John Grant Archives

In Memoriam: Sinead O’Connor

Posted by Ray Padgett at 4:18 pm 6 Responses »

Jul 262023

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

When we do our monthly Best Covers Ever countdowns, paying tribute to different versions of a given artist’s songs, it’s fun to surprise people with something unexpected. But a couple months ago, when we counted down covers of Prince, it was only ever a race for number two. The best cover of Prince is, in this case, also the most famous. Most famous for a reason. I’m talking, of course, about Sinead O’Connor singing “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Here’s a bit of Seuras Og’s writeup from that list:

“Arguably a pretty slim item in the hands of its composer, O’Connor gave it a remarkable polish, inhabiting the lyric and bleeding out the meaning. OK, she had, and still has, the vocal chops to squeeze emotion into and out of almost anything, and this song is a masterclass in voice control, of volume and microphone technique. The video, especially as she sheds unprompted tears, clearly adds to the overall heft, but even without that visual, still the power is immense. Completeness also insists on showing how timeless her ownership of the song has been, with a live performance or two, decades apart, each as striking, in different ways, as the other.”

But Sinead O’Connor had a lot more to offer than just her one big hit—and that’s even just limiting ourselves to the covers world. Sure, she topped our Best Prince Covers list, but she also appeared on our Best Elton John Covers list, our Best ABBA Covers list, our Best Dolly Parton Covers list, our Best Nirvana Covers list. How’s that for range?
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Review: The Endless Coloured Ways – The Songs Of Nick Drake

Posted by Adam Mason at 8:00 am 3 Responses »

Jul 072023

When tasked with covering a Nick Drake song, your first thought might very well be, are my finger-picking skills up to scratch? Then you’d likely be anxious that your acoustic guitar isn’t tuned in the strange and unorthodox way it should be, while under pressure to do justice to Drake’s deeply poetic lyrics. You might also be tempted to slur the occasional word for jazzy effect, as you basically try to honor a uniquely melancholy acoustic sound that’s become a sacred thing since the English singer’s death in 1974, aged just 26, from an overdose of antidepressants.

The message behind The Endless Coloured Ways – The Songs Of Nick Drake, however, is this: don’t sweat all that stuff.

The newest Drake tribute album curators are Cally Callomon, Manager of the Nick Drake Estate, and Jeremy Lascelles, co-founder of Blue Raincoat Music, who are both keen to popularize Nick Drake posthumously in major new ways. Indeed, now that the Estate has agreed to a global publishing deal with Blue Raincoat Music Publishing, why wouldn’t they be? Lascelles, therefore, claims to have issued “one simple brief to each of the artists” involved in paying tribute to the musician barely recognized in his lifetime, which was to “ignore the original recording of Nick’s, and reinvent the song in their own unique style.”
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John Grant Records Extended Spacey Cover of Nick Drake’s “Day Is Done”

Posted by Riley Haas at 12:00 pm No Responses »

Jun 212023

“Day is Done” is one of Nick Drake‘s most sophisticated-sounding compositions from his debut album, Five Leaves Left. It consists of merely his voice, his complicated guitar pattern and an elaborate string part by arranger Robert Kirby. Though it’s a brief song, it has an air of neo baroque art music, due to the intricacies of the instrumentation.

As we wrote about a few weeks ago, there’s a new Nick Drake tribute album on its way. The latest track to be released from it is from former Czars singer-keyboardist John Grant. Drake’s music is inextricably associated with the acoustic guitar, so covers from keyboard players are particularly welcome as they reframe his music in new and interesting ways. Continue reading »

Watch Jamie Cullum, John Grant, Paloma Faith and More Cover Bond Themes with the Royal Philharmonic

Posted by Ray Padgett at 2:36 pm No Responses »

Oct 052022

Last night, London’s Royal Albert Hall held the “The Sound of 007” concert, promoting a new documentary of the same name about James Bond themes. A host of artists came out to sing some of the greatest (and, in a few cases, not-so-great) Bond songs, and plenty of videos are now online. Continue reading »

La Roux, Badly Drawn Boy, John Grant Join Whyte Horse on Covers LP

Posted by Ray Padgett at 12:03 pm 1 Response »

Jan 172020

Dom Thomas is perhaps best known for his other gig, as founder of acclaimed reissue label Finders Keepers. So no surprise that the songs he selected for his band Whyte Horses’ new covers album dig deep. With a shifting group of collaborators, he covers some real cratedigger picks by groups like Belgian music polymath Plastic Bertrand (“Ca̧ Plane Pour Moi”) and Long Island twin soft-rockers Alessi Brothers (“Seabird”). Continue reading »

The Best ABBA Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 9:00 am 9 Responses »

Sep 282018

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

I’ve been watching early episodes of Saturday Night Live recently. On the fifth episode ever – back when it bore the shorter title Saturday Night – the host was comedian Robert Klein. Two musical guests joined him: Loudon Wainwright III and ABBA.

Wainwright’s performance plays it straight, just him and his guitar on stage. With ABBA, though, the show undermines the Swedish quartet from the start. They have to perform “S.O.S.” on a sinking Titanic set, competing for screen time with Klein and some SNL writers pretending to drown in vintage dining-lounge attire. Even when the camera lands on ABBA, it waves and swoops to indicate they’re going down with the ship too.

The second performance, “Waterloo,” does them even dirtier. Before the first verse even ends, these words pop up on the screen: “Right now ABBA is lip-syncing. It’s not their fault. The tracks didn’t arrive from Sweden.” The band appears to have no idea they are being thus undermined, even as the audience titters. I’ve watched the entire first season now, and haven’t seen any other musical performer treated this way. (The individual videos sadly aren’t anywhere embeddable, but the full episode is on Hulu).

This SNL appearance neatly embodies the ABBA dichotomy. On the one hand, they were such huge stars that the show simply had to book them. On the other, they seemed so irredeemably uncool that the show felt obliged to mock them so it didn’t lose its cultural cachet. And forty-plus years on from that performance, we treat them the same way. We’ll sing and dance along to their songs – particularly after a drink or two – but only the most ardent poptimist would put ABBA anywhere but the “guilty pleasure” category.

True, the productions may be dated, and the outfits ridiculous, but at their core the songs are rock-solid. Songwriters Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, sometimes aided by band manager Stig Anderson, penned songs that still rise above the cheese-tacular performances. And there’s no better evidence than in the thousands of genre-spanning covers. Everyone from Richard Thompson to Portishead has covered these songs – and not with a wink and a nudge either, but honestly finding timeless lyrics and melodies beneath ABBA’s very of-its-time presentation.

Cher did it too, releasing her ABBA tribute album today to piggyback on the second Mamma Mia! movie’s success (commercial success, that is, as the reviews were not kind – a true ABBA divide, there). So in honor of that, we decided to pick out the best ABBA covers ever. No, none of Cher’s make the list. But thirty other artists do.
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