Oct 312024
 
best covers of october 2024
Farmer’s Wife — Season of the Witch (Donovan cover)

Austin rockers Farmer’s Wife go full shoegaze-psych on this Donovan cover just in time for Halloween. They write: “Our cover of ‘Season of the Witch’ materialized out of a drum beat and pedal feedback two Halloweens ago. This creepy classic opened us to more experimentation and allowed us to dive into an eerier side of our sound.”

Fiona Apple — Lately (Don Heffington cover)

The late Don Heffington was an acclaimed drummer, so, naturally, his new tribute album includes drum greats like Jim Keltner. But he was also a singer-songwriter, so friends and collaborators like Jackson Browne, Victoria Williams, and Fiona Apple cover his songs. Apple selected “Lately,” the closing song on the final solo studio album of his lifetime, 2016’s Contemporary Abstractions in Folk Song and Dance. Continue reading »

Oct 172024
 

In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!

Peter Frampton

Peter Frampton has been everyone and everywhere at once, with that bloody thing in his mouth. He’s also been anonymous and relatively unknown. Neither pendulum peak has stopped this Brit having a career that’s lasted 50 years and counting. Me, I would say a (belated) induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a spotlight well worth acknowledging, in anyone’s book and by anyone’s reckoning. So, let’s have a look at that career.
Continue reading »

Feb 232024
 

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

beatles covers

Sixty years ago this month, The Beatles played on the Ed Sullivan Show. You don’t need us to tell you what a momentous occasion this was; entire books have been written on the subject. Suffice to say we’re using the anniversary as our excuse to finally devote a Best Covers Ever to perhaps the biggest band of them all. We’ve done Dylan. We’ve done the Stones. We’ve done Dolly and Springsteen and Prince. But there was one last giant remaining.

Though it’s difficult to measure this precisely, The Beatles are the most-covered artist of all time according to the two biggest covers databases on the internet (SecondHandSongs, WhoSampled). And that certainly feels right. “Yesterday” is often cited as the most-covered song of all time, though that needs qualifiers (a ton of Christmas standards would beat it). But, again, it feels right. The Beatles were ubiquitous in their day, and they’ve been ubiquitous ever since. They just had a chart-topping single last month, the A.I.-assisted “Now and Then,” which was duly covered widely. If “Carnival of Light” ever surfaces, no doubt a carnival of covers will soon follow. Continue reading »

Feb 142024
 

(hangs head) How did I not hear of this? How did Billy Valentine and the Universal Truth, a slice of prime r’n’b/jazz–acid jazz if you must–slip under the Cover Me radar last year? Alerted by the end-of-year lists of others, a quick shufti confirmed this demanded our attention. And it comes with quite an impressive back story to boot.

There are two Billy Valentines. There’s the 98-year-old blues and r’n’b man, William A. Valentine, and there’s 73-year-old who was one of the Valentine Brothers, r’n’b hitmakers of the 1970s into ’80s, best known for “Money Too Tight (To Mention),” to be later catapulted into ubiquity by Simply Red. (Their version is better…) This is the latter of the Valentines, however much I secretly hoped it the former.

After the brush with fame offered by “MTT(TM),” with their own version sinking under the lack of promotion capable of their then-tiny independent label, Valentine took on work with Bob Thiele Jr., as a writer for hire. Thiele Sr. was the boss of Impulse Records, when their roster covered acts such as Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane; later her served as the boss of Flying Dutchman Records, which had championed Gil Scott-Heron. Valentine and Thiele Jr. sold songs all over, ahead of some later traction of soundtracks: Valentine was one of the featured singers for The Sons Of Anarchy series, with a number of featured cameos. Come 2020, with Thiele Sr. deceased, his son felt it as good a time as any to revive the Flying Dutchman imprint, as part of the Acid Jazz family. Valentine was his first signing.

Taking a while to gather together the right combination of material and musician, Billy Valentine and the the Universal Truth dropped last March. It features eight songs drawn from the more militant factions of black music, or at least songs that reflect on that. There is some Gil Scott-Heron, some Curtis Mayfield and Pharaoh Sanders, with Stevie Wonder and Prince in there for good measure. Musicians include the likes of Immanuel Wilkins, Alex Acuña, Jeff Parker and Pino Palladino, so the album is class personified. Let’s play it!
Continue reading »

May 222023
 
byrne vincent bam

When we put together our 50 Best Stevie Wonder Covers Ever list last year, you know what song was never in contention? “Chemical Love,” off Wonder’s 1991 soundtrack for the Spike Lee drama Jungle Fever. Because, other than a couple random YouTubers, it’s the rare Stevie tune that basically no one has covered.

Until now. Continue reading »

May 082023
 

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

best covers of 1960s

Last week we kicked off our new One Hit Wonders series with ten covers of big 1950s hits, and today we continue it with 20 covers of 1960s smashes.

Some classic songs getting covered in here, in some cases by artists that should have had many more hits just as big. So it goes in pop music. We’ll probably never be able to do a The 40 Best Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs Covers Ever list, though, so we celebrate them here with a few fun reimaginings of their early 1960 chart-topper “Stay.” Continue reading »