Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea is prepping his first solo album, and a new track from the record shows off his skills and his love of Frank Ocean. “Thinkin Bout You” first appeared on Ocean’s 2012 album, Channel Orange. On this take, Flea takes lead on the two instruments he’s best known for: bass and trumpet. As backed by a string section, Flea’s bass takes up the melody to be followed by the trumpet. And for the remainder of the track, the two instruments trade the lead back and forth in a beautiful duet, imparting the emotion of the song without any lyrics.Continue reading »
Sly Stone died on June 9 at the age of 82. Two days later, Brian Wilson died, also 82. It was a rough week for eccentric musical geniuses years ahead of their time. We paid tribute to Wilson here, and a couple years ago did a full Best Beach Boys Covers Ever list that now serves as a de facto tribute too. After all, he wrote just about all of those songs.)
So today, the great Sly Stone gets the same treatment. Thirty covers of all the hits, and a few deeper cuts too. Hot fun begins on the next page. (And once you’re done with this, check out our new Five Good Covers piece on “Family Affair.”)
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.)
Forest Claudette (aka Kobe Hamilton-Reeves) is an Australian R&B/Soul artist who is currently signed to Warner Music. They have been nominated for several notable awards, including Music Victoria and Rolling Stones awards. That’s all to say that Claudette just released their genre-swapped version of the Chili Peppers 2002 single “Can’t Stop.” This iteration of the tune has super-clean production, and takes the tempo down a notch. By chilling out the tempo of the song, it manages to take on a completely different flavor—less excited energy, more sultry than the original—and the lyrics are now crystal clear, too.
The Hype Magazine has called this cover “infectious” and given the smooth panned flutes, resonant held chords, tasty falsetto harmonies, and pulsing percussion…who could resist it? Listen below!
