The Walt Disney corporation’s use of covers has always turned up some fascinating collaborations, (see LL Cool J’s “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” on 1991’s Simply Mad About the Mouse) and their most recent record is certainly no exception. A Whole New Sound, features a bevy of alternative musicians tackling the Disney cannon. (We wrote about Simple Plan’s cover of Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” back in July and Yellowcard’s “A Whole New World” last week.) In another track from the record, Bowling For Soup covers another classic, this one from the 1992 animated film, Aladdin.Continue reading »
When we began our Best Covers Ever series a little over three years ago, Bob Dylan was about the first artist who came to mind. But we held off. We needed to work our way up to it. So we started with smaller artists to get our feet wet. You know, up-and-comers like The Rolling Stones and Nirvana, Beyoncé and Pink Floyd, Madonna and Queen.
We kid, obviously, but there’s a kernel of truth there. All those artists have been covered a million times, but in none of their stories do cover songs loom quote as large as they do in Bob Dylan’s. Every time one of his songs has topped the charts, it’s been via a cover. Most of his best-known songs, from “All Along the Watchtower” to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” didn’t get that way because of his recordings. In some cases fans of the songs don’t even realize they are Bob Dylan songs. That’s been happening since Peter, Paul, and Mary sang “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and it’s still happening almost sixty years later – just look at the number of YouTube videos titled “Make You Feel My Love (cover of Adele)”.
So needless to say, there was a lot of competition for this list. We finally narrowed it down to 100 covers – our biggest list ever, but still only a drop in the bucket of rain. Many of the most famous Dylan covers are on here. Many of them aren’t. The only criteria for inclusion was, whether iconic or obscure, whether the cover reinvented, reimagined, and reinterpreted a Dylan song in a new voice.
With a list like this, and maybe especially with this list in particular, there’s an incentive to jump straight to number one. If you need to do that to assuage your curiosity, fine. But then come back to the start. Even the 100th best Dylan cover is superlative. Making it on this list at all marks a hell of a feat considering the competition. (In fact, Patreon supporters will get several hundred bonus covers, the honorable mentions it killed us to cut.)
In a 2006 interview with Jonathan Lethem, Dylan himself put it well: “My old songs, they’ve got something—I agree, they’ve got something! I think my songs have been covered—maybe not as much as ‘White Christmas’ or ‘Stardust,’ but there’s a list of over 5,000 recordings. That’s a lot of people covering your songs, they must have something. If I was me, I’d cover my songs too.”
Welcome to Cover Me Q&A, where we take your questions about cover songs and answer them to the best of our ability.
Jaime Joshi lives in South Florida amidst geckos, 24-hour Cuban coffee and soup-like humidity. She has been writing for Cover Me since 2013; of all her pieces, she is particularly proud of her pieces on Bruce Springsteen and Madonna. (She’s the one on the right.) Continue reading »
Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.
It’s hard to think about The Breakfast Club – perhaps the best thing to come out of the ’80s after parachute pants – without recalling one of Simple Minds’ biggest hits: “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” Who can forget the cult classic’s memorable closing scene, Judd Nelson’s triumphant fist-pump into the air? Although Simple Minds had already released a few popular tracks overseas, it wasn’t until 1985, when “Don’t You” appeared in The Breakfast Club, that the Scottish New Wave pop rock band finally entered America’s consciousness.Continue reading »
