event. The album collects 10 covers by the Shirley Manson-led band, but the Furs cover is the only unreleased track on the album. (Other songs & artists covered on the record include U2, Big Star, David Bowie and Patti Smith.) Continue reading »
This month, Bambie Thug represented Ireland in Eurovision, coming in sixth (the country’s highest placement since 2000). Shortly before the finals, they released this cover of The Cranberries’ “Zombie”amidst criticism of their outspokenness about the devastation in Gaza. The top YouTube comment puts it well: “The significance of Bambie choosing to cover this song will not be lost on anyone in Ireland or the UK, or many places outside them. It’s just about the most impactful call for peace an Irish person can give, and they’ve done it as well as anyone ever has.” Continue reading »
“Song to the Siren” is Tim Buckley’s most popular song to cover, and it’s not even close, despite never seeing release as a single. It has four times as many covers as any of his other songs. It’s likely due to nothing Buckley himself did during his lifetime but rather due to the This Mortal Coil cover, which was a hit in the UK, from 1983. Most of the covers of this song come from well after the famous cover. Continue reading »
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 »
“Cities in Dust” was the first single from Siouxsie and the Banshee’s Tinderbox, their seventh record. Arguably among the danciest tracks they’d yet recorded, it became their biggest non-cover hit in basically half a decade, and their highest charting hit in the US so far (which isn’t saying much). Calling it “dance rock” now might seem a little weird, because the dance rock fusions that followed got a lot dancier (not to mention New Order…), but it is still a noticeably “dancy” song for a band that originated as an extremely gothy and gloomy spin on punk.
Perhaps it comes as no surprise that another band that blended dance music with contemporary rock music would want to cover “Cities in Dust.” That’s how Garbage became famous, of course, by blending alternative rock and dance. Continue reading »
We already counted down the 50 Best Cover Songs of 2018 but, inevitably, many of our staff’s personal favorites get left off. So, before we begin scouting for what might become the best cover of 2019, we share the best of the rest, an unranked hodgepodge of worthy covers that only just missed our year-end countdown. Continue reading »