“Holes” is the lead track to Mercury Rev’s chamber pop classic Deserter’s Songs, a musical left-turn for them which saved their career. The songs feature elaborate, orchestrated arrangements around Jonathan Donahue’s fragile voice and “Holes” is no exception. The song begins with mellotron approximating an orchestrate but more and more instruments join the wurlitzer and tambourine accompanying his voice, slowly building to a massive crescendo featuring, among other things, a musical saw.Continue reading »
“Never Tear Us Apart” is perhaps INXS’s most famous ballad, a dramatic waltz with synthesizer strings and an iconic saxophone break. The song is about an intense romantic connection between two people that feels like it will last forever.Continue reading »
The Strokes’ Is This It songs have been covered to death, so musicians are digging deeper. We heard a killer Angles cover in April from Billie Eilish (more on her in a minute), and now singer-songwriter Andrew Combs takes on this Room on Fire track. His own music leans Nashville Americana, but from the crazy horns here, sounds like he’s been spending time in New Orleans.Continue reading »
Follow all our Best of 2017 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.
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.
The National have been covering regionally-appropriate songs on many of their tour stops: New Order in Manchester, Queen in London, etc. When I saw them in Queens last month, they played the Ramones’ “The KKK Took My Baby Away,” joking that Joey Ramone wrote it after his Queens neighbor Donald Trump stole his girlfriend. It was a blast to watch, but the shaky cell phone videos that surfaced didn’t quite live up to the live experience.
Luckily, the National have kept the song in their setlists (complete with the Trump joke). They tagged it onto the end of their recent KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic performance – so now we finally have good video. “This is a true story,” Matt Berninger deadpans.Continue reading »
When I first drove around Iceland in 2013, one album was in every record store window, in every coffee shop: Ásgeir Trausti’s 2012 debut Dýrð í dauðaþögn. My experience was no fluke; supposedly one out of every ten Icelandic households owned a copy. Even the biggest pop star in America wouldn’t have that kind of reach (Beyonce’s Lemonade didn’t even reach one out of every one hundred households).
Suffice to say, Trausti became massive back home. And he has since worked tirelessly to expand his reach, to become the next in the lineage of Björk and Sigur Rós. His debut was re-released internationally as In the Silence, with lyrics translated into English by John Grant. And last month he released his follow-up, Afterglow. No Icelandic-language version this time.Continue reading »
