Feb 192021
 

They Say It’s Your Birthday  celebrates an artist’s special day with covers of his or her songs. Let someone else do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

birthday

Hi, I’m Patrick Robbins, the features editor here at Cover Me, and today’s my birthday. Please forgive the self-indulgence of a one-year-older guy for putting up a post that’s about me.

2021 is kind of a big year for me. Not only am I having one of those milestone birthdays – you know, one of those ones that ends in a zero – I’m also having a milestone anniversary. This year marks ten years since I joined the Cover Me staff. In all that time, I’ve gotten off a few good lines here and there (my favorite: a song had “more hooks than Moulty’s closet”), but far more importantly, I’ve found some great covers that I never would have discovered if I hadn’t been looking for them to share and talk about here.

So, as a little birthday present from me to you, I thought I’d pick out some of my favorite discoveries I’ve made over the years. What follows are some of my all-time favorite covers that I found specifically for Cover Me posts (as opposed to covers I already knew about), and links to the pieces in which I originally wrote about them. There’s a lot of songs here, but they’re only about one percent of the songs I’ve written about. So think of these as the cream of my cover crop.

Thanks to all of you for reading Cover Me – without you, this post wouldn’t exist – and here’s to many more birthdays and anniversaries to come.

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Oct 092015
 

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

beatles umbrellas

“Rain,” the B-side to “Paperback Writer,” showcases all four Beatles at the peak of their creative powers; it promised that the album soon to follow in its wake would be a quantum leap from what was being done in rock ‘n’ roll, a promise kept with the release of Revolver. To this day Beatle fans consider it one of their great accomplishments. The frustrating thing is that, being a B-side only collected on hodgepodges like Hey Jude and Past Masters V.2, its place in the rock ‘n’ roll universe will never be as prominent as it is in the Beatles’ universe. On the other hand, that means that, nearly half a century after its recording, young music fans are still discovering it on a daily basis.
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Jan 062011
 

Certain records labels come to represent a sound as fully as the bands they represent. Sub Pop, Epitaph, Matador – all names that conjure up a particular aesthetic for those familiar with their roster. Anova Music may not boast the fame or history of the big labels, but with its small lineup it too represents a specific sound: Israeli indie. Genre-wise, it’s all over the board – from the EatLiz hard rockers to jazz singer Ruth Dolores Weiss – but the small community stays strong.

On a selfish note, we like Anova because of all the covers they send us. Whether generated by label policy or coincidental artist initiative, the songs always deliver. In September we posted Electra’s cover of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and we recently named Weiss’ Leonard Cohen cover one of the best of 2010. Continue reading »