Saturday, January 18th, an amazing group of musicians gathered in Tulsa, Oklahoma to pay tribute and celebrate the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks album. The celebration titled “Shelter From the Storm: Celebrating 50 years of Blood on the Tracks,” was held at Cain’s Ballroom, a legendary venue located close to the Bob Dylan Center, who were presenting the evening. 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.
If you are going to find and love The Beatles, you will probably do it when you are young. A friend or relative’s music collection might stimulate you first, or you might get a taste via a radio program/podcast. So many roads lead to The Fab Four that the streaming algorithms get you there quickly enough if you start listening to pop music. If you like the tracks all of those sources have more, much more, to help you satisfy your craving. Those who are now disgorged from the cruise ships to the Cavern Club in Liverpool might be older and well upholstered now, but they were probably young when their love formed. The love often stays with people once formed, and people have built careers around growing old with their heroes from fifty-plus years ago.
We must also remember that younger people created this music. Yes, they had a unique musical perspective and unprecedented life experiences, but the band imploded before any of its members reached 30. The ones that got the chance to grow old bring that perspective to their renditions now, but they cannot separate it from the young men they once were.
Lucinda Williams had an opportunity, for reasons wished for and unwished for, to bring a whole new perspective on her music and world, that of someone in late middle age. In 2020 she suffered a stroke, during a worldwide pandemic. She had to relearn how to sing, but never regained her guitar skills, and she got to reappraise the music that she loved and formed her. She released six volumes of Lu’s Jukebox, cover albums of her favorite artists or genres. Once she had recovered enough to tour and perform, she got a more welcome opportunity to rethink her relationship to The Beatles, with an opportunity to record at Abbey Road studios.
The result is Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles from Abbey Road, forming volume 7 of Lu’s Jukebox, and it is a triumph.
Continue reading »
Austin rockers Farmer’s Wife go full shoegaze-psych on this Donovan cover just in time for Halloween. They write: “Our cover of ‘Season of the Witch’ materialized out of a drum beat and pedal feedback two Halloweens ago. This creepy classic opened us to more experimentation and allowed us to dive into an eerier side of our sound.”
The late Don Heffington was an acclaimed drummer, so, naturally, his new tribute album includes drum greats like Jim Keltner. But he was also a singer-songwriter, so friends and collaborators like Jackson Browne, Victoria Williams, and Fiona Apple cover his songs. Apple selected “Lately,” the closing song on the final solo studio album of his lifetime, 2016’s Contemporary Abstractions in Folk Song and Dance. Continue reading »
