Miley Cyrus Archives

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.
Continue reading »

The 50 Best Cover Songs of 2024

Posted by Staff at 9:00 am 4 Responses »

Dec 202024

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.)

Weird Al’s “Polkamania” Covers the Biggest Hits of the Past Decade

Posted by Brendan Shanahan at 9:30 am No Responses »

Jul 252024

Weird Al Yankovic has been quiet on the new music front for about a decade after Mandatory Fun, his last studio album, was released in 2014. So his newest single “Polkamania!” has smashed together some of the last decade’s biggest hits, all in the style of his signature medley genre, a polka.

But which songs are covered in Weird Al’s “Polkamania”?

Adele – “Hello”
Ariana Grande – “Thank U, Next”
Billie Eilish – “Bad Guy”
Cardi B feat. Megan Thee Stallion – “WAP”
Cast of Encanto – “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”
Ed Sheeran – “Shape of You”
Lil Nas X – “Old Town Road”
Luis Fonsi feat. Daddy Yankee – ‘Despacito’
Mark Ronson feat. Bruno Mars – “Uptown Funk”
Miley Cyrus – “Flowers”
Olivia Rodrigo – “Vampire”
Taylor Swift – “Shake It Off”

There’s not much to say about this song sonically – all the covers are straightforward, but done in a polka style, with the exception of “WAP,” which cleverly utilizes sound effects to get the same message across.

Definitely one the Weird Al fans will love, but there’s enough silliness in here for everyone else as well.

Review: ‘Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute To Talking Heads’ ‘Stop Making Sense”

Posted by Mike Tobyn at 10:00 am No Responses »

May 172024

The quote attributed to Brian Eno about the Velvet Underground’s first album inspiring everyone who bought it to form a band applies differently to Talking Heads. If you were already starting your band in your parents’ garage or the art school lounge, surrounded (in either case) by the fog of weed, you would surely dream about being Talking Heads.

During a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame career, Talking Heads retained and maintained artistic integrity, but sold enough records to establish and keep themselves in the public consciousness and charts. We can all name their biggest songs. They got to work with the business’s best, including Eno and Lee “Scratch” Perry, and create critically acclaimed masterpieces. If you needed to draft in legends from Funkadelic or Nigerian music to get the sound right, you could.

It was not all work. There was the opportunity to hang out, and get high with, the coolest people in the world. Mick Jagger might have been a little too high to interact fully with, but Sid Vicious was unexpectedly sympathetic, and John Martyn was expectedly an asshole. At least you knew personally. Later on, cool young people would be desperate to hang out with you. If you are Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth you would get to do all this with your soulmate and the love of your life. (All of this is well documented in Frantz’s memoir Remain in Love. Recommended.)

The lead singer might be a little, shall we say, self-absorbed. Of course, for an average band, between a third and a fifth of you are planning to be the lead singer, so you would regard your behaviour as an acceptable price for accommodating your genius. The rest of you, as talented and driven as you are, might have to suck it up a little. Your Wikipedia entry is much shorter than that of the lead. You can contemplate the injustice of it all as you take your ocean-going yacht down to your Bahamas holiday home and studio.

You can have side projects when the band is on hiatus. This might allow you to participate in an Oscar-winning soundtrack, or produce your biggest-ever hit records. You can be sought-after producers, further increasing your time in the Caribbean and your musical legacy. And at a certain point in your career you make the greatest concert movie of all time.

Stop Making Sense, directed by Oscar-winner Jonathan Demme, was released in 1984 when the band was at its creative, harmonious best. It is a work of art on several fronts, from the curation of the music from an emerging chrysalis to barnstorming romps, to the building of the set and band. It featured the iconic and meme-worthy “big suit,” which cemented the recording and band in the public consciousness. Forty years after its release, the film company A24 has polished up Stop Making Sense for a new generation, and now they’re celebrating further with the release of a new tribute album, Everybody’s Getting Involved. The range of moods, genres and languages on the album are a real testament to the influence that Talking Heads have.
Continue reading »

Sondre Lerche Releases Synthy Cover of Miley Cyrus Hit “Flowers”

Posted by Aleah Fitzwater at 10:37 am No Responses »

Jan 032024

Sondre Lerche is a Norwegian singer-songwriter who is no stranger to the world of cover songs. Lerche has been releasing cover songs for well over a decade now, including a series where at the end of every year he releases a cover of one of that year’s big pop hits. With covers of Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Ariana Grande, Drake, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga tunes, he’s created quite a name for himself in this niche alone. This year, he tackled the Miley Cyrus smash “Flowers.” Continue reading »