Oct 222014
 

Welcome to Cover Me Q&A, where we take your questions about cover songs and answer them to the best of our ability.

Here at Cover Me Q&A, we’ll be taking questions about cover songs and giving as many different answers as we can. This will give us a chance to hold forth on covers we might not otherwise get to talk about, to give Cover Me readers a chance to learn more about individual staffers’ tastes and writing styles, and to provide an opportunity for some back-and-forth, as we’ll be taking requests (learn how to do so at feature’s end).

Today’s question, courtesy of staffer Jordan Becker: What’s a cover song you hate, and why?
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Feb 262014
 

In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!

In the 1980s, there was one artist that Minneapolis became known for. And that was Prince.

But if you took the bus to the bad part of town, watching the blight and the snowy misery go by through fogged up windows, you would eventually spot a burned-out, abandoned, and graffiti-tagged little red Corvette: perched up on blocks, stuffed with liquor bottles in the back seat, and harboring a coffee can in the front filled to the brim with cigarette butts. If you opened the door, you would find a floor littered with cassettes. K-Tel. Kiss. Big Star. And if you ran the VIN number, you’d find the owner to be the Replacements.
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May 162012
 

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!

If anybody deserves to be described as “X years young,” it’s Jonathan Richman, who’s been in this world for 61 years as of today. Robert Christgau famously called him “an almost powerless case of arrested development,” but that was before he wrote songs like “The Girl Stands Up To Me Now,” “Let Her Go Into The Darkness,” and “That Summer Feeling,” all of which have true maturity without ever giving up Richman’s trademark unaffected wide-eyed stance. Long after he made an undeniable impact on the rock world with the Modern Lovers, Richman’s become an acoustic troubadour, criss-crossing the country with his musical tales, and has won a fervid following doing so – when he appeared as the Greek chorus of There’s Something About Mary, his fans didn’t think of him as selling out, but congratulated the world on buying in. His is truly a birthday worth celebrating – we’re doing so with the following covers… Continue reading »

Jan 312012
 

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!

Oh, the dark deeds that must occur on the birthday of the spiky-hair-crowned prince of punk. How does one fete a man whose very name conjures smoking images of filth, fetidness and psychopathy — Decorate a cake with rancid raspberries spilled over the Union Jack? Present a champagne flute of fermenting trash juice to pour on DVD copies of the Queen’s Christmas address? Continue reading »

Jun 282011
 

Take one part punk, mix in one part glam, one part heavy metal and a whole lot of teenage sass and you get the perfect rock’n’roll band: The Runaways. Remarkably young – the oldest members of the band were 17 upon the release of their eponymous first record – the band dissolved amongst a haze of drug abuse and musical differences after four studio albums. Joan Jett continued to hold the punk torch post-breakup, building a successful career backed by the Blackhearts. Now indie rock’n’punk connoisseurs Main Man Records have compiled an extensive two-disc tribute celebrating the music of the Runaways.

The release is not without controversy. Jett and singer Cherie Currie have sued to block the release complaining that the label has used their names to promote the album without permission. Somewhat fitting given that in their time the stories that swirled around the band often overshadowed the music they made. Continue reading »

May 052011
 
Joan Jett And The Blackhearts

For any ex-punks who find Joan Jett’s abrasive attitude and hard-hitting drive too much for tired ears, this is just the cover for you. Indie band Babbling April (named after Graham Greene’s 1925 poetry book) released their eponymous debut album last month, and one track on it is an acoustic “cover/adaptation” of Joan Jett’s classic rocker “Bad Reputation,” renamed simply “Reputation.”
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