My Morning Jacket is on the road, celebrating the 20th anniversary of their album, Z and at a recent gig at Red Rocks in Morrison, Colorado, busted out a cover of a Steely Dan classic.
After performing Z in its entirety, Jim James busted into “Do It Again,” from the Dan’s 1972 debut album, Can’t Buy a Thrill. With an impressive light show and smoke machine, MMJ’s version remained pretty faithful to the original. You can watch fan-shot footage of the performance below.
The Red Rocks show was one of five shows on this tour that saw the band perform all of Z to mark it’s 20th anniversary and an upcoming deluxe reissue.
Lest you think My Morning Jacket has the market cornered on “Do It Again” covers, Smash Mouth covered the song on the soundtrack for the 2000 comedy Me, Myself and Irene, before appearing on the band’s greatest hits record.
“Yacht rock” is a genre kinda like emo: No musician admits to making this style of music. Unlike emo, though (maybe more like “indie sleaze”), no one called it “yacht rock” at the time. Nevertheless, whether artists like the name or not, yacht rock exists now. It used to be considered something of a guilty pleasure, but these days, after a splashy (no pun intended) documentary about it got a lot of attention, it’s just a regular pleasure. Questlove loves yacht rock! So do Thundercat, Mac Demarco, Vampire Weekend, and many other musicians considered far “cooler” than Toto ever was. So, today, we salute the yacht rock catalog through covers.
This brings up a contentious question though: What counts as yacht rock? We didn’t want to get derailed debating that indefinitely, so we deferred to the experts. The guys who coined the term in a 2000s web series have a long-running website and podcasts called Yacht or Nyacht. They literally invented the phrase, so we followed their guidance. Any song that scored above 50 on their 100-point scale—more yacht than nyacht—counted. Any song that scored below did not. (You can read more about their criteria on their website, but one thing to note is they define yacht rock not just by the sound of a song, but also whether it emerged from that specific ’70s-LA studio-rat scene.)
Their rigorous ranking includes most of the songs you’d expect, by The Doobie Brothers (and McDonald solo), Christopher Cross, Toto, etc. It also helps deal with the thorny cases. Steely Dan is mostly not yacht-rock, but some songs, particularly in the Aja era, very much are. Fleetwood Mac, though, is definitively not yacht-rock. (Good news: We have an entire Fleetwood Mac list you can peruse.)
So, if you have any beef with what songs do or don’t count, take it up with them. We just want to celebrate the music. Sail away on these 30 covers that do just that.
Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!
Usually an artist’s popularity wanes after fifty years go by. But nothing about Steely Dan counts as usual. Even in the seventies, their impossibly smooth sound, their obscure yet hyperliterate lyrics, and their focus on the studio in lieu of performing made them stick out like sore thumbs. But Walter Becker, Donald Fagen, and company du jour knew what they wanted, and now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, it turns out to be what people want, need, can’t get enough of. The book Quantum Criminals, portraying the characters in Steely Dan songs with words and paint, was a critical smash, and Rolling Stone just published a listicle ranking every Steely Dan song.
Katy Lied, released fifty years ago this month, saw Becker and Fagen giving up their road-tested bandmates in favor of the best studio musicians money could buy, including twenty-year-old drummer Jeff Porcaro and not-much-older Michael McDonald, whose Doobie Brother days had yet to come. It saw the band getting a little cooler, a little warmer, a little jazzier. Like every Steely Dan album (at least, every one from Steely Dan Mark I), it has champions who say it’s the best thing they ever did. In 1987 Rolling Stone named it to their list of the best 100 albums of the past 20 years, the sole Steely Dan album on that roster. (This, after calling it “exemplarily well-crafted and uncommonly intelligent schlock” in their review twelve years earlier.)
Steely Dan’s unique combination of iconoclasm and tasty licks make them a band that covering artists tend to approach tentatively, if at all. How many other bands see tribute artists be so eager to throw out the lyrics and take their best instrumental whack at it? You’ll find more than one instrumental in this Katy Lied cover collection, along with live covers and one cover that’s a tribute to another band altogether.
Deer Tick – Dancing In The Dark (Bruce Springsteen cover)
“For me, ‘Dancing in the Dark’ isn’t a song about romance, but instead a desperate plea to break out of some degraded, stagnant situation. The narrator is filled with angst, self doubt, and the only way out is to the sheer force of unwavering will power,” says Deer Tick guitarist/vocalist Ian O’Neil. “Bruce really shows us who he is on this one and it looks an awful lot like the rest of us.”
Die Sauerkrauts Polka Band — Now That’s What I Call Polka! (Weird Al cover)
There are a lot of Weird Al covers out there (okay, maybe not a lot, but more than you might think). This is new though. This band didn’t cover one of Weird Al’s parodies. They didn’t even cover a Weird Al original, like “Dare to Be Stupid.” They covered one of his polka medleys (a subject I interviewed Al about in Cover Me the book—excerpt at The AV Club). Meaning, they covered polka versions of hits by Miley Cyrus, One Direction, Gotye, and many more, all in a brisk medley. A very silly music video brings it home.Continue reading »
Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!
Can’t Buy a Thrill was always peak Steely Dan for me. Before they became too smooth, too clever, too polished and too damned good for their own damned good, they put together a set of sure fire songs that swiftly endeared them to a record buying public and remains a favorite in this household. Who can forget the gushing praise printed on the back of the cover, written by one Tristan Fabriani: “the newly formed amalgam threatens to undermine the foundations of the rock power elite.” Heady prose and, in due course, prescient, with Tristan, who played keyboards for Jay and the Americans, being eminently placed to pass such comment. Of course, you might know Tristan better under his given name: Donald Fagen. Continue reading »
Brett Eldredge – Cold Heart (Elton John, Dua Lipa cover)
Against all odds for a rocker of his generation, Elton John had a genuine hit with a single he released just last year, at age 74: “Cold Heart.” It topped the chart in the UK – his first song to do so in 16 years. It did nearly as well in the States, reaching number 7 and topping a number of secondary charts. Having current pop hitmaker Dua Lipa on board no doubt helped, as did releasing it as a remix by Pnau (“Hot Dance/Electronic Songs” was one of those secondary U.S. charts). It also fairly shameless incorporates bits of earlier hit singles “Rocket Man” and “Sacrifice” as well as deeper Elton cuts “Kiss the Bride” and “Where’s the Shoorah?” In country star Brett Eldridge’s live cover, though, it all blends together seamlessly.Continue reading »
