Mar 282025
 

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

best david bowie covers

If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting. – David Bowie

In March 1975, David Bowie released Young Americans, the album that saw him move from glam rock to Philly soul. It was his first top ten album in America, featuring his first number one song in “Fame.” Fifty years later, that golden anniversary is enough of a hook to hang a Cover Me Best Covers Ever feature on. But the remarkable thing about David Bowie is, this was little more than a blip in his career. He had other personas to invent, other forms to master, other brilliancies to create. And he wouldn’t rest until (long after) he did.

Bowie’s influence on popular culture cannot be overstated, and not just in the music world – I’m convinced that roughly one-third of Tilda Swinton is David Bowie. For millions of misfits worldwide, he himself was the freak flag, the one who made it okay to be other than. I’ll help you with the pain, he sang. You’re not alone. Give me your hands. ‘Cause you’re wonderful. It’s a message that still sings out today, in Bowie’s songs and in the work of those he influenced.

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Oct 182024
 

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

cher covers

When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class of 2024 was announced, we polled our Patreon supporters and asked, Who should get the big Best Covers Ever countdown treatment: Foreigner, Tribe, Frampton, Kool (with Gang), Mary J., Cher, Dave (with Band), or Ozzy? And the winner… well, you can probably guess from the photo an inch above this paragraph. Cher!

(We also did different covers features on the other seven though—find them all here.)

There’s big, there’s Big, and then there’s Cher Big. At the time of her ‘70s run of smashes—already a decade after she first scored all-time-classic hits with Sonny & Cher—she was the female solo artist with the most number-one singles in US history. She is currently is the only solo artist to have a number-one single on a Billboard chart in seven consecutive decades, from the 1960s to the 2020s. Her most-covered song, “Believe,” came out a full 33 years into her professional career. That’s one hell of a run. What other pop star has released their biggest song in their 50s?

So today, we’re celebrating Cher with covers of all her hits, both with and without Sonny, and a few deep cuts. Though, let’s be honest, Cher is a hits machine, and not many artists cover her deep cuts. We easily could have done this whole 30-song list with just “Believe” covers (and, even paring them down, there’s still plenty of life after love here). Welcome to the Rock Hall, Cher!

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Feb 012021
 
cover songs january 2021
Amanda Shires – That’s All (Genesis cover)

Our first song kicks off what will be a theme here. A lot of these came out at the very top of the year (or the very end of 2020) to kick a garbage year to the curb and hope for something better. Shires said: “’That’s All’ is a song that I have played a lot on tour. The song defines 2020 for me. It’s a true Covid anthem and I dare you to not dance to my version when you hear it!” Continue reading »

Feb 252019
 

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

buddy holly covers

The so-called “Day the Music Died” occurred 60 years ago this month. One night after an Iowa concert, that fateful plane crash took out a host of young pioneers of the first wave of rock and roll: Ritchie Valens, J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson (in a last minute seat-trade with Waylon Jennings), and, of course, Buddy Holly.

Over at 22, Holly’s career had barely begun. But in a few short years, he’d written and recorded some of the most foundational tracks of rock and roll. So, to remember him six decades on, we’re ranking the best covers of his songs – from “Rave On” to “Not Fade Away” to a host of deep-cut gems that deserve wider recognition.

We were going to include 22 covers to honor Holly’s age but – in a testament to how much he accomplished in such a short time – that turned out to be not nearly enough. So we expanded the list to 36, his birth year. And frankly, we could have easily doubled it. That’s how often his songs have been covered by his admirers of yesterday and today. So rave on, Buddy, with these 36 fantastic covers of your songs.

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Aug 302016
 

A few months back, Nashville’s iconic Ryman Auditorium hosted two star-studded tribute concerts to Bob Dylan to celebrate his 75th birthday. Kesha performing “I Shall Be Released” was the big news-maker as her first high-profile performance during her ongoing legal battle, but many other members of country and Americana royalty also took the stage for an amazing couple nights. The full thing was webcast, but it hasn’t been archived anywhere, so if you missed that you were stuck with grainy YouTube videos – until now. We’ve got every song to stream below (except Kesha, which wasn’t webcast, presumably for legal reasons). For the first time since that night, you can hear pristine recordings of Jason Isbell, Kacey Musgraves, Kurt Vile, Emmylou Harris, Butch Walker, Wynonna Judd, Boz Scaggs, Langhorne Slim, John Paul Williams of the Civil Wars, Ann Wilson of Heart, and more covering their favorite Dylan songs, many for the first time ever. Continue reading »

Aug 232012
 

Fleetwood Mac is not easy to pigeonhole. Part of this is due to their talent and timelessness; more significantly, the band’s leader and line-up has changed 3 times over, taking the band from its incarnation with Peter Green at the helm as one of the fiercest English-blues bands on the scene, to a more adolescent stage with Bob Welch steering and producing hippie-of-the-times songs, to its final incarnation in which the ferocious duo of Buckingham and Nicks turned Fleetwod Mac into what it has now been hallmarked as. Point is, the band is more than Nicks and Buckingham, and the hope is that any Fleetwood Mac tribute album would duly recognize the band’s colorful history with remarkable covers that are juxtaposed in a way that reflect the unique unfurling of the band’s growth and self-discovery. Continue reading »