Dec 202024
 

Follow all our Best of 2024 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

best cover songs of 2024

Welcome to the 50 Best Tom Petty Covers of 2024!

We kid, of course. But for whatever reason, this year’s big trend in covers was: Tom Petty. At one point there were something like 20 Petty covers on our longlist. Many came from two all-star tribute albums that dropped, entirely coincidentally, the same year (they both made our Best Albums list). We narrowed it down, of course. Three Petty covers ended up in this Top 50, one not even from those albums. Then, just this week, another high-profile Petty cover dropped: Snoop and Jelly Roll reworking “Last Dance for Mary Jane”! Suffice to say that one wouldn’t have been a contender even if it hadn’t arrived too late.

That was the big surprise trend in 2024 covers. The less-surprising trend you could have called from a mile out: The new wave of young pop divas—Chappell, Sabrina, Charli—got covered a lot. We could have done an entire 50-song list of their covers, too (the “Good Luck Babe”s alone!). But, if we had, we would have missed out on gospel R.E.M. and country The Weeknd and electropop Mott the Hoople and soul Green Day and… you know what, just read the list.

(Moo-chas gracias and Deng-ke schoen to Hope Silverman for this year’s tiny-hippo art.)

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Dec 192024
 

Follow all our Best of 2024 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

best cover and tribute albums

A great cover song is hard enough to pull off. Doing it over and over again enough times to make a great cover album is something like a miracle. This year, miracles abounded. We awarded only the third or fourth five-star album in the site’s history. That’s our number one, naturally. But if we’d run a full review of our number two album, it might have gotten five stars too.

Our list includes tributes to everyone from Lou Reed to Low to Tom Petty—twice. It includes jammy experimental covers of ’90s alt-rock, fingerpicked guitar covers of Kraftwerk, and skankin’ ska covers of Weird Al. It translates Leonard Cohen into Hebrew and Talking Heads into Spanish. It honors Fleetwood Mac before Fleetwood Mac and deeper Bob Dylan cuts than you can imagine. (Seriously, imagine the most obscure Bob Dylan song you can. These are more obscure than that.) It was that kind of year.

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Jun 252024
 
she she she slippery people

At a just-released “Sofa Session” with the BBC’s venerable DJ Jo Whiley, New York-based “discodelic” band Say She She broke out a version of Talking Heads’ “Slippery People.” Though they have not recorded it before, it has been a barnstorming part of their live show for some time. Continue reading »

May 312024
 
Bat for Lashes
Bambie Thug – Zombie (The Cranberries cover)

This month, Bambie Thug represented Ireland in Eurovision, coming in sixth (the country’s highest placement since 2000). Shortly before the finals, they released this cover of The Cranberries’ “Zombie”amidst criticism of their outspokenness about the devastation in Gaza. The top YouTube comment puts it well: “The significance of Bambie choosing to cover this song will not be lost on anyone in Ireland or the UK, or many places outside them. It’s just about the most impactful call for peace an Irish person can give, and they’ve done it as well as anyone ever has.” Continue reading »

May 172024
 

Talking Heads TributeThe quote attributed to Brian Eno about the Velvet Underground’s first album inspiring everyone who bought it to form a band applies differently to Talking Heads. If you were already starting your band in your parents’ garage or the art school lounge, surrounded (in either case) by the fog of weed, you would surely dream about being Talking Heads.

During a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame career, Talking Heads retained and maintained artistic integrity, but sold enough records to establish and keep themselves in the public consciousness and charts. We can all name their biggest songs. They got to work with the business’s best, including Eno and Lee “Scratch” Perry, and create critically acclaimed masterpieces. If you needed to draft in legends from Funkadelic or Nigerian music to get the sound right, you could.

It was not all work. There was the opportunity to hang out, and get high with, the coolest people in the world. Mick Jagger might have been a little too high to interact fully with, but Sid Vicious was unexpectedly sympathetic, and John Martyn was expectedly an asshole. At least you knew personally. Later on, cool young people would be desperate to hang out with you. If you are Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth you would get to do all this with your soulmate and the love of your life. (All of this is well documented in Frantz’s memoir Remain in Love. Recommended.)

The lead singer might be a little, shall we say, self-absorbed. Of course, for an average band, between a third and a fifth of you are planning to be the lead singer, so you would regard your behaviour as an acceptable price for accommodating your genius. The rest of you, as talented and driven as you are, might have to suck it up a little. Your Wikipedia entry is much shorter than that of the lead. You can contemplate the injustice of it all as you take your ocean-going yacht down to your Bahamas holiday home and studio.

You can have side projects when the band is on hiatus. This might allow you to participate in an Oscar-winning soundtrack, or produce your biggest-ever hit records. You can be sought-after producers, further increasing your time in the Caribbean and your musical legacy. And at a certain point in your career you make the greatest concert movie of all time.

Stop Making Sense, directed by Oscar-winner Jonathan Demme, was released in 1984 when the band was at its creative, harmonious best. It is a work of art on several fronts, from the curation of the music from an emerging chrysalis to barnstorming romps, to the building of the set and band. It featured the iconic and meme-worthy “big suit,” which cemented the recording and band in the public consciousness. Forty years after its release, the film company A24 has polished up Stop Making Sense for a new generation, and now they’re celebrating further with the release of a new tribute album, Everybody’s Getting Involved. The range of moods, genres and languages on the album are a real testament to the influence that Talking Heads have.
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Apr 302024
 
best cover songs
The Dirty Nil — Total Eclipse of the Heart (Bonnie Tyler cover)

I’m honestly surprised there weren’t more “Total Eclipse” covers during this month’s total eclipse. Perhaps because our total eclipse was of the sun, rather than the heart. Or, more likely, because this song is hard as hell to sing. Best of the bunch came this garage-rocking version from Ontario trio The Dirty Nil. Gritty and raw, and singer Luke Bentham sells the hell out of it. Continue reading »