Hopefully a full recording will be released of the Carnegie Hall tribute to Patti Smith. Until then, there are a number of videos on YouTube. Best I’ve seen is Ben Harper doing “Ghost Dance,” Smith’s mesmerizing mediation from 1978’s Easter. Note Flea on bass and Dylan/Costello sideman Charlie Sexton on guitar. Continue reading »
A harrowing, dingy, noisy song about the DTs, “Waves of Fear” from Lou Reed‘s eleventh album The Blue Mask is one of his more uncompromising songs (which is saying something). It’s just Reed’s description of what it’s like to detox, with no varnish and no protecting the listener from the misery, with Reed almost spitting the lyrics. It’s combined with an extremely grimy and relatively noisy rhythm guitar part, followed by just a bonkers solo from former Voidoid Robert Quine. It’s a deep cup fora number of reasons. Continue reading »
Follow all our Best of 2024 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.
Welcome to the 50 Best Tom Petty Covers of 2024!
We kid, of course. But for whatever reason, this year’s big trend in covers was: Tom Petty. At one point there were something like 20 Petty covers on our longlist. Many came from two all-star tribute albums that dropped, entirely coincidentally, the same year (they both made our Best Albums list). We narrowed it down, of course. Three Petty covers ended up in this Top 50, one not even from those albums. Then, just this week, another high-profile Petty cover dropped: Snoop and Jelly Roll reworking “Last Dance for Mary Jane”! Suffice to say that one wouldn’t have been a contender even if it hadn’t arrived too late.
That was the big surprise trend in 2024 covers. The less-surprising trend you could have called from a mile out: The new wave of young pop divas—Chappell, Sabrina, Charli—got covered a lot. We could have done an entire 50-song list of their covers, too (the “Good Luck Babe”s alone!). But, if we had, we would have missed out on gospel R.E.M. and country The Weeknd and electropop Mott the Hoople and soul Green Day and… you know what, just read the list.
(Moo-chas gracias and Deng-ke schoen to Hope Silverman for this year’s tiny-hippo art.)
Follow all our Best of 2024 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.
A great cover song is hard enough to pull off. Doing it over and over again enough times to make a great cover album is something like a miracle. This year, miracles abounded. We awarded only the third or fourth five-star album in the site’s history. That’s our number one, naturally. But if we’d run a full review of our number two album, it might have gotten five stars too.
Our list includes tributes to everyone from Lou Reed to Low to Tom Petty—twice. It includes jammy experimental covers of ’90s alt-rock, fingerpicked guitar covers of Kraftwerk, and skankin’ ska covers of Weird Al. It translates Leonard Cohen into Hebrew and Talking Heads into Spanish. It honors Fleetwood Mac before Fleetwood Mac and deeper Bob Dylan cuts than you can imagine. (Seriously, imagine the most obscure Bob Dylan song you can. These are more obscure than that.) It was that kind of year.
The Reverend Al Green is offering up a new cover of R.E.M.’s modern classic, “Everybody Hurts.”
“Recording “Everybody Hurts,” said Green, “I could really feel the heaviness of the song and I wanted to inject a little touch of hope and light into it.” And, because he’s Al Green, he did just that. The song still has the melancholy that seeps through the original, but the final chorus reaches another level of redemption, courtesy Green.
Playing on the track includes some heavy hitters, including Reverend Charles Hodge on keyboards, Texas guitar legend Will Sexton, and Steve Potts from Booker T and the MG’s on drums.
Speaking on behalf of his former bandmates, Michael Stipe said, “We could not be more honored, more flattered and more humbled. This is an epic moment for us.”
Green’s last release was in 2023 and was a cover of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.”
I’m honestly surprised there weren’t more “Total Eclipse” covers during this month’s total eclipse. Perhaps because our total eclipse was of the sun, rather than the heart. Or, more likely, because this song is hard as hell to sing. Best of the bunch came this garage-rocking version from Ontario trio The Dirty Nil. Gritty and raw, and singer Luke Bentham sells the hell out of it. Continue reading »