Lucy Kaplansky Archives

Five Good Covers: “These Boots Were Made For Walking” (Nancy Sinatra)

Posted by Seuras Og at 12:00 pm 2 Responses »

Nov 152024

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walking” first broke free as 1965 broke into 1966, becoming a worldwide smash in the January of ’66, at least in the world as then existed, the USA and the UK. In truth, it did pretty well everywhere else as well, with Europe, Australia, Singapore and Mexico all loving the sentiment. Writer Lee Hazlewood had based “Boots” on a line of dialogue Nancy’s Dad, Frank, had spoken in the comedy western 4 For Texas, so who better than her daughter to sing it? With the Wrecking Crew team of crack session players in attendance, the song is chiefly notable for the quarter tone walking descent of the bass line, provided by Chuck Berghofer. Indeed, most of the well over 300 covers replicate and repeat this, such is the shorthand of the song.

Cover Me Q&A: What’s your favorite cover of a traditional song?

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm 7 Responses »

Nov 062024

Welcome to Cover Me Q&A, where we take your questions about cover songs and answer them to the best of our ability.

Here at Cover Me Q&A, we’ll be taking questions about cover songs and giving as many different answers as we can. This will give us a chance to hold forth on covers we might not otherwise get to talk about, to give Cover Me readers a chance to learn more about individual staffers’ tastes and writing styles, and to provide an opportunity for some back-and-forth, as we’ll be taking requests (learn how to do so at feature’s end).

Today’s question comes from staff member Tom McDonald:

What’s your favorite cover of a traditional song?

The 75 Best Beatles Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 9:00 am 22 Responses »

Feb 232024

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

Sixty years ago this month, The Beatles played on the Ed Sullivan Show. You don’t need us to tell you what a momentous occasion this was; entire books have been written on the subject. Suffice to say we’re using the anniversary as our excuse to finally devote a Best Covers Ever to perhaps the biggest band of them all. We’ve done Dylan. We’ve done the Stones. We’ve done Dolly and Springsteen and Prince. But there was one last giant remaining.

Though it’s difficult to measure this precisely, The Beatles are the most-covered artist of all time according to the two biggest covers databases on the internet (SecondHandSongs, WhoSampled). And that certainly feels right. “Yesterday” is often cited as the most-covered song of all time, though that needs qualifiers (a ton of Christmas standards would beat it). But, again, it feels right. The Beatles were ubiquitous in their day, and they’ve been ubiquitous ever since. They just had a chart-topping single last month, the A.I.-assisted “Now and Then,” which was duly covered widely. If “Carnival of Light” ever surfaces, no doubt a carnival of covers will soon follow. Continue reading »

Full Albums: Elvis Costello & the Attractions’ ‘Armed Forces’

Posted by Seuras Og at 10:30 am No Responses »

Mar 172021

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Last year we polled our loyal band of Patreon-izers as to which Elvis Costello album they would like to read a Full Albums post about. The winner was This Year’s Model, and we duly dealt with it here. The runner-up, Armed Forces, has recently had its umpteenth revamp and re-release, making it entirely apt for it to addressed in turn.

1979’s Armed Forces was Costello’s third record all told, his second album with the Attractions, and the first actually bearing the Attractions’ name. It sold well, reaching #2 in the UK album charts and #10 in the US charts, notching platinum sales altogether in the former, gold in the latter. And, as stated, there have been a number of re-packages, notably in 1993 and 2002. 1993 added a few extra tracks, whilst 2002 threw in a whole extra disc, the selections on each chosen by Costello. This year’s release, Complete Armed Forces, goes a step further and is a mammoth box set (vinyl, naturally) with nine records.

But finding a decent set of covers proved elusive. Only now, thanks to a link being made available to one long-lost recording and to the commissioning of a totally new rendition of another, are we able to finally complete the circle.
Continue reading »

The Best Cover and Tribute Albums of 2015

Posted by Staff at 11:00 am 3 Responses »

Dec 112015

Follow all our Best of 2015 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

Everywhere but here, the world of cover and tribute albums tends to be a sleepy one. Most years our “Best Cover Albums” list is composed of records that either flew totally under the radar or, at best, earned a few news posts on music blogs. There’s the “all star” tribute albums that make a brief mark before being largely forgotten. And there’s the big-name artists whose cover albums get seen as a side project before their next “real” albums. That’s just the lot you sign up for when you release an album of cover songs most years.

But most years don’t have Ryan Adams. Continue reading »

Five Good Covers: More Than This (Roxy Music)

Posted by Seuras Og at 5:00 pm 4 Responses »

Oct 232015

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

I was a big fan of Roxy Music, in both their spiky earlier incarnation and their smoother second phase, then lost a little faith as Bryan Ferry seemed to endlessly noodle around and around the same somewhat bland and anodyne motifs, solo recordings palling – apart from, I have to say, and appropriately on this site, his all-Bob cover album Dylanesque, which carried a bit more verve and spark than his own stuff. However, back and currently on the road, Ferry seems to have hit upon a bit of a stride – largely, in truth, by an extensive revisiting of his Roxy catalog, rarely playing material from this century. Be that as it may, “More Than This,” from 1982’s Avalon, and actually their last UK top ten hit (it barely bothered the US charts, peaking at 102), has always struck me as a bit of a throwaway, with the by-then Ferry formula padded out in what was becoming a somewhat repetitive set of chord progressions, later repeated ad nauseum in his subsequent solo career. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that it’s bad, it’s just a bit meh. But, inexplicably, it has become a bit of a standard for covering, perhaps on account of one of the versions commented upon below.
Continue reading »