Feb 232024
 

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

beatles covers

Sixty years ago this month, The Beatles played on the Ed Sullivan Show. You don’t need us to tell you what a momentous occasion this was; entire books have been written on the subject. Suffice to say we’re using the anniversary as our excuse to finally devote a Best Covers Ever to perhaps the biggest band of them all. We’ve done Dylan. We’ve done the Stones. We’ve done Dolly and Springsteen and Prince. But there was one last giant remaining.

Though it’s difficult to measure this precisely, The Beatles are the most-covered artist of all time according to the two biggest covers databases on the internet (SecondHandSongs, WhoSampled). And that certainly feels right. “Yesterday” is often cited as the most-covered song of all time, though that needs qualifiers (a ton of Christmas standards would beat it). But, again, it feels right. The Beatles were ubiquitous in their day, and they’ve been ubiquitous ever since. They just had a chart-topping single last month, the A.I.-assisted “Now and Then,” which was duly covered widely. If “Carnival of Light” ever surfaces, no doubt a carnival of covers will soon follow. Continue reading »

Apr 282017
 

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

dark side of the moon

On April 28, 1973 – forty-four years ago today – Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon reached number one in the Billboard Top 200 Bestselling Album charts. Fifteen years later, it was still on those charts. Impeccably produced and beautifully played, Moon deservedly served as the band’s breakthrough. This was an album that worked best as a whole, even if it did contain a top 20 single in “Money,” and it’s an album that’s been covered in its entirety by multiple single artists. Among them: Phish, the Flaming Lips, Dream Theater, and the Easy Star All-Stars, whose Dub Side of the Moon was so successful they released an album of remixes, Dubber Side of the Moon, seven years later.

Let’s just say that when it came time to put together our own Full Album collection, the pickings were anything but slim. Consider the following just one of many, many Moons.
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Aug 102012
 

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Let It Be was the soundtrack of a band falling apart. That was never the plan, of course – the Beatles conceived the album as a back-to-basics effort, in which they would rediscover the joys of playing together without overdubs, only to find themselves bored, angry, and miserable, each one trapped with three bandmates who couldn’t understand what he was going through. They were unhappy with the results and shelved them, but a known goldmine won’t stay untampered, and Phil Spector was brought in to make something of the mess. Upon its release, the highest praise any Beatle gave it came from John, and his quote – “When I heard it, I didn’t puke” – scarcely counts as a ringing endorsement.

Today Let It Be is still seen as one of the weakest albums in the Beatle catalog – but then, this being the Beatles, that means there are only three or four immortal classics, plus a few more that would be high points in the catalogs of 98% of the world’s bands. Somehow, this dying gasp of an album, recorded in notoriously joyless circumstances, found its way into the hearts of millions; somehow, that’s where it was always meant to be.
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