This beautiful performance aired on South Dakota Public Broadcasting and, as of this writing, has 81 views, half of which are mine. (To be fair, presumably more people saw it when it aired on actual TV). But this Sioux Falls singer-songwriters beautiful Taylor Swift cover deserves a far bigger audience. It’s simply done, no frills or gimmicks, but he sells the hell out of it. Continue reading »
‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.
There’s plenty of good reasons that the Cars and their songs have retained their power long past the expiration date of most new wave bands. For one, though their cool-geek look was a part of their appeal, they never relied on it the way other bands had to rely on their appearance. For another, they brought together multiple influences – rock, pop, synth, punk – and created a sound with deep roots that was both edgy and fresh – no mean feat, that.
Most importantly, the songs that (mostly) Ric Ocasek and Benjamin Orr wrote for the band were strong and memorable, loaded with hooks and containing lyrics that take on more meaning the more you look at them – is “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” a positive or negative? What does it mean if you “needed someone to bleed”?
Their self-titled debut album is their strongest, and Heartbeat City may be their biggest, but the Cars are primarily known as a singles band, with over a dozen of them reaching the top 40. So it seems appropriate that a list of the best Cars covers should echo that. Here are the top forty cover songs of a band whose best songs won’t be tied down to any one era, preferring instead to resonate to all the generations that followed.
clap clap clapclapclap clapclapclapclap Let’s go!
– Patrick Robbins, Features Editor
Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.
Stevie Nicks’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a historic one. She’s the first woman to be elected twice – once with Fleetwood Mac, and once for her solo career. Before Diana Ross, before Tina Turner, before Janis Joplin, before any other woman. We’ve discussed “Landslide,” her signature song that she brought to Fleetwood Mac; now we’ll pay tribute to what she accomplished after she emerged from their shadow. Continue reading »
When last we heard from Matt Pond PA, he was turning The Cars’ “Drive” into a lush folk-pop ballad. Now Pond and bandmate Chris Hansen are back with new covers applying a similar soft sheen to two very different artists: Peter Gabriel and Led Zeppelin.
They covered Gabriel’s “Mercy Street” to close out the year and to celebrate the final episode of a radio show they do in upstate New York. Here’s what Pond wrote about it: Continue reading »
Whatever your feelings about the music of the Cars, they were impossible to ignore. In the late-‘70s sea of muted earth-tones, the band’s retro-techno-geek look was a revelation. And in an era when the charts were dominated by soft rock, disco and 1950s nostalgia – the Bee Gees, Andy Gibb, the Grease soundtrack – the Cars’ spiky, New Wave-inflected guitar pop signaled a coming sea change in popular music.
Of course popular taste didn’t change overnight and, in retrospect, it may not even have changed a great deal. If the wildfires of punk and art-rock had blazed through the underground music scene and left behind a very altered landscape, in the larger arena of the Billboard Top 100 it was a different story. In America at least, punk wasn’t quite ready for primetime (nor, it should be noted, were the Cars in any sense a punk band). Continue reading »
Over the years, we’ve written about Matt Pond PA’s fantastic covers of Lindsey Buckingham, The Human League, and Nico. For years, the NYC-based band fronted by the titular Matt Pond has bought a tender beauty to every song they’ve touched. But with their newest album, the just-released Still Summer, Matt Pond PA is calling it a day. Before they do, though, they’re releasing one more cover, which we’re pleased to premiere below. Continue reading »