Green Day‘s Billie Joe Armstrong‘s side project, The Coverups, played a show in and included a David Bowie cover, featuring Iron Maiden‘s Bruce Dickinson. Continue reading »
Aug 032026
May 022025
‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.
Up the irons! Iron Maiden turns 50 this year. They’re still going strong too, releasing music, playing shows, engaging in mock sword battles with a towering Eddie. So we felt it was time to honor them with a Best Covers Ever. Personally, I feel the list should rightfully be 666 covers long, but that seems like a lot of blurbs to write.
We haven’t done that many heavy metal bands in these lists. The reason is simple: Metal bands often only get covered by other metal bands. This is particularly true for bands that are either a) niche or b) extremely technical. Iron Maiden is neither. Like Metallica, who we tackled a few years ago, their songs are versatile enough to be easily covered in any number of genres. You don’t need to know insane time signatures or ridiculously complicated riffs to find a way in. Many are essentially pop songs in metal garb—well, pop songs about the number of the beast, that is.
A few of the covers below come from metal acts, but most don’t. Nevertheless, we recommend headbanging to them all. Even the klezmer one.
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Oct 312024
Farmer’s Wife — Season of the Witch (Donovan cover)
Austin rockers Farmer’s Wife go full shoegaze-psych on this Donovan cover just in time for Halloween. They write: “Our cover of ‘Season of the Witch’ materialized out of a drum beat and pedal feedback two Halloweens ago. This creepy classic opened us to more experimentation and allowed us to dive into an eerier side of our sound.”
Fiona Apple — Lately (Don Heffington cover)
The late Don Heffington was an acclaimed drummer, so, naturally, his new tribute album includes drum greats like Jim Keltner. But he was also a singer-songwriter, so friends and collaborators like Jackson Browne, Victoria Williams, and Fiona Apple cover his songs. Apple selected “Lately,” the closing song on the final solo studio album of his lifetime, 2016’s Contemporary Abstractions in Folk Song and Dance. Continue reading »
Oct 152024
Iron Maiden is currently on a North American tour. Bruce Dickinson will pilot Eddie and the band across the West for the next few weeks. For the current dates they are being joined by their buddies from The HU as the support act. The latter have released their version of Maiden’s “The Trooper” as an appetizer, sung entirely in their native Mongolian. A song about the glories of comradeship in the cause of a dangerous, but futile, war certainly sets the scene for an assault on the arenas of the United States and Canada! Continue reading »
Oct 312023
Deer Tick – Dancing In The Dark (Bruce Springsteen cover)
“For me, ‘Dancing in the Dark’ isn’t a song about romance, but instead a desperate plea to break out of some degraded, stagnant situation. The narrator is filled with angst, self doubt, and the only way out is to the sheer force of unwavering will power,” says Deer Tick guitarist/vocalist Ian O’Neil. “Bruce really shows us who he is on this one and it looks an awful lot like the rest of us.”
Die Sauerkrauts Polka Band — Now That’s What I Call Polka! (Weird Al cover)
There are a lot of Weird Al covers out there (okay, maybe not a lot, but more than you might think). This is new though. This band didn’t cover one of Weird Al’s parodies. They didn’t even cover a Weird Al original, like “Dare to Be Stupid.” They covered one of his polka medleys (a subject I interviewed Al about in Cover Me the book—excerpt at The AV Club). Meaning, they covered polka versions of hits by Miley Cyrus, One Direction, Gotye, and many more, all in a brisk medley. A very silly music video brings it home. Continue reading »
Oct 042023
Silent Skies is a collaboration between pianist Vikram Shankar and vocalist Tom Englund of metal bands Evergrey and Redemption. We first encountered them at Cover Me when they covered Linkin Park back in April. Now they’ve tackled Iron Maiden.
“The Trooper” is one of Iron Maiden’s few hit singles outside of the UK. In addition to nearly being a Top 10 hit in the UK for them (something that became a regular occurrence), it was a rare for them Top 40 (Modern Rock) hit in the US. It’s most famous for its knotty opening guitar salvo, its instantly recognizable main riff and the breaks right before Bruce Dickinson sings his lines in the verses. Continue reading »