The Best Cover Songs of January 2026

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Jan 302026
 
The Best Cover Songs of January 2026
The Beaches — I Ran (So Far Away) (A Flock Of Seagulls cover)

The Beaches released one of the best albums of last year with No Hard Feelings. Now they’ve followed up with a Flock of Seagulls cover. Why? Why not! They don’t veer too far away from the original arrangement, but add an extra dose of indie-rock crunch. Halfway through it gets a little more shoegazy and expansive, with a huge build.

The Damned — Making Time (The Creation cover)

This deeper cut is a high point of the Damned’s new covers record, which, per our review, “takes the song into near heavy metal territory, if leavened by the catchy choral chorus, which, especially with the bass and drums, comes over like the Who in their prime.” Continue reading »

Ian Sweet Covers “Semi Charmed Life” As If It’s a Ballad

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Jan 162026
 
ian sweet semi charmed life cover

For a brief period at the end of the ’90s, Third Eye Blind were pretty big. They had two Top 5 hits, three Top 10 hits and four Top 20 hits, in the span of just three years. But “Semi Charmed Life” topped some other charts, just not the Hot 100. And, decades later, it has double the streams of their next most popular song and double the covers. But “Semi Charmed Life” is one of those covers that poses a difficult conundrum for the cover artist. Because if you attempt Stephan Jenkins’, um, semi rap, you run the risk of sounding exactly like him. Continue reading »

IAN SWEET Performs Stripped Down Cover of Sharon Van Etten’s Seventeen

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Aug 222024
 
IAN SWEET

“Seventeen” is a single from Sharon Van Etten‘s fifth album, 2019’s Remind Me Tomorrow. It got a fair amount of attention when it was released, including a performance on The Late Show with Norah Jones guesting. A song about looking back on the titular age, either through memory or through seeing a teenager who reminds her of herself, it’s a melancholic lyric that is rendered more intensely through the original performance by Van Etten and her band.

For season of AV Undercover, their first in seven years, indie rock artist IAN SWEET, Jilian Medford’s alter ego, was one of the invitees. Medford is a big fan of Van Etten, apparently, and jumped when she saw the song on the list.
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