Miley Cyrus Archives

The 50 Best Cover Songs of 2025

Posted by Staff at 9:00 am 2 Responses »

Dec 192025

Follow all our Best of 2025 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

Last year’s unexpected theme was Tom Petty covers. For no obvious reason, he popped up again and again on our 2024 year-end list. And whaddya know, Tom’s back this year, with two more Petty covers on our list. This year, however, he is not the most-covered artist on our list.

That’s a tie between two artists, one extremely of-the-moment, one timeless. With three covers apiece, Chappell Roan and Neil Young share the most-best-covered crown. (Artists with two covers apiece this year, in addition to Petty, are Gillian Welch, John Prine, and—this one’s surprising—Nelly Furtado!)

Spoiler alert: None of those appears in the number-one position. Number one covers an artist who I don’t think has ever appeared on one of our year-end lists. But don’t skip ahead. There are 49 equally (well, almost) as good covers to get through first, spanning genres and sounds and eras and ages. Here we go.

Cover art by Hope Silverman

Good, Better, Best: “Zombie” (The Cranberries)

Posted by Tom McDonald at 1:00 pm No Responses »

Sep 122025

Some covers are more equal than others. Good, Better, Best looks at three covers and decides who takes home the gold, the silver, and the bronze.

Countless fans of ‘90s music love “Zombie,” many without actually having listened to it. Sure they heard it–it was inescapable in 1994–and could sing along on the chorus, but few understood it as a protest song. They wondered more about Dolores O’Riordan’s ululating vocal style than about her lyrics, her intent. (We are all a bit zombie-like in our listening habits–we respond at gut level to a singer’s emotions, rhythms, textures; the semantic processing comes later if it comes at all.) But make no mistake, “Zombie” is not only a protest song, it’s one of the great ones.

The triggering event for the Irish singer/songwriter was the killing of two young English boys by Irish paramilitary forces. Thus the mournful opening. But in the lines that feel most raw and personal O’Riordan is not protesting the violence itself, but the fact that she is so powerless against it. “But you see, it’s not me, it’s not my family.” She’s saying, in essence, “I didn’t vote for this, no one I know supports it, and yet here we are, with a select few hate-minded people preaching mindless violence.” A few extremists. Zombies.
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The 30 Best Pearl Jam Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm No Responses »

Aug 012025

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

Earlier this month, Matt Cameron announced he was leaving Pearl Jam. He wasn’t their first drummer—or their second, or third, or fourth—but he’d been there longer than all the rest combined. So it felt like the end of an era. Or, at least, an opportunity for us to celebrate their catalog through covers.

As big as Pearl Jam was, and is, they don’t get covered as much as you might expect. No doubt they’re sick of constant comparisons to Nirvana, but, in this respect, Kurt and co. get ten covers for every one of Pearl Jam. But that means the artists who do bother to cover Pearl Jam really care. Find 30 such artists below.

Photo by Danny Clinch

Five Good Covers : “Wrecking Ball” (Miley Cyrus)

Posted by Seuras Og at 12:00 pm 1 Response »

Jul 222025

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

The number of cover versions committed to disc of this song far outnumber those of other and comparable “Wrecking Ball”s. SecondHandSongs lists 124 covers of the Miley Cyrus hit, against a paltry six for the Neil Young-written song of the same name, and four for that by Gillian Welch. Both are fine songs, of course. However, hand on heart, neither can hold a candle to the might of Miley’s tsunami of sangfroid regret, a song that clinically examines a deteriorating relationship with velvet-gloved precision, the lyrical accuracy as apt as it is transparent. Continue reading »

The Best Cover Songs of February 2025

Posted by Ray Padgett at 10:48 am No Responses »

Mar 032025

Bring Me the Horizon — Wonderwall (Oasis cover)

Screamo Oasis? That’s sure to piss some people off! Can’t wait for the Gallagher brothers to weigh in. This reminds me of Biffy Clyro’s highly divisive “Modern Love” a few years back. Not generally my genre of music, but I do love when a band takes a swing like this.

The Great Leslie — Fix You (Coldplay cover)

For a couple weeks this months, my Google Alerts were taken over by some TV-performance show called Chefsache ESC 2025. Which I’d never heard of, and still only vaguely understand what it is (some sort of Germany-only Eurovision?). It produced some wild covers though. The Feuerschwanz medieval-metal version of “Dragostea Din Tei” must be seen to be believed. But we’ve written about that song before—they released it on an album a couple years ago—so, instead, here’s a group called The Great Leslie performing Coldplay like they’re Franz Ferdinand. Continue reading »

Review: Thea Gilmore’s ‘These Quiet Friends’

Posted by Seuras Og at 7:00 am No Responses »

Feb 282025

Thea Gilmore has been on quite a journey these past few years, and, against the odds, has shown herself to be a survivor, when the odds were more she may barely wash up. One of those artists seemingly around for ever, it is a shock to realize she is still only in her mid-40s, despite a staggering catalog of over 20 albums, starting in 1998.

Whilst her own writing is sharp and incisive, she is neither a stranger to covering the work of other artists. That’s how we know her here, with her 2011 track-by-track recreation of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding meeting with no small approval. Prior to that she had issued 2004’s Loft Music, a diverse set that ranged from Creedence Clearwater Revival through to Phil Ochs, via the Ramones and Neil Young. On Don’t Stop Singing (also in 2011), she was gifted the opportunity to put music to a set of posthumous orphan lyrics written by Sandy Denny. (The fact that UK Denny tributers the Sandy Denny Project have covered one such song, “London,” is a wry testament.)

Anyhoo, here we are in 2025, and here is These Quiet Friends, a second set of disparate covers. The mood is here more consistent than the earlier set, that mood being generally low key and pensive, perhaps given away by the album title. An impression is that these songs helped sustain her over the brick wall her personal life crashed into, back in 2021. The details aren’t for here, but rather than a career-put-on-hold stalling release, this set provides a companion to Gilmore’s new material, which continues, her muse anything other than consumed by circumstance.
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