Jun 132025
 

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

This week brings the news that Sly Stone has passed away, leaving many anthems and antics to remember him by. His passing comes at a time when Sly is fresh in mind, though several decades past his productive years. That’s due in part to the release, just a few months ago, of Sly Lives!, Questlove’s documentary about the artist, and his earlier doc Summer of Soul, featuring Sly and the Family Stone at the Harlem Cultural Festival. In part it’s thanks to Sly himself, since his own long-awaited memoir came out in 2023 and is still being processed. And in part he’s fresh in mind because Sly’s music was just so timeless, his performances so indelible.

Even if you can’t name more than one or two of Sly Stone’s hits, his influence is inescapable. When you dance to the music–any music, particularly dance music of the last 30 years–it’s likely he’s in that music’s DNA. Sly directly shaped the sound and sensibility of performers like Michael Jackson and Prince who went on to eclipse Sly himself in popularity. (Prince acknowledged the debt in his Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction speech.) It’s largely through Prince’s influence that the Sly vibe pulses through the music of today’s strongest performers. Sly’s mark wasn’t only on the dance-floor, either: he was also a huge influence on Miles Davis, and without Sly’s template there’d be no Bitches Brew, or jazz fusion as we know it.

The most enduring of Sly Stone’s hits for me is “Family Affair” from There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1971). “Family Affair” is the most successful of all Sly’s singles, and yet artists haven’t covered it to death. In fact, it’s a little surprising that artists have covered it at all, because it’s that unique. One of the most genre-defying songs of its era, it’s at once a deeply personal snapshot–recorded as the Family Stone ensemble was unraveling–and a comment on societal decay, the generational and racial divides roiling the country as ’60s optimism gave way to despair. “Family Affair” signaled a new dark direction for Stone, with its stark sonic palette stripped of the exuberance and lush orchestration that defined his earlier recordings.

The song features the groundbreaking use of a drum machine. It highlights keyboard work by Sly’s good friend Billy Preston (who had a knack for stepping in when great bands were falling apart). There’s a vocal marked by a remarkably grainy texture and a confessional tone. (It ultimately admits to nothing, and Sly’s voice despite its intimacy has a cold and distant feel.) The refrain by Sly’s sister Rose is almost airy and light in comparison, as if the vocal styles reflect the two different children Sly sings about in the first verse (“One child grows up to be somebody who just loves to learn…”).

Subsequent verses describe emotional traps within and without the family:

You can’t leave, ’cause your heart is there
And you, you can’t stay, ’cause you been somewhere else

Sly’s words circle back on themselves and cancel out:

You can’t cry, ’cause you’ll look broke down
But you’re cryin’ anyway ’cause you’re all broke down

He’s caught up in contradictory desires; he could see the downfall coming, perhaps. These lines were weighty the day the record came out, and they only get heavier the more you know about the way Sly’s entrapment in addiction destroyed his circle, his family, and his career.

After this song, sadly, the story for Sly was mostly a story of chaos and breakdown. He made recoveries, yes, but never made a comeback. The irony is that he outlived so many of the artists who followed his model–Gil Scott-Heron, Michael Jackson, Prince–and still never found that second wind. But Questlove said it in his documentary, and the words stand true even with this week’s sad news: “Sly Lives.”
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May 312024
 
Bat for Lashes
Bambie Thug – Zombie (The Cranberries cover)

This month, Bambie Thug represented Ireland in Eurovision, coming in sixth (the country’s highest placement since 2000). Shortly before the finals, they released this cover of The Cranberries’ “Zombie”amidst criticism of their outspokenness about the devastation in Gaza. The top YouTube comment puts it well: “The significance of Bambie choosing to cover this song will not be lost on anyone in Ireland or the UK, or many places outside them. It’s just about the most impactful call for peace an Irish person can give, and they’ve done it as well as anyone ever has.” Continue reading »

May 012023
 
best cover songs
The Flowers of Hell – Atmosphere (Joy Division cover)

Toronto-London ensemble The Flowers of Hell first released this cover on their 2012 orchestral-pop covers album Odes, but, in honor of its first vinyl release on Record Store Day, it got a new music video. If you missed this wonderful Joy Division cover the first time around, it’s a perfect time to catch up. There’s a new “Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft” video too. Continue reading »

Nov 012022
 

In Defense takes a second look at a much maligned cover artist or album and asks, “Was it really as bad as all that?”

Duran Duran Thank You

With Duran Duran about to be indicted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, what better time to re-examine Thank You, their eighth full-length offering, released in 1995 to a blaze of apathy. To be fair, it didn’t actually fare that badly in the charts, reaching the top 20 in both the UK and the US. The singles did less well, failing to make any stateside impression and only one of them bruising, just, their homeland top 20. The critics gave Thank You a fairly uniform hammering, with the legacy casting a long shadow over the rest of their career: Q magazine, in 2006, called it the worst record of all time, having had 11 years to make that considered opinion. At the time Rolling Stone described many of the selections as “stunningly wrong headed.” Ouch.

Today we’re thinking it about time this much derided potpourri of styles and statements had a good seeing to, via the retrospectroscope. I fully confess I had never listened to Thank You until researching this piece. So I got me a copy sent through, all of £3 plus p&p, which currently equates to about $3. Money well spent? Well, you know, actually, yes, it isn’t half as bad as I had been led to believe, and some of the tracks are really rather good. Of course, it is dated, but, by imagining myself back all those 27 years, I find myself heartily disagreeing with those snarky scribes from Q.

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Oct 142022
 

Here It IsWith peak anticipation building in lovers of the Bard of Montreal, here finally drops Here It Is: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, the Larry Klein-helmed and Blue Note-imprinted all-star tribute we have been sneaking peeks at these past few months. We have been a little underwhelmed by James Taylor and then bowled over by Nate Rateliff, so what of the rest?

First, some background. Klein and Cohen were good buddies during the final decade and a half of the singer’s life, having been crossing paths a good deal longer. Klein himself has an interesting pedigree, a jazz bassist of some renown, starting his career off by playing with Joe Hubbard and Wayne Shorter. Becoming more mainstream, as rock drew out for the greater sophistication jazz might offer, he began to play with, most notably, Joni Mitchell, actually marrying her. Whilst that didn’t last, he became one of the go-to bassists. It is him on Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” Bob Dylan’s Down in the Groove, and Peter Gabriel’s So album, still keeping his hand in with older buddies like Herbie Hancock.

Adding the production arrow to his quiver, Klein went on to take charge of studio work by a throng of artists encompassing many, many genres. Who else can say they produced acts as varied as Holly Cole, Rodney Crowell, and (Jefferson) Starship? Not to mention Joni, even after their marriage dissolved, and the aforementioned Hancock, including his The Joni Letters, where those two worlds aligned.

Having spent a fair amount of time covering Cohen songs for other artists, Klein came up with the idea of assembling an album’s worth of new ones. He brought together a collection of his contacts and acquaintances, largely from the jazz world, or, as he himself put it: “a group of the most prescient and forward-looking musicians.” Thus the band here, which is led by unassuming guitar titan Bill Frisell, includes also saxman Immanuel Wilkins, Kevin Hays on piano, and the rhythm section of bassist Scott Colley and drummer Nate Smith. Longtime Frisell associate and pedal steel player to the stars Greg Leisz also gets to play, as does Larry Goldings. So a crack band, and already catnip to the Blue Note label, even ahead the roll call of vocalists.
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Jan 142022
 

Cat PowerAt this stage of her career, Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power, is as arguably well known for her cover versions as her own songs. Covers is her third dedicated album thereto (we’ve looked at the first two before), with a scattering more across the rest of her other output. When other artists reach their third such collection, whispers carry that this may be a sign of fading inspiration. If Marshall’s covers were just a stack of facsimile copies, cut’n’pasted from the usual culprits, possibly that worry could carry some weight for her as well. But Marshall has long since stopped having to defend her love of remorphing and remolding the songs of others, oft citing that being her approach, anyway and as well, to her own songs. It is only recordings that are ever frozen in time and space, and most performers with any lasting legacy are constantly rewriting and revising, a view we heartily here endorse. And, as if to underline that, one of the “covers” here is of one of her old songs, “Hate,” here newly named as “Unhate.”

So what do we get here? Twelve songs, from this century to just over halfway through the last, from artists some celebrated and some surprising, taking no heed of genre or expectation in the songs chosen. So Frank Ocean sits alongside Nick Cave, Shane McGowan with Lana del Rey, with Billie Holiday and Kitty Wells (Kitty Wells, fer chrissakes!) for good measure. Plus, as if deliberately to contradict my earlier comment, there is even a cover of Jackson Browne’s surely by now overly frequently presented “These Days.”
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