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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Oct 312024
 
best covers of october 2024
Farmer’s Wife — Season of the Witch (Donovan cover)

Austin rockers Farmer’s Wife go full shoegaze-psych on this Donovan cover just in time for Halloween. They write: “Our cover of ‘Season of the Witch’ materialized out of a drum beat and pedal feedback two Halloweens ago. This creepy classic opened us to more experimentation and allowed us to dive into an eerier side of our sound.”

Fiona Apple — Lately (Don Heffington cover)

The late Don Heffington was an acclaimed drummer, so, naturally, his new tribute album includes drum greats like Jim Keltner. But he was also a singer-songwriter, so friends and collaborators like Jackson Browne, Victoria Williams, and Fiona Apple cover his songs. Apple selected “Lately,” the closing song on the final solo studio album of his lifetime, 2016’s Contemporary Abstractions in Folk Song and Dance. Continue reading »

Oct 242024
 
surfrajettes

It’s always fun to see how songs sound when run through the filter of a good surf band and, on their most recent LP, the Toronto-based Surfrajettes tackle a Spice Girls classic. On their second album, Easy as Pie, released in early October, the instrumental surf band takes on the Spice Girls’ classic “Spice Up Your Life” among a group of new songs. Continue reading »

Apr 302018
 
surfrajettes toxic

You’re probably not familiar with the Surfrajettes‘ oeuvre. An all-girl, go-go booted Surf Rock band from Toronto might not be on everyone’s musical radar. When I think Bikini Beach-era surf rock, I imagine Southern California, Santa Cruz, or maybe the banzai pipeline in Hawaii, but certainly not a Canadian city a thousand miles from any ocean, where the girls that make up Surfrajettes hail from.

Fresh off an ear-popping set at the Asbury Park Surf Music festival where they shared a bill with Dick Dale and Los Straight Jackets, this band seems to be intentionally flying just under the radar. No vocals, just psychedelic instrumental surf music played straight, fast, and furious. Continue reading »