Meet Postmodern Jukebox: Everyone’s favorite music collective. Known for taking pop and rock tunes and turning them into everything from ragtime to bebop to soul covers. Recently the pianist-spearheaded group has decided to recreate the mournful and apocalyptic feeling of the Soundgarden tune “Black Hole Sun.”
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“Black Hole Sun” is the most popular Soundgarden song to cover by an order of magnitude. With something like 150 covers, it can feel like there aren’t too many fresh versions. And, to be perfectly honest, when I heard the opening of the first verse of Aloe Blacc‘s new cover of “Black Hole Sun,” I assumed I was in for another straight-ahead cover of the song that follows the vocal line and just replaces the guitars with something a little more contemporary. To be fair to Blacc, the opening sounds nothing like the original, with some ethereal vocals and faint percussion instead of the iconic guitar. But when Blacc starts singing that first verse, it initially sounds like he’s just going to sing the song over some 21st century beats. Ho hum. Continue reading »
As will surprise absolutely no one, “Black Hole Sun” is the most covered Soundgarden song ever, and it’s not even close. (Second Hand Songs lists almost ten times as many covers of “Black Hole Sun” as the runner up, “Rusty Cage.”) So it’s hard for artists to put their individual spin on it.
American singer-songwriter King Princess (aka Mikaela Mullaney Strauss), who we last heard from covering the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes,” is determined to put her stamp on the oft-covered grunge ballad. She recorded for the legendary Australian radio station triple j’s “Like a Version” series. Continue reading »
Born 111 years ago this week, Chester Burnett, better known as Howlin’ Wolf, was a blues musician who possessed one of the most distinctive voices in 20th century popular music, and who wrote some of his genre’s most enduring hits. With his rival Muddy Waters, Wolf defined the electric blues style that reverberated out of Chicago in the 1950s. This sound in turn altered the course of the nascent rock music genre, as youngsters like Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton absorbed Chicago blues, and brought their own trippy flavor of it to new and wider audiences. Wolf was among the first black musicians to capitalize on white youths’ love for the blues form.
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Soundgarden’s 1994 classic “Black Hole Sun” is one of rock’s titanic singles. The anthem carries an inextinguishable torch for grunge — its generational malaise, its plodding melancholia. Yet the song’s singular beauty arises from the ways it lifts the genre’s massive, earth-bound sounds to new and transcendent heights. In the song’s airy verses, Chris Cornell’s words swirl like gathering storm clouds, brewing power pop melodies and Sgt. Pepper psychedelia into a festering, ominous mass. By the time its final iconic chorus drops, “Black Hole Sun” has soared amid some pretty expansive sonic vistas — heaven, earth and back again. Continue reading »
Our first song kicks off what will be a theme here. A lot of these came out at the very top of the year (or the very end of 2020) to kick a garbage year to the curb and hope for something better. Shires said: “’That’s All’ is a song that I have played a lot on tour. The song defines 2020 for me. It’s a true Covid anthem and I dare you to not dance to my version when you hear it!” Continue reading »