Rosanne Cash Archives

The Best Cover Songs of March 2026

Posted by Ray Padgett at 9:00 am No Responses »

Mar 312026

Anna Prior — No More Drama (Mary J. Blige cover)

Metronomy drummer Anna Prior is back with a new EP, Firefly. The first single is a cover of the Mary J Blige classic. “I’ve wanted to do a cover song for a long time and I just never found the right one that fit with my sound,” Prior wrote. “The overall tone and feeling of the original fit so well with the ‘A minor’ theme of the EP that I just couldn’t resist. It’s a song that shaped my late teenage years and I really hope I’ve done it justice and I don’t get sued.” [Editor’s note: You won’t. That’s not how covers work…]

Bonnie “Prince” Billy — Trustfall (Pink cover)

Last December, the prolific Bonnie “Prince” Billy hopped onstage with Yo La Tengo to cover—of all people—current Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominee Pink. The song was a pretty deep cut too, a single from 2023. Will Oldham must really like that song, because he’s returned to it again in a solo incarnation. As if that combo wasn’t wild enough, add this one: This video was recorded at the early 18th-century pub The Lamb in Bloomsbury London, regular haunt of Charles Dickens. Continue reading »

Matt Berninger and Rosanne Cash Cover The Velvet Underground for New TV Show

Posted by Luke Poling at 12:00 pm No Responses »

Mar 122026

The fourth Velvet Underground album Loaded opens up with “Who Loves the Sun,” a fun, light, upbeat song, complete with a chorus including backup singers singing “ba-baba-ba.” And a new cover of the song by Matt Berninger and Rosanne Cash is serving as the credits music for the new Hulu series, Sunny Days.

“I’ve been a Trent O’Donnell fan for a long time,” said Berninger. “We became good friends when he cast my brother, Tom, in an episode of his show No Activity, and we’ve had a close, creative bond ever since. When he asked me to cover the Velvet Underground for Sunny Nights, I immediately thought of it as a duet with Rose and John [Leventhal].”

When describing the division of labor in recording the song, Berninger said, “John did most of the work while Rose and I drank chardonnay in the garden in the sun.”

While the song is a pretty straight-ahead version of the song, Berninger’s vocal tone adds some darker qualities not completely missing in the original.

The 50 Best Cover Songs of 2024

Posted by Staff at 9:00 am 6 Responses »

Dec 202024

Follow all our Best of 2024 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

Welcome to the 50 Best Tom Petty Covers of 2024!

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.)

Review: ‘The Power of the Heart: A Tribute to Lou Reed’

Posted by Seuras Og at 9:00 am No Responses »

Apr 192024

Lou Reed was quite the fella. Initially a proto-Brill Building popsmith for Pickwick Records, he morphed into a leather and shades VU biker and glam-rock trans offender. And FX metal feedback noisenik, and elder statesman socio-political commentator, before closing his recording career with a soundtrack for meditation and mindfulness. Indeed, just about anything and everything, for nearly five decades, all while being a notoriously spiky literary curmudgeon, bane of any journalist trying to capture his essence. It took music, not words, to do that, and with The Power of the Heart: A Tribute to Lou Reed, it’s officially been done.
Continue reading »

Review: ‘I Am a Pilgrim: Doc Watson at 100’

Posted by Seuras Og at 8:00 am No Responses »

May 012023

There are few more frictions than when folk start discussing who is the best guitarist ever. It’s guaranteed to produce a bevy of opinions, as ever more effusive hyperbole gets trotted out, ever more fierce grudges dusted down, and ever more unlikely proponents pushed forward. So we won’t go there, other than to comment that Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson was probably in the top few, certainly if you remove the anathema of electricity. (To be fair, he probably had way more electricity than many a blues-rock road warrior, but remained resolutely unplugged the length of his days, 1923 – 2012.) He merited a tribute long ago, and now, with I Am a Pilgrim: Doc Watson at 100, he’s got a fairly worthy one.

I Am a Pilgrim is crammed with musicians great and the good, partly drawn from the country/bluegrass/Americana palette he made his home, coming together to salute his playing, his singing and his all round good-eggness. Quite what Watson might have made of such a shindig is anyone guess, the fuss possibly embarrassing the quietly spoken and mild-mannered dude all parties suggest he was.

I first came across Watson’s superlative talent when I was a teenaged schoolboy. A new boy in class was an expatriate Yank, with a precocious talent for fiddle, or violin, as I then thought it was called. He drew my attention to the now and rightly fabled triple album set, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken. My Deep Purpled and Pink Floyded mind was blown, possibly never again grouping back together again in the same way, such was the richness of the material across those discs, as a plethora of country royalty got to spar with some longhair hippies, burying prejudices and forging alliances aplenty.

Doc Watson was a key part of that. His mellifluous picking seemed just so impossibly relaxed and, at the same time, impossible to grasp. Add in his down-homey back porch dialogue, one of the delights of the project, and he just seems the coolest man on earth. Seriously, if you haven’t heard him at full pelt, raising nary a bead of sweat, try to search him out. With all the recordings containing his name–solo, with his son, with his grandson, collaborations aplenty–you can’t go wrong.
Continue reading »

Full Albums: The Beatles’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

Posted by Tom McDonald at 12:30 pm 1 Response »

Oct 142022

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

After watching all eight hours of Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, and another three hours of interviews with Jackson about the making of Get Back I had to put on A Hard Day’s Night to restore balance. I had to get back to a time when John Lennon was firing on all creative cylinders and Paul McCartney was slacking.

In early-to-mid 1964, Lennon was engaged, prolific, and self-confident enough that the Beatles finally released a full album with all original material: AHDN. No covers! All 13 tracks are Lennon–McCartney compositions, officially, but 10 of them are really Lennon’s. And they are all good to really good Lennon songs, too, except for the ones that are great, like “If I Fell” and the title track.

If McCartney’s contributions were few in number, two of them loom large in the catalog: “Can’t Buy Me Love” became the album’s first #1 single, while his ballad “And I Love Her” stands with McCartney’s best songs of any period. Mostly, though, Paul was not quite finding his stride in ‘64, much like John in the Get Back period.
Continue reading »