Solomon Burke Archives

Review: Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow: A Tribute to the Music of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan

Posted by Tom McDonald at 9:00 am No Responses »

May 282026

The Tom Waits fanbase is not entirely starved for news lately, but most of it is about Waits’s acting career. On the music side, the news is small change: something about singing on a new Pogues tribute, and similar tidbits.

Then came the announcement of Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow, a star-studded tribute to the music of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. OK, it’s not new original music (we’ve waited 15 years for a new Waits album) but whatever it is, we’ll take it!

The excitement gives way, on closer inspection, to disappointment: there’s nothing actually new in this new release. (“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away,” to borrow a classic Waits-as-huckster phrase.)

Each cover has been available for years–in many cases, for three or four decades. So this is material we have heard before, and written about before–see our 2023 feature The 50 Best Tom Waits Covers Ever. The most recent of the tracks on hand is “Hold On” by Madison Cunningham, but even that one dates back six years. It’s a killer version, by the way, a clear highlight of this compilation.

Still, having these covers compiled in one place serves a purpose, if only to help reassess the song catalog. And realistically, the number of Waits devotees who have actually listened to all these songs is miniscule; they could fit in a single booth at an all-night diner. If a song is new to you, then it’s new music, regardless of its original release date.

The very title of the album suggests a new framing, a fresh lens: the notion that Waits’s song-writing changed when he partnered with Brennan, and their extensive and lengthy collaboration deserves its own celebration.
Continue reading »

The 30 Best Van Morrison Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm 9 Responses »

Aug 292025

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

I do not consciously aim to take the listener anywhere. If anything, I aim to take myself there in my music. If the listener catches the wavelength of what I am saying or singing, or gets whatever point whatever line means to them, then I guess as a writer I may have done a day’s work. – Van Morrison

When I wrote my first post for Cover Me, it was in celebration of Van Morrison’s 66th birthday. In it, I called him “perhaps the most incantatory singer in rock history; the words tumble from his mouth so fast they become never-quite-meaningless sounds, or they emerge bound and struggling themselves raw, or they flow out like brook water. Truly, he’s mastered what he calls ‘the inarticulate speech of the heart.’”

Fourteen years later (my gosh, has it been that long?), as Morrison reaches his four score, that still holds true. He is rock’s most spiritual curmudgeon, inscrutable and evocative, grouchily but magnificently folding into the mystic. His songs tap into their listeners in ways that would be eerie if they weren’t so universal. You don’t listen to Van Morrison’s music – you respond to it.

Today we’re looking at thirty responses, in the form of cover songs. These artists felt the hand of Van and responded accordingly. We think you’ll find them to be worthy rejoinders, what with their acuity and grace. They will make you feel good, and they will make you feel whole, when their spirit moves you and fills you through and through.

—Patrick Robbins, Features Editor

Rarely Covered Bob Dylan Songs III: 1970s

Posted by Ray Padgett at 9:00 am 2 Responses »

May 252022

Rarely Covered looks at who’s mining the darkest, dustiest corners of iconic catalogs.

Part three of our Rarely Covered Dylan Songs series – after the Early and Late 1960s – sees us hit the era of Blood on the Tracks, Desire, and Bob’s first gospel album. But this doesn’t include songs from any of them! As with the first two installments, our definition of what Dylan song could qualify as “rarely covered” starts at “not on a proper album” and expands (or, rather, constricts) from there. So below, covers of outtakes and oddities from Bob’s second decade. Continue reading »

The 100 Best Bob Dylan Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 7:00 am 13 Responses »

May 242021

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

When we began our Best Covers Ever series a little over three years ago, Bob Dylan was about the first artist who came to mind. But we held off. We needed to work our way up to it. So we started with smaller artists to get our feet wet. You know, up-and-comers like The Rolling Stones and Nirvana, Beyoncé and Pink Floyd, Madonna and Queen.

We kid, obviously, but there’s a kernel of truth there. All those artists have been covered a million times, but in none of their stories do cover songs loom quote as large as they do in Bob Dylan’s. Every time one of his songs has topped the charts, it’s been via a cover. Most of his best-known songs, from “All Along the Watchtower” to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” didn’t get that way because of his recordings. In some cases fans of the songs don’t even realize they are Bob Dylan songs. That’s been happening since Peter, Paul, and Mary sang “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and it’s still happening almost sixty years later – just look at the number of YouTube videos titled “Make You Feel My Love (cover of Adele)”.

So needless to say, there was a lot of competition for this list. We finally narrowed it down to 100 covers – our biggest list ever, but still only a drop in the bucket of rain. Many of the most famous Dylan covers are on here. Many of them aren’t. The only criteria for inclusion was, whether iconic or obscure, whether the cover reinvented, reimagined, and reinterpreted a Dylan song in a new voice.

With a list like this, and maybe especially with this list in particular, there’s an incentive to jump straight to number one. If you need to do that to assuage your curiosity, fine. But then come back to the start. Even the 100th best Dylan cover is superlative. Making it on this list at all marks a hell of a feat considering the competition. (In fact, Patreon supporters will get several hundred bonus covers, the honorable mentions it killed us to cut.)

In a 2006 interview with Jonathan Lethem, Dylan himself put it well: “My old songs, they’ve got something—I agree, they’ve got something! I think my songs have been covered—maybe not as much as ‘White Christmas’ or ‘Stardust,’ but there’s a list of over 5,000 recordings. That’s a lot of people covering your songs, they must have something. If I was me, I’d cover my songs too.”

The list begins on Page 2.

The Best Smokey Robinson Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 3:00 pm 7 Responses »

Feb 272020

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

The story goes that Bob Dylan called Smokey Robinson “America’s greatest living poet.” Not so, it turns out, but it sure seems like something he would say – it sounds a note of contrariness, but it also has the ring of truth.

Smokey Robinson turned 80 this month, and his legacy as one of the architects of the Motown sound has long been assured. Not only did he have a silken falsetto that conveyed sunshine and rain with equal ease, he also wielded a pen with a similar level of genius. Whether writing for The Miracles, the band that he led throughout the sixties, or the other members of the Motown stable, he came up with songs that became not just a part of music history, but a part of our nation’s history. As Smokey said, the Motown slogan was not “The Sound of Black America,” but “The Sound of Young America,” and that sound has rung down through the corridors of time as surely as the sound of the Liberty Bell.

No further proof is needed than the number of covers of Smokey’s songs – covers of his own recordings or covers of the original recordings by The Temptations or Marvin Gaye or the many other singers who benefited from his pen. His voice has spoken to other artists for decades, and when those artists tell us what he told them, those songs are just as fresh as they were the day he first set them down. We found thirty superlative covers of songs that Smokey wrote and/or sang, but, as we could have found thirty great recordings of “My Girl” alone, we know we’ve missed a few along the way. Whether you’re steamed at what we missed, or excited to discover what we found, we can agree on one thing: Smokey Robinson is one of the all-time greats, and we’re fortunate to have the privilege to listen to the songs he wrote for the rest of our lives.

– Patrick Robbins, Features Editor

The list starts on Page 2.

The Best Bruce Springsteen Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm 39 Responses »

Sep 232019

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

To quote a Bruce song, this list has been a long time comin’. After all, twelve years ago we borrowed one of his song titles to name this site (a song that, surprisingly, doesn’t actually get covered very often). And over those twelve years, we’ve posted hundreds, maybe thousands, of Bruce covers: “Full Albums” tributes to Born in the U.S.A., Darkness at the Edge of Town, and Tunnel of Love; tributes to the tributes, honoring several classic Boss tribute records; a spotlight on the best “Born to Run” covers; and a million news posts. It’s time to pull it all together.

Appropriately enough for a man whose concerts routinely top three hours, this list is long. Fifty covers long, and even then we still found ourselves left with dozens of killer bonus tracks for our Patreon supporters. The hits are all here, of course, but Bruce’s catalog runs deep. This list includes many covers of lesser-known cuts and more recent songs – even one from his just-released solo album Western Stars. Though he turns 70 today, the man is not slowing down, and neither are the artists paying tribute to him. As Bruce famously sang, he learned more from a three-minute record than ever learned in school. Well, here are fifty artists who learned something from his three-minute records.

The list starts on Page 2.