Jun 032026
 

Don't Let It Die, Vol. 1There are a number of ways to tackle a covers album. The easiest is arguably to top-load it with songs and/or artists sufficient to attract the applicable demographic of fans. On Don’t Let It Die, Vol. 1, Deslondes have assuredly not done this. Indeed, this album houses a dozen deep cuts that would credit the deepest of crate diggers. None of these songs are on the tip of tongues of John Q. Listeners out there, let alone those of grizzled old completists like me. Indeed, if you know this New Orleans band and their quirky take on a country-funk jamband ethos, Don’t Let It Die could easily pass as all their own work. Which is no bad thing.

Even for those songs by artists familiar, the Deslondes have also included a bevy from their own peer group, friends and co-conspirators, collaborators and tour mates, which is an admirable show of strength to those thus featured. So, alongside your Johnny Cash, Shelby Lynne and Swamp Dogg, we get Nick Woods, Pat Reedy and The Kernel. The current members of the band–Dan Cutler, Sam Doores, Riley Downing, Howe Pearson  and John James Tourville–are all songwriters, so know their way around reviewing and renewing arrangements, which adds to the overall polish the quintet provide across this set.
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Oct 212024
 
swamp dogg rocky raccoon

Country soul singer Swamp Dogg offers his take on a Beatles classic in an expanded edition of his most recent record.

Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St was originally released in May of this year, on Oh Boy records. The deluxe edition released last week, includes a cover of “Rocky Raccoon,” and a new original song titled “Fools Like Me.” Continue reading »

Jul 292020
 

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

bee gees covers

Despite the fact that Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb have sold upwards of 120 million records, they can sometimes seem oddly underrated. They aren’t regarded with the reverence afforded to other artists that emerged during roughly the same era, like The Rolling Stones or The Who. They haven’t generated the same level of dramatic intrigue as Elton John or Queen. And discovering their music was never part of some traditional teenage rite of passage like Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin. But while they don’t seem to receive near the same level of acclaim as the aforementioned artists, their music has remained as utterly ubiquitous as just about all of them. There are few other artists as essential to documenting the sound of an era as The Bee Gees were to the late ’70s.

Throw the Here At Last…Bee Gees… Live album from 1977 on the turntable or queue up the stream. You will be confronted with a veritable assembly line of perfectly constructed, exquisitely performed pop songs. Take a step back and really listen. The outlandish songwriting gift on display is nothing short of mind-blowing, You might think, how is it even possible to have written this many incredible songs? And those are just 20 or so selected tracks Barry, Robin, and Maurice had done up to that point – before Saturday Night Fever! There were dozens more to come.

We were overwhelmed by the number of incredible covers of both Bee Gees classics and deep cuts and their glorious diversity. But we really shouldn’t have been surprised. Despite the band itself not always getting its due, the Bee Gees’ songs remain for everyone and forever.

Hope Silverman

The list begins on Page 2.

May 012020
 

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

john prine covers

Are there any bad John Prine covers?

I mean, sure, there are bad covers of anyone worth covering. But it struck me going through the many candidates for this list that they mostly ranged from transcendent on the high end to pretty good on the low. “Pretty good” was about as bad as it got! I don’t think you could say that for anyone else we’ve featured in this series. Continue reading »

Dec 172018
 
best cover songs of 2018

Two things strike me as I scan through our list this year. This first is that many of the highest-ranking covers are tributes to recently-deceased icons. No surprise there, I suppose. But none actually pay tribute to artists that died in 2018. They honor those we’ve been honoring for two or three years now – your Pettys, your Princes, your Bowies. Hundreds of covers of each of these legends appeared in the first days after their deaths, but many of the best posthumous covers took longer to emerge.

Good covers take time. That principle – the cover-song equivalent of the slow food movement, perhaps – holds true throughout the list. Sure, a few here appear to have arisen from sudden moments of brilliance, flash-arranged for some concert or radio promo session. But many more reveal months or even years of painstaking work to nail every element. Making someone else’s song one’s own isn’t easy. These 50 covers took the time to get it right.

– Ray Padgett, Editor-in-Chief

Start the countdown on the next page…

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Jul 312018
 
Arctic Monkeys – Lipstick Vogue (Elvis Costello cover)

Arctic Monkeys got a lot of attention covering the Strokes last week (especially because on his new album, Alex Turner sings: “I just want to be one of the Strokes”). But I preferred their wonderfully sleazy “Lipstick Vogue” cover, played in honor of Costello as he recovered from cancer surgery. Turner’s a product of his influences; in addition to the Strokes and Elvis, he appears to have his Nick Cave snake slither down cold. Continue reading »