Feb 192021
 

They Say It’s Your Birthday  celebrates an artist’s special day with covers of his or her songs. Let someone else do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

birthday

Hi, I’m Patrick Robbins, the features editor here at Cover Me, and today’s my birthday. Please forgive the self-indulgence of a one-year-older guy for putting up a post that’s about me.

2021 is kind of a big year for me. Not only am I having one of those milestone birthdays – you know, one of those ones that ends in a zero – I’m also having a milestone anniversary. This year marks ten years since I joined the Cover Me staff. In all that time, I’ve gotten off a few good lines here and there (my favorite: a song had “more hooks than Moulty’s closet”), but far more importantly, I’ve found some great covers that I never would have discovered if I hadn’t been looking for them to share and talk about here.

So, as a little birthday present from me to you, I thought I’d pick out some of my favorite discoveries I’ve made over the years. What follows are some of my all-time favorite covers that I found specifically for Cover Me posts (as opposed to covers I already knew about), and links to the pieces in which I originally wrote about them. There’s a lot of songs here, but they’re only about one percent of the songs I’ve written about. So think of these as the cream of my cover crop.

Thanks to all of you for reading Cover Me – without you, this post wouldn’t exist – and here’s to many more birthdays and anniversaries to come.

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Sep 122014
 

In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.

Eleven years ago today, Johnny Cash breathed his last. Two weeks before, Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” beat Cash’s “Hurt” for Best Male Video at the MTV Video Music Awards. Timberlake began his acceptance speech by saying, “This is a travesty. I demand a recount.” He went on to say, “My grandfather raised me on Johnny Cash… and I think he deserves this more than any of us in here tonight.” In a career that’s had far more right moves than wrong ones, this may have been Timberlake’s wisest move – not only did he cede the spotlight to a true legend, he acknowledged that Cash’s already-legendary cover of the Nine Inch Nails song was and would ever after be the true winner.
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