Jan 052024
 

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

I Can See Clearly Now covers

Starting a new year from the old has often the effect of bestowing clarity on the observer, a post-festive pause in the storm, allowing evaluation of the present and a filter to the past, seeking a better way forward. That’s the idea, anyway, and anyone wondering about New Year’s resolutions (assuming anyone still does) needs the ability to clear their eyes and brush away any blurring of intent.

That’s where Johnny Nash comes in. On “I Can See Clearly Now,” Nash writes lucidly about that movement, should you stumble upon it. To me the song always seemed to be a song of hope, one designed to welcome positive thoughts for the way ahead, enticing them to become actions.

“I Can See Clearly Now” spent four weeks at the top of the Billboard chart and soon certified gold, doing well also in markets of the UK, Australia and South Africa, ironically all areas where the record buying population was largely white. Nash, an American by birth and upbringing, was one of the first non-Jamaican artists to break a wider recognition of Reggae. Indeed, the prime aim of his mid-60s move to Kingston had been to broker a wider acceptance of the musical styles of the West Indies. Ironically, his success arguably led to a later fade from the spotlight, as the artists who were making the songs he championed, in the style he had possibly softened up an audience for, no longer needed introduction, with the likes of Bob Marley (who wrote or co-wrote four of the songs on I Can See Clearly Now) now able to stand on the world stage in their own right.

Nash died, aged 80, in 2020, but had benefitted from a resurgence in interest, as films and TV bought up the rights for “I Can See Clearly Now,” most notably through Jimmy Cliff’s version from the 1993 film Cool Runnings. It is a song of hope and, as such, it never fails to lift my mood.
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Mar 312023
 

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

Tom Waits covers

“Downtown Train.” “Ol ’55.” “Jersey Girl.” These are just three of the Tom Waits songs better known for their covers (respectively: Rod, Eagles, Bruce) than for Waits’ own performances.

It probably doesn’t need saying that Tom’s recordings are, in the best way possible, idiosyncratic. So it makes sense that, like Dylan, like Cohen, his songs often become more popular when more “traditional” voices sing them. Many of the best covers, though, keep some of that strangeness. No, they don’t do “the Tom Waits voice” – most people wouldn’t be able to talk for a week after attempting that. But they don’t sand off the strangeness.

Tom’s debut album Closing Time came out 50 years ago this month; he’s doing a reissue to celebrate. It, and its successor The Heart of Saturday Night, are in some ways his least representative albums, though. The songwriting is already strong on these, but it comes in – if you can believe it – a fairly conventional package. His voice hasn’t revealed its true character (to pick one among many memorable descriptions: “a voice like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car”), and he hadn’t discovered that hitting a dumpster with a two-by-four makes great percussion.

Some of those very early songs get covered in our list below. But his later, weirder, songs abound, too. Tom’s wife Kathleen Brennan, his musical co-conspirator for decades now, said her husband has two types of songs: “Grim Reapers” and “Grand Weepers”. On his Orphans box set, Tom divided them up another way: Brawlers, Ballers, and Bastards. You’ll find some of all flavors below. (And, if you want more new writing on Tom Waits music, subscribe to a newsletter called Every Tom Waits Song that – full disclosure – I also run).

– Ray Padgett

PS. Find Spotify and Apple Music playlists of this list, and all our other monthly Best Covers Ever lists, at Patreon.

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Aug 252022
 

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

Elvis Costello Covers

When Elvis Costello first appeared on the scene, the press fell over themselves not only to praise him, but to pigeonhole him. He was a punk. He was a new waver. He was a nerd, what with his glasses and gawky suits (Dave Marsh memorably said that “Elvis Costello looks like Buddy Holly after drinking a can of STP Oil Treatment”). Most commonly, he was lumped in with Graham Parker, Joe Jackson, Billy Joel, and others as an Angry Young Man. “I’m not angry,” Costello protested on My Aim Is True, and everyone nodded and smiled and patted his head.

Costello wasn’t interested in living on that particular cul-de-sac. He began expanding his musical palette, making more complex songs with more complex rhymes. He delved into other genres, starting with country & western (to the dismay of both Costello fans and C&W fans, and to the pleasant surprise of music fans) and moving on to blues, jazz, orchestral, classical pop, and more. As he became a greater student, he became a greater teacher, giving credit in word and action to his influences, penning a well-received autobiography, and hosting the talk/music show Spectacle, where he interviewed and played with his peers. He continues to record – his most recent album, The Boy Named If, was released earlier this year – and has settled into the role of elder statesman that his talent earned him long ago.

Costello turns one year elder today, his 68th birthday. We’re celebrating with a collection of the fifty best Elvis Costello covers we could get our hands on. They reflect his wide range of styles, revel in his literacy, plumb his depths. Most of all, they reveal his heart, showing over and over again how his love of song can lift, wrench, open up the people who listen to him and to his music. We hope you find this list as worthy of celebration as Elvis Costello is.

– Patrick Robbins, Features Editor

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Feb 152019
 

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

Gordon Lightfoot

Gordon Lightfoot wasn’t happy. He’d learned that Warner Brothers intended to change the name of his album Sit Down Young Stranger, and he flew from Toronto to Los Angeles to ask them why. Stan Cornyn, head of merchandising, responded with his own question: “Gord, did you take algebra?”

“I took it, but I sure as hell never passed it,” Lightfoot confessed.

“Well, Gord, changing the name of the album is the difference between x and 8x.”

“Go ahead and change it,” said Lightfoot. Smart move on both their parts – as If You Could Read My Mind, the album went from 80,000 in sales to 650,000. Credit the now-title track, which peaked at #5 on the Billboard charts forty-eight years ago this month.
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Apr 112016
 

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

MerleHaggard

Merle Haggard died on April 6th, his 79th birthday. On another April 6th, eleven years earlier, he celebrated his birthday in Chicago, opening the spring run of Bob Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour.”

I don’t know what he did for most of that 66th birthday, but I do know how five minutes or so was spent. He was standing outside his tour bus, listening to a handful of Dylan obsessives sing “Happy Birthday” to him. I was one of them. Continue reading »

Sep 072012
 

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

Jon Bon Jovi was on VH1 Storytellers, telling the audience about the cover he’d just performed. “Bruce wishes he wrote that song,” he said. “I wish I wrote that song even more. But it was that grouchy old guy from California.”

Indeed it was. Tom Waits had fallen in sha-la-la-la-love with Kathleen Brennan (born in Johnsburg, IL; raised in Morristown, NJ), and he wanted the world to know. “Jersey Girl” marked the moment Waits climbed out of the gutter to be with the one he loved. He sings of crossing the river to the Jersey side; it could be the Hudson River, but it could also be the river Styx, with Waits leaving the underworld behind to rejoin the carnival of Planet Earth. All for the love of a woman. What could be more romantic? Continue reading »