Green Day Archives

The 40 Best John Lennon Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm 3 Responses »

Feb 282025

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

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

The 50 Best Cover Songs of 2024

Posted by Staff at 9:00 am 4 Responses »

Dec 202024

Follow all our Best of 2024 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

Welcome to the 50 Best Tom Petty Covers of 2024!

We kid, of course. But for whatever reason, this year’s big trend in covers was: Tom Petty. At one point there were something like 20 Petty covers on our longlist. Many came from two all-star tribute albums that dropped, entirely coincidentally, the same year (they both made our Best Albums list). We narrowed it down, of course. Three Petty covers ended up in this Top 50, one not even from those albums. Then, just this week, another high-profile Petty cover dropped: Snoop and Jelly Roll reworking “Last Dance for Mary Jane”! Suffice to say that one wouldn’t have been a contender even if it hadn’t arrived too late.

That was the big surprise trend in 2024 covers. The less-surprising trend you could have called from a mile out: The new wave of young pop divas—Chappell, Sabrina, Charli—got covered a lot. We could have done an entire 50-song list of their covers, too (the “Good Luck Babe”s alone!). But, if we had, we would have missed out on gospel R.E.M. and country The Weeknd and electropop Mott the Hoople and soul Green Day and… you know what, just read the list.

(Moo-chas gracias and Deng-ke schoen to Hope Silverman for this year’s tiny-hippo art.)

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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In Memoriam: Eric Carmen

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 8:00 am No Responses »

Mar 132024

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

Eric Carmen, one of power-pop’s pioneers as the frontman for the Raspberries and a successful adult-contemporary solo artist, passed away over the weekend. He was 74 years old.

Carmen was forever a man out of time. Even as he accumulated hit records (did you know he cowrote the Footloose love theme “Almost Paradise”?), his music was scorned for being too wimpy, too poppy, too much not what was cool at the time. But time marched on, and people found themselves returning to the songs he wrote, because of their messages – what could be more direct than “I wanna be with you so bad”? – and the feelings they stirred up. Try as the critics did to shame him for his career, he had a lot to be proud of.

When it comes to covers of Eric Carmen songs, the veins are rich, but they’re tapped a lot more rarely than you might think. According to Secondhandsongs.com, the most-covered Raspberries song, “Go All the Way,” has fewer than a dozen versions. If anything good comes out of Carmen’s passing, maybe it’s that people will discover what a true artist he was. Here are five artists who have already made that discovery.

Stick Figure Release Reggae “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” Cover

Posted by Aleah Fitzwater at 3:00 pm No Responses »

Sep 142023

California reggae band Stick Figure went to Great Stone Studios to reinvent Green Day’s 2004 track “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” As the tune phases in with the traditional tremolo pedal, we hear a slow pleasant swell. The band doesn’t just “start the song” they blossom into it. Stick Figure’s version of this melancholy tune is lackadaisical in diction (which is extremely satisfying given the genre’s context), and heavy on the backbeat, with a countermelody on a percussive steel pan, crisp timbales, and clean guitar hits.

This cover will be a part of Nathan Aurora’s Pop Punk Goes Reggae collection (volume 1) and will feature other big-name reggae bands such as SOJA, Ballyhoo! And more.

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The Best Cover Songs of March 2023

Posted by Ray Padgett at 9:00 am No Responses »

Apr 032023

Bria – When You Know Why You’re Happy (Mary Margaret O’Hara’ cover)

Bria’s “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” made our list of the Best Covers of 2022. The track was a sneak peak at her covers EP Cuntry Covers Vol. 2, and the full thing dropped a few weeks ago. It includes a wonderful version of this much more obscure song. Bria explains: “Mary Margaret O’Hara is a creative force and one of my favorite Canadian artists. I have been a huge fan of hers for quite some time and really wanted to try my hand at one of her songs for Vol. 2. She is a real queen of vocal improvisation. It’s a trait of hers that I’ve always admired, so I really wanted to explore that when recording this cover. The video for this track is special to us, a sort of collage of memory; fragmented footage of summer taken over the last two years is dispersed throughout shots of a vast winter scene, filmed while we finished the record up North with our live band.” Continue reading »