The Last Dinner Party spent their pupal years in the pandemic. Their years behind a mask, or a veil, were spent honing their aural and visual craft. In 2023, they burst from their chrysalis as a fully conceived, fully formed, art-rock entity. They have spent this year barnstorming across sell-out tours and festival appearances. In March we praised their live cover of Sparks’ “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For the Both of Us.” Now, in preparation for a new album release in October, featuring several covers, they have released a pro recording of the Sparks tune with a video covering their performances of the classic over Brat summer.Continue reading »
For some artists we look at for these lists, it seems like every time someone covered one their songs, it turned out pretty good. Leonard Cohen was like that; the quality of the average Cohen cover is fairly high. John Prine, too.
Stevie Wonder is not one of those artists.
It’s not his fault, or the fault of his songs, but his material often gets sucked into the same cocktail-jazz muck that fellow piano man Billy Joel’s does. Nothing wrong with that sort of lounge jazz-pop when done well – and there are a few times on this list when it is – but there’s a lot of mediocrity to wade through. Stevie’s performance and production skills are so sharp that, when placed in lesser hands, his songs can come off as sentimental shlock. All the “Isn’t She Lovely”s alone are so sugary sweet you feel like you’ll get diabetes.
But here’s the good news: Covers of Stevie Wonder’s songs are so ubiquitous that, even when you weed out the bad and the just-okay, you’re still left with plenty of greatness. The fifty below span funk, bluegrass, rock, hip-hop, jam band, jazz, and into galaxies beyond. So here they are, signed, sealed, and delivered to knock you off your feet.
To come up with our year-end list, we listened to thousands of covers.
That’s not an exaggeration, or loosely throwing around “thousands” for effect. My iTunes tells me I personally listened to and rated 1,120 new covers in 2021. And I’m just one of a dozen people here. Many of those thousands of covers were very good! But “very good” isn’t good enough for our annual year-end Best Cover Songs list. So when we say these 50 are the cream of the crop, we mean it.
They, as usual, have little in common with each other. A few tie into current events: Artists we lost, social justice concerns, live music’s fitful return. Most don’t. But does a doom metal cover of Donna Summer really need a reason to exist? How about African blues Bob Dylan, New Orleans bounce Lady Gaga, or organ ballad Fleetwood Mac? Nah. We’re just glad they’re here.
So dive into our countdown below – and, if you want us to send you a couple hundred Honorable Mentions culled from those thousands, join the Cover Me Patreon.
Progressive bluegrass quartet Barbaro takes on a few obvious inspirations on their new EP Under the Covers. Gillian Welch’s “Dark Turn of Mind,” makes sense. Wilco’s “Jesus Etc,” sure. But the other two tunes venture a little further afield. Sheryl Crow’s pop hit “If It Makes You Happy” makes for a jaunty fiddle and banjo number, as does, surprisingly, Cher’s “Believe.”Continue reading »
“Weird Al” Yankovic takes being funny very seriously. From his prodigious accordion chops on the accordion to the diligence he takes to obtain permission from his parody subjects, Yankovic’s humorous constructions are surprisingly involved and thorough. His approach has quite a bit in common with Sparks, the long-running art pop duo comprised of brothers Ron and Russell Mael. Like Yankovic, the Mael brothers are longtime Los Angeles denizens and pursue their hilarity with a kind of sharp focus and discipline; they’ve released twenty-four frank and tightly constructed records, with many of their recent releases entirely self-produced. Their connection was affirmed earlier this year with Weird Al’s appearance in The Sparks Brothers, a revelatory new music documentary produced by Edgar Wright. Yankovic appears in the film as a talking head on numerous occasions, but his most enthralling — and “serious” — contribution to the film is a solo accordion cover of Sparks’ wild “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For the Both of Us.”Continue reading »
