It’s a collaboration the music world never thought it would see- Ice-T and someone from Pink Floyd.
Ice-T and his collaborators in his rap-metal band Body Count are including a cover of the Floyd classic “Comfortably Numb” on their new record, Merciless, due November 22nd. And if that isn’t enough, they enlisted former Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour to join in. Continue reading »
Given that Robyn Hitchcock hails from a day where content may not always match the label, his succinctness of title is here pitch perfect. 1967: Vacations in the Past is a set of songs, all of which came to fruition during the (first) summer of love. Hitchcock formulated the selection to bookend his memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left. The jacket copy states, “In January 1966, Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for his green Dalek sponge and his family’s comforting au pair, Teresa. By December 1967, he’s mutated into a 6 ft 2-inch rabid Bob Dylan fan, whose two ambitions in life are to get really stoned and move to Nashville.”
Along the subsequent way, he has become an individual and idiosyncratic voice, as near instantly recognizable for his quirky worldview as for his never more English vocals, despite spending much of his career, and much his success, in the US. (And yes, he subsequently lives in East Nashville, answering on of his ambitions.) Starting off with college radio favorites, the Soft Boys, and then moving forward through and into Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, he now has a solo career, lasting throughout most of this century. He’s never shy of performing cover versions, especially in a live setting, complementing his own prodigious output. Why, not two weeks ago we were considering his Dylan set, Robyn Sings.
The joy of 1967 is that you don’t have to be familiar with Hitchcock’s memoir (although you might wish to be, I recommend it). It stands perfectly as a stand alone, a snapshot of what the 14 year old boy might have been daydreaming to, on the radio. And you don’t really have to have been there yourself either, the selection, by and large, tendis more toward the big hitters of the year, most of which left a long and illustrious footprint. But I bet you never heard ’em much like this!
Continue reading »
‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.
As regular readers know, here at Cover Me we put together a Best Covers Ever list every month for a celebrated artist. We’ve recently done the Pet Shop Boys and Sheryl Crow. And before them we did the biggie – The Beatles – and before them, Bob Dylan! But every now and again, there’s a particular genre that’s crying out for the Best Covers Ever treatment – and this month it’s the Dark Genre. It’s goth!
So why now, you ask? Are goth covers really a thing? And why don’t Alien Sex Fiend or Fields of the Nephilim have their own Best Covers Ever features?
Fair questions, all. First off, goth music is everywhere right now. It may have emerged out of the UK post-punk scene and enjoyed its most innovative period from 1980 to 1982, but it’s now the reason we have Whitby Goth Weekends in April and November (well, that and Count Dracula), World Goth Day on May 22, and goth nights down the Hatchet Inn in Bristol most nights, particularly Thursday. It’s also why we have heaps of goth books on the market right now, from John Robb’s The Art of Darkness to Lol Tolhurst’s Goth: A History and Cathi Unsworth’s Season of the Witch, all trying to explain goth’s lasting influence as a musical subculture: the fixation with death, the dark theatricality, the Victorian melodrama, the leather, the thick black eyeliner, the fishnet tights, the deviance, the sex, the deviant sex, and, of course, spiders. Continue reading »
Cover Genres takes a look at cover songs in a very specific musical style.
Oho! Well, you were warned that this was coming, but the oft-maligned bagpipes have a surprisingly fertile life in coverland. As with the banjo, it isn’t a genre per se, even if usually most associated with the folk and indiginous musics of the Celtic nations. Luckily(?!) for you, it has leaked into any number of unexpected other genres, which, by and large is where we are going today.
But first, some context. Bagpipes have existed since the dawn of time, the ingredients of their manufacture largely available to mankind from very early on, usually in the form of the body parts of an otherwise eaten animal. All you need is a stomach and a pair of lungs–the stomach from your kill, the lungs your own. Apply lips and blow. At the other end of the “bag” is the chanter, a bit like a whistle. By maintaining a constant input of air into the bag, as it flows out and through the chanter, the sounds produced can be altered.
As sophistication advanced, further “pipes” were added, giving a constant tone, as background. This provides the drone, or drones, suddenly a texture so beloved in modern post-rock circles. If you can’t be blethered to blow, bellows devices bypassed the need for the musicians own lung power, these filling the bag by under-arm pumping action, pushing air into the bag that way. The Scottish highland bagpipes are the prime example of the former, the Irish uillean pipes of the latter, but there area host of other models, some lungs driven, some bellows. So we have the Scottish small pipes, Northumbrian pipes, probably the next best known, ahead crossing the channel to the many and varied European varieties.
As “civilization” advanced, so the pipes tended to move outward, towards the edges of any world known at that time, partly as pianos and violins swept in to classier society, in the hubs of nations and empires, and partly through pipes being exported to the “colonies”, the savages taking their primitive instrument of choice to the very fringes of the world.
Enough natter, let’s groove!
Continue reading »
In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!
Today we place Low in the spotlight, even if the Duluth-based band has already occupied the spotlight in recent months, and for the worst of reasons: Low’s co-founder Mimi Parker passed away in November 2022, age 55. The tributes and memorials that poured out to Mimi took many beautiful forms, all of them disbelieving and heartbroken. As we sample the amazing music that she and her husband Alan Sparhawk (Low’s other co-founder and the band’s primary songwriter) gave us in their 30-year run as a band, we’ll look at covers by Low and covers of Low, and pay our respects to Mimi along the way.
Continue reading »
If you missed the whole brouhaha when Steely Dan dropped Aimee Mann as their opening act, it’s too long to recap here. To skip to the end, Mann tweeted, “All is forgiven if Donald [Fagan] just tells me what Brooklyn is about.” And he did! So, at a recent show at City Winery, she covered it. All does indeed appear to be forgiven. Continue reading »