Mar 142025
 

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

Katy Lied covers

Usually an artist’s popularity wanes after fifty years go by. But nothing about Steely Dan counts as usual. Even in the seventies, their impossibly smooth sound, their obscure yet hyperliterate lyrics, and their focus on the studio in lieu of performing made them stick out like sore thumbs. But Walter Becker, Donald Fagen, and company du jour knew what they wanted, and now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, it turns out to be what people want, need, can’t get enough of. The book Quantum Criminals, portraying the characters in Steely Dan songs with words and paint, was a critical smash, and Rolling Stone just published a listicle ranking every Steely Dan song.

Katy Lied, released fifty years ago this month, saw Becker and Fagen giving up their road-tested bandmates in favor of the best studio musicians money could buy, including twenty-year-old drummer Jeff Porcaro and not-much-older Michael McDonald, whose Doobie Brother days had yet to come. It saw the band getting a little cooler, a little warmer, a little jazzier. Like every Steely Dan album (at least, every one from Steely Dan Mark I), it has champions who say it’s the best thing they ever did. In 1987 Rolling Stone named it to their list of the best 100 albums of the past 20 years, the sole Steely Dan album on that roster. (This, after calling it “exemplarily well-crafted and uncommonly intelligent schlock” in their review twelve years earlier.)

Steely Dan’s unique combination of iconoclasm and tasty licks make them a band that covering artists tend to approach tentatively, if at all. How many other bands see tribute artists be so eager to throw out the lyrics and take their best instrumental whack at it? You’ll find more than one instrumental in this Katy Lied cover collection, along with live covers and one cover that’s a tribute to another band altogether.

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Feb 042025
 
Janelle Monae Covers Michael Jackson

Leading this past weekend’s Grammys tribute to the legendary Quincy Jones was Janelle Monae. Taking the stage in a tuxedo and a “I (Heart) QJ” tank top, she performed Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” The song originally appeared on Jackson’s 1979 album, Off the Wall, which Jones produced. To top it all off, Monae threw a moonwalk into her performance. Monae ended her performance by tossing her jacket into the crowd, which was caught by Taylor Swift, who wore it for the rest of the night.

Also paying tribute to Jones were Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, Lainey Wilson, Jacob Collier, and Cynthia Erivo.

Jones passed away in November last year at age 91.

May 032019
 

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

joni mitchell covers

Joni Mitchell is 75 and won’t be with us forever. She suffered an aneurysm in 2015, and she’s coping with the little-understood Morgellons disease. She has difficulty walking, and has not spoken publicly in years. But if her place on earth is tenuous, her place in the heavens is secure; millions of people already look up to her every day.

Joni Mitchell’s songs are famous for being intensely personal, a deep expression of her self that people nevertheless relate to. Those who aspire to her voice become near-slavish devotees. There’s a great New Yorker piece about a small show of Joni’s that a drunken Chrissie Hynde gets overly caught up in (“That’s a REAL singer up there!”), and Hynde’s not alone. Mitchell isn’t just a real singer, though. She’s a real songwriter, a real painter, a real guitarist, a real follower of her muse – a real artist, one of the realest of the past hundred years. That authenticity is what continues to bring people into her circle on a daily basis.

In an excellent essay for NPR, Ann Powers wrote: “Like her prime compatriots Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and her favorite protégé Prince, no one can adequately echo her; even great singers, taking on her songbook, admit they can only hope to achieve proximity.” Indeed, a Joni Mitchell cover is never just a tribute – it’s an assertion, an artist coming forth to pick up a gauntlet she lay down decades ago.

We found 30 covers that show the artists doing an especially good job at matching their talents to Joni’s, creating new works of art that, no matter how novel or innovative they may be, never set out to eradicate the original artist’s signature. May her art continue to open eyes, whether through her own performances or those of others, for centuries to come.

–Patrick Robbins, Feature Editor

Jul 222016
 

They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with other people singing his or her songs. Let others do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

donhenley

My love must be as free/As is the eagle’s wing,/Hovering o’er land and sea/And everything. – Henry David Thoreau

The name “Don Henley” conjures up images of the American West – dust swirling in canyons, expansive desert highways, the smell of colitas rising up through the air – but for me, Don Henley is damp, cold London afternoons spent tucked behind the couch in a small, cozy home. When I played Barbies, my dolls were raven-haired beauties, pretty mamas, and blondes dressed up in lace and lies, and it was Don Henley who sang the stories of their lives.
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Dec 142011
 

Every Wednesday, our resident Gleek Eric Garneau gives his take on last night’s Glee covers.

In “Extraordinary Merry Christmas,” Artie (Kevin McHale) is offered the chance to direct McKinley’s glee club in a televised Christmas special. Little do the other club members know he takes his Christmas inspiration from some bizarre sources.

“Extraordinary Merry Christmas” is not the first Christmas special to air on television this year. It’s not even the first Glee Christmas special to air, thanks to the irreverent, genius and criminally unpopular NBC sitcom Community, which last Thursday dedicated its entire Christmas episode (entitled “Regional Holiday Music”) to spoofing the Fox musical juggernaut. The staff behind Community probably couldn’t have predicted that they’d get payback for spending a half hour in Glee‘s shoes; this week, Glee decided to live in Community‘s world with an episode you’d expect to see on that show or, really, anywhere but Glee. The Christmas special Artie ends up producing is a (directly referred-to) mash-up of the much-maligned 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, Judy Garland’s classic 1963 Christmas special, and at the end some Charlie Brown Christmas for good measure. The result basically ends up a cover of a TV show. Though Glee certainly likes to allude to existing pop culture, even going so far as to recreate certain music videos shot-for-shot, it has never lived in another universe for two acts before. That’s Community territory, but Glee pulls it off marvelously. Continue reading »