May 312023
 
best cover songs may 2023
Beck – Hands on the Wheel (Willie Nelson cover)

Willie Nelson’s giant 90th birthday concert in Los Angeles featured a whole host of covers. Some of them featured the man himself. Admittedly, that makes those not really covers, so we’ll feature a couple Willie-less Willie tunes. First up, Beck tackles Willie’s Red Headed Stranger classic “Hands on the Wheel.” (Find another cover of this song in the Best of the Rest list.) Continue reading »

Apr 032023
 
best cover songs of march 2023
Bria – When You Know Why You’re Happy (Mary Margaret O’Hara’ cover)

Bria’s “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” made our list of the Best Covers of 2022. The track was a sneak peak at her covers EP Cuntry Covers Vol. 2, and the full thing dropped a few weeks ago. It includes a wonderful version of this much more obscure song. Bria explains: “Mary Margaret O’Hara is a creative force and one of my favorite Canadian artists. I have been a huge fan of hers for quite some time and really wanted to try my hand at one of her songs for Vol. 2. She is a real queen of vocal improvisation. It’s a trait of hers that I’ve always admired, so I really wanted to explore that when recording this cover. The video for this track is special to us, a sort of collage of memory; fragmented footage of summer taken over the last two years is dispersed throughout shots of a vast winter scene, filmed while we finished the record up North with our live band.” Continue reading »

Mar 022023
 
forty feet tall shout cover

“Shout” is the hit that broke Tears for Fears in the US, as part of the “Second British Invasion,” and it remains one of their biggest songs. Like so much of Tears for Fears’ oeuvre, the song is really tied to its aesthetic, which saw the band mixing synthpop and rock music.

Forty Feet Tall are a Portland, OR-based post-punk-influenced rock band who have been putting out music for about a decade. So they’re into the music that was all over the UK underground a little bit before Tears for Fears made it big. Continue reading »

Dec 092022
 

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

Mad World

You break something down to its most basic parts and people just react.–Michael Andrews, 2003

The Californian composer Michael Andrews and his childhood buddy Gary Jules scored the most unlikely UK Christmas #1 in history with their cover of “Mad World” in 2003. Listeners raised a lot more questions than glasses of eggnog. Where were the sleighbells, the snow allusions? Where was the Christian message of peace, à la Cliff Richard? The children’s choir? The cloying sentimentality? The song had none of these things. Instead, it had a stripped-back sound, a quiet mournfulness, and some distinctly unfestive lines laid bare. One was: “Went to school and I was very nervous / No one knew me, no one knew me.” Another was: “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.”

In fact, the song was basically about a depressed kid.

It wasn’t just about a depressed kid; it was even more about a depressed kid than the original. And this was likely the key to its greatness and, amazingly, its Yuletide success.
Continue reading »

Oct 312022
 
avril lavigne
Avril Lavigne & All Time Low – All the Small Things (Blink 182 cover)

One way you can tell millennials are getting old: There are now nostalgia-bait festivals catering to the music of their (our) youth. Such was the case with When We Were Young, the emo and pop-punk fest in Vegas a couple weeks ago with Paramore, My Chemical Romance, Bright Eyes, and dozens more. A video high point is this extremely fun and infectious cover of “All the Small Things” by All Time Low and Avril Lavigne, performed right after Blink 182 announced they were getting back together. Best part: When the entire crowd hollers alone to “Work sucks / I know”! Continue reading »