One of the biggest stories in cover song news this week was Miley Cyrus teaming up with David Byrne to perform a cover of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” on Cyrus’ New Year’s Eve special. Coincidently, I actually spent most of Dec. 31 thinking about Byrne and the Talking Heads’ musical legacy. Continue reading »
‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.
Dolly Parton is a singer and a songwriter. I mention that obvious truth because these days it tends to get overshadowed by her other titles: Icon. Inspiration. National Treasure. The Only Human Being Alive Everyone Agrees On (Radiolab produced an entire nine-part radio series based on that premise). And she is all those things, but first and foremost she’s a working 9-to-5 musician who has been perfecting her craft for seven decades.
Parton says she wrote her first song as a five year-old in 1952. She hasn’t stopped writing songs since. She once estimated she’s amassed 10,000. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but the verifiable numbers speak for themselves: 52 studio albums, 25 Number One songs, 100 million records sold worldwide. Just as important a tribute to her gifts, though, are how often her songs get covered. Not just the obvious ones, the “Jolene”s and “I Will Always Love You”s (though plenty of those, lord knows), but the album cuts, the singles that didn’t top the charts, and the songs she didn’t write herself but made into Dolly Parton songs anyway.
Some of the below covers sound a little bit like Dolly’s own music. Most do not. She considers herself straight country, not, as she made clear when first nominated for the Rock Hall earlier this year, rock and roll. But, in this list, she is rock and roll. And folk and pop and hip-hop and soul and a whole host of other genres. Dolly Parton may indeed be the only human being everyone agrees on. What a way to make a living.
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Rarely Covered looks at who’s mining the darkest, dustiest corners of iconic catalogs.
What counts as a “rarely covered” Bob Dylan song? Every Dylan song has been covered a million times, right?
Not quite. But most have. So, to find the all-but-unearthed gems in a catalog as heavily mined as Bob’s, we need to define the terms. To make my search for rarely-covered Dylan songs more manageable, I first stipulated one rule: No songs he released on proper albums. Only covers outtakes, Bootleg Series cuts, one-off singles, etc. count for these purposes. It’s not a perfect rule – it’s not like artists are rushing to cover proper album tracks “Ballad in Plain D” (Another Side of Bob Dylan) or “Wiggle Wiggle” (Under the Red Sky) – but it makes the pool easier to navigate.
That no-album-cuts rule wasn’t enough though. If I left it at that, non-album track “I Shall Be Released” would qualify as a “rarely-covered” Dylan song. Ha! So I further disqualified the twenty or so most-covered singles and outtakes. Bye to “Blind Willie McTell,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “Quinn the Eskimo,” etc.
That left us with an interesting batch of obscurities and oddities that few artists tackle. It still contained a lot of great material, killer deep cuts only covered once or twice. So for Bob’s 81st birthday week, we’re breaking it up into five parts, grouped by when Bob first wrote/recorded the song: Early ‘60s, Late ‘60s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and Beyond. We’ll be posting another installment every day this week.
The richest period of them all in terms of sheer quantity of songs is this one. In his first couple years on the job, young folkie Dylan wrote dozens more songs than he could fit on his albums. Some he gave to other artists, some he played live for a while and discarded, some he eventually released on Biograph or various Bootleg Series installments. Though none have been covered often, almost all have been covered at least once or twice. After all, they’ve had sixty years for someone to pick them up. Continue reading »
‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.
“I usually come in second to Dylan,” Paul Simon once said, “and I don’t like coming in second.” Indeed, he’s had to deal with it literally ever since he was born, in 1941. We already celebrated Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday in May, and today we turn to the man Dylan has called “one of the preeminent songwriters of the times,” Paul Simon, as he hits his own 80th. Simon’s in the rarified air of someone whose songs get covered almost as much as Dylan’s (ugh – second place again), so for this month’s Best Covers Ever, we’re diving into covers of the entire Paul Simon catalog, both solo and with Simon and Garfunkel.
Another thing Dylan once said about Simon, in relation to his own music, is this: “I’m not Paul Simon. I can’t do that. My songs come out of folk music and early rock n’ roll, and that’s it. I’m not a classical lyricist, I’m not a meticulous lyricist. I don’t write melodies that are clever or catchy.”
False modesty aside, Dylan hits on some of what makes Simon’s work so beloved by other musicians. His melodies are clever and catchy. His lyrics are meticulous. In both words and music, Simon can use a little to say a lot. His songs have strong cores, but leave a lot of space for other artists to play around with. So it’s no surprise that the list below spans genres from punk, dance music, gospel, and more. You’ll hear every sound except one: Silence (sorry). No matter how afield the songs roam, though, they still sound like Paul Simon.
So enough talk about Simon being a perennial silver medal winner. His craft and his talent have earned him and his songs a place at the top of the medal podium, and these fifty covers prove it.
The list begins on Page 2.
Anyone who was paying attention to cover songs a decade ago will remember The A.V. Club’s “Undercover” series. In the vein of the BBC Live Lounge and Triple J Like a Version, the entertainment web site would bring bands into their Chicago offices to cover a song. The concept, though, was the site started with a masters list of songs and the band had to pick one. The later they came in, the fewer song choices remained. It went on for years and the covers were ubiquitous (we must have posted a million of ’em). Practically every indie band of the era stopped by (many several times), and they often delivered something great. Continue reading »