The Best Cover Songs of March 2023

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Apr 032023
 
best cover songs of march 2023
Bria – When You Know Why You’re Happy (Mary Margaret O’Hara’ cover)

Bria’s “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” made our list of the Best Covers of 2022. The track was a sneak peak at her covers EP Cuntry Covers Vol. 2, and the full thing dropped a few weeks ago. It includes a wonderful version of this much more obscure song. Bria explains: “Mary Margaret O’Hara is a creative force and one of my favorite Canadian artists. I have been a huge fan of hers for quite some time and really wanted to try my hand at one of her songs for Vol. 2. She is a real queen of vocal improvisation. It’s a trait of hers that I’ve always admired, so I really wanted to explore that when recording this cover. The video for this track is special to us, a sort of collage of memory; fragmented footage of summer taken over the last two years is dispersed throughout shots of a vast winter scene, filmed while we finished the record up North with our live band.” Continue reading »

Rosie Thomas Crafts a Synth Lullaby from The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame”

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Mar 062023
 

Singer-songwriter Rosie Thomas has been an underrated, reliable presence in the pages of Cover Me for over a decade. Most recently, she’s been on a kick of some noteworthy, and unexpected, cover picks, like Bjork and Mariah Carey. There’s wry humor in her approach, at least in terms of song choice — taking left-field or especially poppy picks down a peg from the stratosphere, mellowing things out. But the effect has felt consistently authentic and heartfelt, and remains so on her latest cover: a version of The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame.”

When I first encountered Thomas and her music, it was in close collaboration with Sufjan Stevens. The pair have worked together frequently through the years, perhaps most surprisingly around Stevens’s 2010 record, The Age of Adz. That record, one of Stevens’ first moves away from acoustic material, felt like a total glitchy aberration (meant in the best way possible). Thomas’s solo work remains a bit less radical than Adz, but it’s in this liminal sonic space that her cover of “Eternal Flame” resides: part electronic rip in the continuum, part gentle folksy reel. The track, featuring collaborators William Fitzsimmons and Denison Witmer, is featured in an EP series that Thomas is calling Lullabies for Parents. That title feels like the most fitting description possible for what Thomas has made here: dark, heavy and drowsy, supremely dreamy.

Check out more Rosie Thomas covers here.
Check out more covers by The Bangles here.

The Best Cover Songs of March 2022

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Mar 312022
 
best cover songs of march 2022
Avhath – Cool / Levitating / Don’t Start Now (Dua Lipa covers)

What’s better than one Indonesian black-metal Dua Lipa cover? Three Indonesian black-metal Dua Lipa covers! Not that you’d ever know these were Dua Lipa songs unless you were listening really closely to the lyrics (and could manage to make them out).

The Band of Heathens – El Paso City (Marty Robbins cover)

During lockdown, Band of Heathens hosted a regular livestream variety show called Good Time Supper Club. One segment, “Remote Transmissions,” featured them covering a new song every episode – over 50 in all. They’re collecting some of the best on a forthcoming album of the same name: Remote Transmissions. “Making records is always about cataloging any point in time. We wanted to celebrate the unique collaborative aspect of the show,” guitarist Ed Jurdi told American Songwriter. “What better way to document the last year than with these songs?” First up is this take on a Marty Robbins country classic. Continue reading »

Rosie Thomas Enlists Sufjan Stevens, The Shins for Mariah Carey Cover

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Mar 222022
 
rosei thomas always be my baby cover

Mariah Carey;s “Always Be My Baby” is the single that tied her with Madonna and Whitney Houston for the most successful woman in US chart history in terms of #1s. To most people, though, it’s one of the more straightforward pop tracks in her mid ’90s stylistic shift towards more hip hop-influenced music. It was a massive hit but not as much as at least one other song from the same album. (Mariah was really big in the ’90s.) Continue reading »

The Best Cover Songs of January

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Jan 312022
 
best cover songs january 2022
Butcher Brown ft. Alex Isley – Best Friend (Brandy cover)

Virginia jazz collective Butcher Brown throws it back to ’90s R&B with this cover of Brandy’s 1994 slow jam “Best Friend.” Though it’s a little out of their usual wheelhouse – for one, it has a singer, Ernie Isley’s daughter no less – they ably blend their own leanings with the retro soul-pop feel. If you like this, don’t miss their rooftop NPR Tiny Desk Concert.

Kate Clover – These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ (Nancy Sinatra cover)

“If Suicide produced a Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood song” is a hell of a tag line, and Kate Clover’s “These Boots” delivers on that premise. The menacing guitar seems pulled straight from “Frankie Teardrop,” while Clover’s vocals channel Sinatra’s swagger. Bonus points for the fun Twin Peaks-esque video. Continue reading »

The Best R.E.M. Covers Ever

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Nov 122019
 

‘The Best Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

REM Covers

Last week, R.E.M. released a 25th anniversary expanded reissue of their 1994 album Monster. Unlike many of their albums, Monster was not an obvious candidate for a splashy box set. Practically every new review has noted that Monster was, as Salon succinctly put it, “a notorious staple of dollar bins everywhere.” But, as tends to happen with such reissues, the celebrated albums get celebrated again and the less-loved albums get a critical reappraisal. Sure enough, everyone loves Monster all of a sudden.

So perhaps an avalanche of Monster covers is forthcoming – because there certainly aren’t many now. Despite that being the ostensible news peg for this list, no songs from that album appear on it. But, in a band with as rich a discography as R.E.M.’s, there was a lot of competition. Sure, the obvious hits get covered as much as you think, but many artists delve deeper. The song at the very top of the list, for instance, originally appeared on 1998’s Up, an album that might have an even worse reputation than Monster.

Luckily we don’t need to wait four more years for the reappraisal of that, or of any of the other songs on our list. These 25 covers reappraise R.E.M. deep cuts you didn’t know and reimagine the hits you’ve heard a million times.

The list starts on Page 2.

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