In anticipation of their upcoming fall tour, nu metal band P.O.D. have released a cover that you may not expect: their take on The Beatles‘ “Don’t Let Me Down.” And while in the abstract that might sound like oil and water, their version, while certainly in their style, sticks pretty close to the Lennon-written original from the Let It Be sessions. Continue reading »
Since Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band announced their first-ever concerts in Liverpool there was a building sense of anticipation in the city. Would Bruce’s friend, collaborator, and occasional roaster Sir Paul McCartney appear? Continue reading »
The annual “The Music Of” tribute extravaganzas at Carnegie Hall are a fount of interesting covers and artist pairings. (Archival footage is often scarce, but by way of some surprising on-paper examples: Todd Rundgren covering Aretha Franklin; Cee-lo Green covering Talking Heads; Elvis Costello playing Prince… the list goes on.) Many of the illustrious performers who’ve been involved in the series’ 20 years of live shows have just appeared once, but Patti Smith—long one of New York City’s most legendary “local” artists—has been game enough to stop by Carnegie for seven appearances with the series. She may be the most consistent through-line this series has had, in fact, covering Bob Dylan in 2006; R.E.M. in 2009; The Who in 2010; Neil Young in 2011; Bowie in 2016; Van Morrison in 2019. Last week, she came by the Carnegie Hall stage for one more appearance paying tribute in this year’s installment to Paul McCartney with a cover of The Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home.” Continue reading »
‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.
There are a lot of weird and wacky images within Alan Aldridge’s 1969 cult classic book The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. One of the most memorable is a drawing imagining what John, Paul, George, and Ringo will look like as senior citizens. In this fantastical portrait, John and George are depicted as eccentric elders. Ringo, in keeping with his everyman persona, is shown as a shopworn sad sack. But it is Paul McCartney who offers the most disturbing vision of the future. “The cute one” appears as a conservative besuited and well-fed bank manager. His smug grin suggests he is proud to have finally outgrown all that silly pop music nonsense. Continue reading »
On their new album Ghost Stories, The Whitmore Sisters – Eleanor and Bonnie – cover another iconic sibling duo: The Everly Brothers. But they don’t go for an obvious oldies-radio hit like “All I Have to Do Is Dream” or “Cathy’s Clown.” Instead, they dig out the 1984 Paul McCartney-penned chestnut “On the Wings of an Nightingale,” and make it sound every bit as classic as anything in the Brothers’ catalog. In some ways, their cover actually sounds more like the Everly Brothers than the original, which piles on some unfortunate ’80s production. Continue reading »
“Golden Slumbers” is one of the more over-the-top moments from the famous medley which closes the Beatles’ Abbey Road. It’s not really a song so much as a song-fragment and, in the medley, it’s sequenced between the brief but complete song “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” and the fragment “Carry That Weight.” “Golden Slumbers,” like most Beatles songs credited to Lennon-McCartney, was actually an adaptation by McCartney of a poem by Thomas Dekker. Continue reading »