Nov 062020
 

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

depeche mode covers

Way back in January, we polled our Patreon supporters to see which 2020 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee they wanted to see get the “Best Covers Ever” treatment. Depeche Mode won, so we started planning our schedule to get it ready in advance of the big induction ceremony on March 24.

Then…you know.

Tomorrow, many months later, the Rock Hall is finally hosting some sort of ceremony – remotely, of course – and we’ve been honoring each artist all week with covers features: Whitney Houston, Notorious B.I.G., The Doobie Brothers, T. Rex, and Nine Inch Nails. Now, many months after we expected to post it, the grand finale: The 25 Best Depeche Mode Covers Ever. Continue reading »

Dec 152017
 

Follow all our Best of 2017 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

best covers 2017

Year-end lists are a time to look back. That’s something we’ve been doing a lot of this year.

See, we turned ten years old in 2017 – practically ancient in internet-blog terms – so we’ve indulged in what we feel is well-earned nostalgia. At the beginning of the year, each of our writers picked the ten most important covers in their life (see them here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). We even listed the ten most important covers in Cover Me‘s life, from the song that inspired the site to our very first Best of the Year winner.

Then, to cap things off, in October we commissioned a 25-track tribute to the cover song itself – which you can still download for free. We love the covers everyone contributed so much, incidentally, that we didn’t consider them for this list. It’d be like picking favorite children – if you had 25 of ’em.

Oh, and have I mentioned I wrote a book? … What’s that you say? I mentioned that constantly? Well, I’m quite proud of it. It’s called Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time and it makes a great Christmas gift and – ok, ok, I’ll stop. You can find plenty more about it elsewhere.

Suffice to say, there’s been a lot of looking back this year. And we hope you’ll indulge us this one last glance rearward before we leap into 2018. Because if it’s been a hell of a year for us, it’s certainly also been a hell of a year for the cover song in general. Some of this year’s list ranks among the best covers we’ve ever heard, period. So dig in, and thanks for your support this past decade.

– Ray Padgett
Editor-in-Chief

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Sep 062016
 
eurythmics

Eurythmics haven’t released an album or toured since 1999, but for whatever reason this summer has seen a surge of covers. And not even just more versions of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” but other singles and deeper cuts. It’s probably just coincidence (unless Dave Stewart releasing his memoir earlier this year was a catalyst), but whatever the reason, we’re always happy to get new interpretations of their catchy-but-slightly-odd dance classics.

First up was Iron And Wine’s Sam Beam and Jesca Hoop. Earlier this year, they teamed up for a duets album Love Letter For Fire, and this summer they added an outtake: a cover of “Love Is a Stranger.” If you know even the tiniest thing about Beam or Hoop, it will not surprise you one iota to learn they take the pop song in a radically different direction. Their voices blend beautifully on the delicate acoustic cover. Continue reading »

Feb 242015
 

At the beginning of the year, Sam Smith quietly settled a copyright dispute with Tom Petty over the striking similarities between Smith’s three-time Grammy-nominated “Stay With Me” and Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” co-written with ELO’s Jeff Lynne. Both parties have claimed that there are no hard feelings and have moved on since the incident, which wasn’t even supposed to be made public. In an odd way, it is fortunate for us, because we have been able to hear a myriad of mash-ups of the two songs, including this rerecording by love+war. Continue reading »