Jun 252024
 

Tom Petty was always open in his love and respect for country music. Debt, even, with many of his songs a mere pedal steel away from sounding that way. So the new tribute album Petty Country: A Country Music Celebration of Tom Petty is not remotely any leap into uncharted territory. And, go figure the number of existing covers of his songs, effortlessly traversing into the full Nashville, Bakersfield or wherever you want to be the center of the genre. And then go figure who is lined up here, with Dolly and Willie, to start with, they who need no surname, right through Steve Earle and Margo Price and to more conventional hat acts like Chris Stapleton and George Strait.

Made with the full co-operation of the Petty estate, and, particularly, the oversight of his daughter, Adria, Petty Country unsurprisingly contains a Heartbreaker or two to beef up the instrumental chops. The songs contained herein also take a good walk through the catalog, unafraid of both picking the obvious candidates and digging deeper.
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Apr 012024
 
best cover songs
Aoife O’Donovan — The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (Bob Dylan cover)

Bartees Strange — You Always Hurt The Ones You Love (Mills Brothers cover)

Beyoncé — Blackbird (The Beatles cover)

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Nov 102022
 
loretta lynn tribute

Last weekend, CMT broadcast “A Celebration of the Life and Music of Loretta Lynn” at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry House. A host of country music royalty turned up to play her songs, from veteran industries stars like George Strait and Tanya Tucker to newer outlaws like The Highwomen and Margo Price. Jack White sang “Van Lear Rose,” off the album of the same name he produced for Lynn in 2004. Keith Urban busted out a banjo-guitar for “You’re Lookin’ at Country,” Lynn’s 1971 hit. Strait tackled early chart-topper “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind).” Her tracks pushing at the conservative country establishment got airings too: Price performed the pioneering birth control song “The Pill” – a song the Opry, where this show took place, once tried to ban – and Darius Rucker (of all people) performed the feminist anthem “Fist City.” Continue reading »

Nov 292021
 
willie nelson all things must pass

“All Things Must Pass” is one of George Harrison’s signature solo songs, but by all rights, it should have been a Beatles tune. In the new documentary The Beatles: Get Back, there are scenes of the group working on the track in rehearsal. After the Fab Four opted not to record it, Billie Preston released a version on his 1970 album Encouraging Words. The song was later immortalized as the title track to Harrison’s 1972 solo album. Now, fifty years later, it almost seems like an understatement to call “All Things Must Pass” a classic. The track is both timeless and timely, a secular hymn, meditating on the brevity of beauty, love and time itself.

Willie Nelson knows a thing or two about the passage of time. The country music legend released his first album in 1962, several months before the Beatles dropped their debut Please Please Me. Nelson has continued putting out records at a furious pace over the last few decades. For his latest, The Willie Nelson Family, he enlisted the talents of his children. The album has the feel and consistency of many of Nelson’s recent offers, not exactly breaking new ground but still compelling enough to warrant a listen. The album features multiple gospel recordings including takes on Hank Williams’ “I Saw the Light” and “Keep It On the Sunny Side,” a hymn made famous by the Carter Family.

Wedged in between the many tracks about Jesus is a cover of Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass.” Willie’s son Lukas Nelson takes on the lead vocal duties, with Willie providing backup. The two deliver a quiet, passionate rendition of Harrison’s masterwork that feels like it’s been part of their family repertoire for decades.

Click here to listen to more covers by and of Willie Nelson.

Apr 212021
 

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

a cappella cover

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, suggested by staffer Jordan Becker: What’s your favorite cover song based on a relative’s original?
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Jul 242020
 

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

CSNY

Crosby, Stills and Nash had already staked their claim as a bona fide supergroup courtesy their first release, cemented by their appearance in the Woodstock documentary. Of course, Neil Young had already joined the band by the time they got there, if mysteriously missing from the film in its initial iteration. His second gig, he appeared for the electric second part of the set. To me he always seemed their secret weapon. Old compadre and sparring partner of Stephen Stills in Buffalo Springfield, there was always the fear he could engineer the gig to being as big a draw in his own right as the trio he joined. Maybe he did; however much I loved the trio, they were always in a different league with Young’s fiery presence on board.

Deja Vu came out in 1970, after being put together in different studios and at different times, with only selections of the four featuring at any one time. All the vocals save “Woodstock” were recorded separately and then spliced together, amid much argument and revision. Young did everything on the half of the album he appears on all by himself, then took away the contributions of the others to mix as he saw fit. Completion took hours, days and weeks.

But it was all worth it. Somehow Deja Vu holds together cohesively, in no small part down to the rhythm section, the excellent Dallas Taylor and Greg Reeves. Certified gold within a fortnight, partly on the back of $2 million presales, it spent nearly two years in the Billboard chart, despite largely grudging and lackluster reviews. It still seems the pinnacle of their collective career, the only real instance wherein the deceitful artifice of any group collective manages fully to convince, melding individual directions with a combined corporacy.

Like most of our Full Cover posts, we have near-endless options for some songs and had to go scrounging for others – no trouble finding covers of “Teach Your Children,” but how many versions of “Everybody I Love You” have you heard? See what you think of the ten songs we pulled together here…
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