Dec 152017
 

Follow all our Best of 2017 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

best covers 2017

Year-end lists are a time to look back. That’s something we’ve been doing a lot of this year.

See, we turned ten years old in 2017 – practically ancient in internet-blog terms – so we’ve indulged in what we feel is well-earned nostalgia. At the beginning of the year, each of our writers picked the ten most important covers in their life (see them here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). We even listed the ten most important covers in Cover Me‘s life, from the song that inspired the site to our very first Best of the Year winner.

Then, to cap things off, in October we commissioned a 25-track tribute to the cover song itself – which you can still download for free. We love the covers everyone contributed so much, incidentally, that we didn’t consider them for this list. It’d be like picking favorite children – if you had 25 of ’em.

Oh, and have I mentioned I wrote a book? … What’s that you say? I mentioned that constantly? Well, I’m quite proud of it. It’s called Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time and it makes a great Christmas gift and – ok, ok, I’ll stop. You can find plenty more about it elsewhere.

Suffice to say, there’s been a lot of looking back this year. And we hope you’ll indulge us this one last glance rearward before we leap into 2018. Because if it’s been a hell of a year for us, it’s certainly also been a hell of a year for the cover song in general. Some of this year’s list ranks among the best covers we’ve ever heard, period. So dig in, and thanks for your support this past decade.

– Ray Padgett
Editor-in-Chief

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Aug 072017
 
sky ferreira easy

Director Edgar Wright’s seat-of-your-pants heist film Baby Driver features a carefully chosen group of songs that are set in perfect time to the action on the screen. City sounds and the movements of the actors and actresses work in time with the music with ease. It’s not often that a soundtrack precedes a movie, but in Baby Driver, it even inspired it.

One of the soundtrack’s standouts is Sky Ferreira’s cover of The Commodore’s “Easy”. Ferreira’s blend of drums, guitar, organ, and vibraphone feels just right reinterpreting the cool, seemingly untouchable vibe of the original. Continue reading »

Jan 132012
 

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

In the mid-’80s, a besotted Robert Smith decided to write a song about a trip he took to the seashore with his girlfriend. The girlfriend would later become his wife; the song would later become “Just Like Heaven” (hereinafter “JLH”), the Cure‘s signature song, the one that everybody knows and every band wants to play. The cascading guitar line, the ethereal synths, and the rush in Smith’s vocals, especially that opening “Show me show me show me,” combine to make the song as exciting and inevitable as a waterfall. It’s a remarkably malleable song as well, easily transformed to sound perfectly at home in any context – it’s as likely to show up on a metal tribute as it is to be redone as a lullaby for babies. The following five songs fall somewhere in between. Continue reading »