Mar 132023
 

Well, the last thing anyone would ever accuse Van Morrison of is predictability, so seeing his name and his new album on this particular website shouldn’t surprise as much as it actually does. The famously taciturn Belfast crooner is known, after all, for his own compositions, and he has built up a vast legacy of work over his 60 years of prodigious activity. But every so often, usually to demonstrate his love for the songs he heard in his youth, good Sir Ivan will cobble together a set of standards, usually performed in his own idiosyncratic style, and leave everyone gasping. One such was Irish Heartbeat, a set of trad Irish folk that he made with the Chieftains in 1988; another, 2006’s Pay The Devil, looked (if less memorably) at the country and western songbook. Furthermore, he has dedicated an album to the music of Mose Allison (who appeared with him for that) and made collaborations with bluesman John Lee Hooker and, more recently, jazz organist Joey Francesco.

Indeed, neither is this the first time he has embraced skiffle, that delightfully do-it-yourself style of the late 1950s, wherein UK musicians played an amalgam of trad jazz, blues, folk, gospel and swing, often on homemade instruments. Arguably, it was the punk of its day, with Lonnie Donegan the king of the movement, and other players, like jazz trombonist, Chris Barber, drawn along and into its wake. Those two, along with Morrison, produced a terrific live set, The Skiffle Sessions–Live in Belfast, recorded in 1998 and released two years later. Could this be part two, one might wonder, this time without those elder statesmen, both since deceased? We’ll get to that.

It is true Morrison has been confounding his fan base of late; lockdown saw him never more prolific, with a flurry of albums, some doubles, indulging in a hitherto seldom seen angry commentary of the day. An ardent anti-vaxxer, anti-lockdown and seemingly anti-science, his lyrics chockful of diatribes against those who would restrict his freedoms, bitter polemics of bile, and many erstwhile followers were bemused and bedeviled. Some began to consider him out of touch and out of line, stuck in a rose-tinted past. I know. I was one, writing him off as someone I used to love. And now, fer chrissakes, this!
Continue reading »

Feb 242023
 

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

Them

What makes the original artist of a cover? Does it depend on which you heard first? Me, I doubt even I could pretend my initial exposure to “Baby Please Don’t Go” was the original I held dearest and first to my heart. I’ll go further: I bet, that for many, the first notes of “Baby Please Don’t Go” they ever heard came from the whip-thin guitar of Billy Harrison (unless the rumors are true and it was actually session veteran Jimmy Page). He was part of Belfast’s finest, Them, with none other than Mr. Grumpyguts himself, Van Morrison, in moodily magnificent vocal form even then.

But no, Them’s take wasn’t the original, that being the domain of good old trad. arr., responsible for any number of ancient ditties that have transformed and transmogrified over the ages, across oceans and genres. But for the purposes of this piece, Them’s take is my original, even if their version was drawn from the twin wells of Big Joe Williams, the first recorded iteration, in 1935, and John Lee Hooker‘s 1949 version, which lopped the “please” off the title.
Continue reading »

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.

Continue reading »

Nov 022020
 
baha men

On Friday, we published a massive list of the 50 best cover songs from the year 2000. Some were emblematic of that year’s musical trends, but most could just as easily have come out yesterday.

So today, a postscript: Covers that came out that year that just scream “2000.” If you were paying attention to music then, you will recognize many of these trends. There’s the ska revival. There’s rap-rock. There are, of course, boy bands.

Smash Mouth and Aaron Carter both make appearances. So do the Vengaboys. Madonna covers “American Pie”; Fred Durst covers Public Enemy. Someone sings a ska cover of “Take On Me” while sitting on the toilet. It was just that sort of year.

To be fair, these covers are not all terrible…but most are. Many were also among the year’s biggest hits, proving that people in the year 2000 exhibited no better taste in music than they did picking a president. And a few you probably didn’t even know were covers in the first place.

Relive your most traumatic memories of music back then below. Bonus hall-of-shame points if the cover has a music video featuring bleached tips or JNCOs. Continue reading »

Aug 312020
 
irish artists cover van morrison

It’s a fantastic time to be a Van Morrison fan. Between Aug. 3 and Sept. 15, Ireland’s Hot Press Magazine is posting 75 new covers of Morrison’s songs by Irish artists. The YouTube event is in celebration of the Belfast native’s 75th birthday today. Most people will recognize a couple of big-name artists mixed in with many up-and-coming Irish musicians participating in the event. Continue reading »

Jul 022020
 

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

Van Morrison

Some songs have the capacity to weave a legacy greater than simply a sum of their constituent parts. “Into the Mystic” is one such song. It isn’t necessarily the best song Van Morrison has ever constructed, but somehow it strikes chords heavier than it first seems to hit. Prefacing and pre-empting Morrison’s classic mid period of dreamy treatises on humanity and higher powers, all spiritual quests and transcendentalism, “Into the Mystic” actually appears on 1970’s Moondance, that almost most commercial of his works, the follow-up to the way more cerebral Astral Weeks. But for all the FM-friendliness of many of the songs, go read the lyrics, and Van is as philosophical as he ever has been. “Into the Mystic” proves to be the epitome, a yearning hymn to the seeking of an understanding of the cosmos, within and without the body and world.

The first draft was entitled “Into the Misty”; we can be grateful he took a pen through that, the meaning so less, well, cosmic in that phrase, and so more earthbound. The effect of the song is in no small part down to the superlative musicians then at his command, and the consummate arrangements, with the guitar, keyboards, and sax of John Platania, Jef Labes, and Jack Schroer, respectively, exquisite and never bettered subsequently. Even better than the studio take is that on 1974 live opus It’s Too Late To Stop Now, with the same musicians, and a stellar string section, still a high-water mark for live recordings by anyone.

Mind you, the vocals are pretty damn good too.
Continue reading »