Pick Five: Nicki Bluhm

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Jul 172018
 

In Pick Five, great artists pick five cover songs that matter to them.

nicki bluhm cover songs

Singer-songwriter Nicki Bluhm boasts a lot of experience with collaboration. Her new album To Rise You Gotta Fall (hear a track below) features two co-writes with her friend Ryan Adams, and in recent years she’s toured in Phil Lesh’s band and as part of the Incredible Stringdusters. When last I saw her live, she was singing “The Weight” in Levon’s barn as part of Amy Helm’s female-musicians collective Skylark.

So as someone who knows how different musicians and genres can blend to create unexpected classics, it’s no surprise she’s a fan of cover songs. She used to record amazing covers with her band while driving the van, and her new album includes a powerful blast through Dan Penn’s “I Hate You” (appropriate for a divorce record). And she digs deep in her cover recommendations below, going from a certain song you might remember from last month’s Best Beyoncé Covers countdown to a nod to a Grateful Dead song she has sung with Lesh himself. Check out Nicki’s picks below. Continue reading »

The Best Beyoncé Covers Ever

 Posted by at 1:30 pm  11 Responses »
Jun 292018
 

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

beyonce covers

We all know the reason everyone’s talking about Beyoncé this month: It’s the fifteenth anniversary of her debut solo album Dangerously in Love!

Okay, maybe that’s not the only Beyoncé news setting the internet aflutter these days – but it is the reason we initially decided to do this list. So it was extra nice of her to drop a surprise album with her husband, what’s-his-name, to give us something else to tie this into. In tribute, we’re writing this entire post from the Louvre.

There aren’t any Everything Is Love songs covered here, but we can’t imagine the first great “Apeshit” cover is far off. And every other facet of her career is represented, from the Destiny’s Child radio hits to her early solo pop jams to the more recent political tracks from Lemonade and beyond. Appropriately enough, the artists doing the covering represent an equally wide spectrum. I challenge you to find another list on the internet containing both serpentwithfeet and Reba McEntire.

So let’s start the countdown (heh) of the best B covers ever. All hail the Queen! Continue reading »

Full Albums: Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Surrealistic Pillow’

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May 242013
 

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Every day, more music is released. Most of it will be quickly forgotten, some of it will resonate with an audience, and a very, very small percentage will be listened to for years to come. An even smaller subset can fairly be said to embody a particular moment in time. Surrealistic Pillow, the second release by the Jefferson Airplane, is one of those special albums. Released in early 1967 by a group of hippies who also happened to be extraordinary songwriters and musicians, it is both a classic and a reflection of its era.
Continue reading »

Watch: Grace Potter and Sharon Jones Do Right by Otis Redding

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Jul 212011
 

Otis Redding is heartbreak’s greatest translator. The tragically short-lived soul singer knew how to sing a love song for the forlorn better than most, and his melismatic vocal abilities brought listeners to their knees as he crooned for the woman who left him behind. Now two ladies are picking up where Otis left off and pouring their own booming voices on top of Redding’s classic, “Pain in My Heart,” like syrup on pancakes. Grace Potter and Sharon Jones exist on opposite ends of the soul spectrum. The former represents nouveau blue-eyed soul and the latter is the closest thing today’s listeners have to the original Stax sound. Continue reading »

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals Perform Beyoncé Single for Billboard

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Apr 252011
 

The latest Billboard Mashup Mondays cover more than makes up for last week’s Dom travesty. It’s longtime Cover Me favorite Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, adding another tune to the already 40+ we’ve seen them cover before. She chose Beyoncé’s “Why Don’t You Love Me,” using her huge voice to as powerful an effect as always.

Beyoncé “has such a mastery over her career and her music. She’s just an inspiration,” Potter told Billboard. While you wouldn’t know it from Potter’s own songs, the translation of the soul-pop banger to acoustic guitars and hand claps is surprisingly smooth. Check it out below. Continue reading »

Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, and More Saluted the Troops (and Themselves) on VH1

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Dec 062010
 

Last night VH1 Divas Salute the Troops aired on – you guessed it – VH1. It featured an endless stream of female pop stars, including Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Sugarland, and Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. Whether any of these women are really divas is questionable (Perry, maybe), but it’s hard to focus on semantics amidst this much glitter. Perry parachuted in, Minaj wore a vampire-clown-meets-Alice-from-Dilbert wig, and everyone changed costumes about every thirty seconds.

Mostly the stars pimped their current singles (though sadly no “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”-relevant “I Kissed a Girl”), but a few covers worked their way in. Props to Perry, Keri Hilson, and Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland for turning the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” into a full USO-worthy production. Less props to Perry and Minaj for covering “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Hey ladies, I’m pretty sure the focus is supposed to be the soldiers, not yourselves. Still, with Katy Perry, one out of two songs not being entirely self-serving is better than normal. Continue reading »

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