Feb 282025
 

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

John Lennon Covers

Fifty years ago this month, John Lennon released his covers album Rock ‘n’ Roll, in which he tackled a bunch of pre-Beatles rock and roll classics by folks like Gene Vincent and Fats Domino. Admittedly, the album isn’t all that good. It was done under legal pressure, and sounds like it. But the anniversary is a good enough is excuse to celebrate Lennon covers our own way: Not covers by John, but covers of John.

We should our one rule state up front: No Beatles songs! We did a giant 75-song Beatles covers list last year, which, naturally, included a bunch of John songs. So, for this list, as we did with Paul McCartney a few years back, we’re focusing entirely on his solo output. “Solo” loosely defined as anything post-Beatles: co-billed with Yoko, officially backed by Plastic Ono Band, etc.

If you think the no-Beatles rule adds a pretty strict limitation, think again. There was no shortage of solo-Lennon song covers to choose from. And it’s not 50% “Imagine” covers either; in fact, on our list of 40 covers, only two “Imagine”s make the cut. Most “Imagine” covers are pretty damn saccharine, not a word often associated with the most caustic Beatle. But just about every other mood and sound appears below.

Click to the next page to get started. All we are saying is give these a chance.

– Ray Padgett, Cover Me Founder/Editor

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Oct 142024
 

In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!

On their 1985 hit “King of Rock,” the future Reverend Run declared: “As one def rapper, I know I can hang/I’m Run from Run-DMC, like Kool from Kool & the Gang.” In retrospect, it seems only fitting that the group that helped bring rap to the mainstream would namecheck Kool & the Gang on one of their biggest hits. Kool & the Gang’s multi-instrumental fusion of rock, pop, R&B, funk and disco, provided the backbone for modern rap. As of this writing, the website WhoSampled.com lists 2053 known samples of their music, and the number will only keep growing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. If you went to a party, dance or club in the ‘70s and ‘80s, odds are that Kool & the Gang was booming through the speakers. Whether you were from New York or Hollywood and wanted to “Celebrate and have a good time,” “Get down on it,” “Get up with the get down,” “Go dancin’,” or perhaps “Reggae dancin’,” they had a song for seemingly every type of occasion. Even today, it’s rare to attend any life milestone event (wedding, bar mitzvah, etc.) and not hear their good-time anthem “Celebration.”

Though the group has not recorded many covers throughout their long career, cover songs were an important part of the band’s origin story. The band was founded in the mid-‘60s in Jersey City, New Jersey by a group of child jazz prodigies that included brothers Ronald and Robert “Kool” Bell. Performing under various names, they got their start playing bars, clubs and events throughout New Jersey in the ‘60s as teenagers. In a 2023 interview with Questlove, drummer George Brown said that would often perform the hits of the day to win over the crowd. It’s a not-uncommon story for many of the world’s greatest rockers.

One can hear elements of these origins on their early albums. Singing with Dee-Lite Records in 1969, the band included a handful of covers on their first few releases. Listening to these songs now, on the eve of the band’s long-overdue induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, provides a fascinating glimpse into their virtuosity as musicians. One can hear elements of just about every style of popular music from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. It’s easy to imagine them as members of the house bands at Motown or Muscle Shoals.

In their early years, the band were masters at emulating other people’s music, even if they had not quite found the sound that would make them superstars. Listen to their past, and you’ll hear why their future was indeed a “celebration to last throughout the years.”

Author’s Note: The group would later release a Christmas album in 2013 that contained several covers, but we’ll save that for another time and instead focus solely on the early years.

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Oct 112024
 

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 terms of commercial metrics, like the number of plays on US radio, or the number of cover versions released, John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind” is massively popular and always has been since its 1967 debut. And yes, the most successful version of Hartford’s hit is a cover: namely Glen Campbell’s arrangement, which he recorded with the Wrecking Crew in LA within months of Hartford’s original release.

Both Hartford’s version and Campbell’s version earned Grammys (in different categories) in 1968. Every subsequent cover of “Gentle on My Mind”–and there are several hundreds of them–is most likely a take on Campbell’s version. Hartford didn’t seem to have a problem with Campbell stealing his thunder–see this video in which the two artists perform “Gentle on My Mind” together on the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour TV show. Both artists revisited the song multiple times through the decades to come; the best of these may be this one, in which Hartford convenes a few bluegrass and country music legends to pick and grin on it.

The song’s chances of success must have seemed thin in 1967 when Hartford first shopped it around. “It violates all the principles of songwriting,” Hartford told an interviewer in 1987. “It’s a banjo tune, it has no chorus. It has a lot of words so that it’s hard to sing.” Indeed, it’s too bare-bones, musically, to amount to much. There’s no chorus, no bridge, no catchy instrumental riff. Second, the song doesn’t slot into any particular genre–it’s not quite bluegrass, country, folk-rock, or pop–it’s all of the above and therefore none of them. Finally, Hartford breaks basic lyric-writing rules (and he breaks them beautifully). His verses are long-winded; his rhyme scheme is offbeat. He crams in janky words and phrases that are difficult to sing. Lines like “I dip my cup of soup back from a gurglin’ cracklin’ cauldron in some train yard” would have most vocalists calling for a rewrite. But this free-spirited prose poem is deeply American in the Walt Whitman/Jack Kerouac tradition, as is fitting for a song of the open road, a song of freedom. The song that shouldn’t work at all works perfectly.

If traveling the backroads and riding the rails and hanging out in hobo camps is the life, why is the song’s narrator always thinking of one special person back home? Who is the person whose door is always open and who is ever in his thoughts? Hartford himself never committed to one definitive interpretation of the song. He admitted that if he had been trying to write a hit song, he would have written it differently.

Hartford also revealed that this quintessentially American song was actually inspired by Doctor Zhivago, the epic Russian novel (and 1965 David Lean film) about the Bolshevik Revolution. And with that, comrades, it’s time to look at three interpretations of this undyingly popular song…
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Jan 312024
 
best cover songs january
BABii — Lovefool (The Cardigans cover)

Brent Amaker And The Rodeo – Gut Feeling (Devo cover)

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Nov 302023
 
best cover songs
boygenius ft. Ye Vagabonds — The Parting Glass (Trad. cover)

Every year, Phoebe Bridgers releases a surprise cover around the holidays to benefit charity. This year, she brought in her boygenius bandmates as well as vocal group Ye Vagabonds to cover “The Parting Glass.” It’s a traditional Irish tune, but their version pays specific homage to Sinead O’Connor, who covered it in 2002. Sales benefit the Aisling Project, an after-school project working with children and young people growing up in a disadvantaged area of Dublin. The beneficiary was chosen by the estate of O’Connor, who died in July. Continue reading »

Oct 272023
 

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

Velvet Underground and Nico

On October 27, 2013, ten years ago today, Lou Reed died. I happened to be in New York City at the time, and his passing was a lead story on the 11 o’clock news. It was as though a part of the city itself had died. Which, inescapably, it had. Reed embodied NYC, from its seedy back rooms to its secret heart, in a way few other people, let alone musicians, ever did.

While Reed’s solo career is highly and deservingly accoladed, it still got overshadowed by the Velvet Underground. Reed’s first band featured Welsh musician John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, and drummer Maureen Tucker, with Nico singing on the first album and Doug Yule replacing Cale in 1968. The band’s four studio albums started ripples that turned into tsunamis; they went from secret-handshake status to Hall of Fame giants, their influence right up there with the Beatles.

We’re honoring Lou and Company with this collection of covers. Some covers couldn’t hold a candle to the original (you’ll find no “Heroin” here), but many of the originals were receptive to another artist’s distinctive stamp. Whether you prefer the first or what followed, you’ll hear the sound of immortality as it opens yet another path of discovery.

–Patrick Robbins, Features Editor

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