Jun 232023
 

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

1970s one hit wonders

Last month, we presented covers of one-hit wonders of the 1950s and the 1960s. And we’re back to do it again!

This month, we’ll tackle huge hits by not-so-huge bands from the ’70s and, next week, the ’80s. Today, covers of classics like “Spirit in the Sky,” “Black Betty,” “Why Can’t We Live Together,” and “Video Killed The Radio Star” (I would have thought that one was ’80s given the famous MTV connection, but it came out November 1979). Then next week we’ll dive into perhaps the greatest decade for one-hit wonders cover. Continue reading »

Oct 052020
 
best tribute albums

Over our time tracking cover songs (13 years this month!), we’ve written about hundreds of new tribute albums, across reviews, news stories, and, when they’re good enough, our best-of-the-year lists. We also have looked back on plenty of great tribute albums from the past in our Cover Classics series. But we’ve never pulled it all together – until now. Continue reading »

Jan 312019
 

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

best neil young covers

Neil Young released his self-titled debut solo album on January 22, 1969. Well, technically he re-released it that day. It had initially landed without much fanfare the previous November, only for Young to quickly pull it from shelves due to what he deemed a subpar mix. Even in his professional infancy, decades before Pono and the Neil Young Archives, he was a stickler for quality control.

We hope this list would pass muster with him. At 50 songs, it’s our longest to date (tied only with The Rolling Stones) and still barely scratches the surface. We could have quite easily listed the best 50 covers of “Heart of Gold” or “Like a Hurricane” alone. He gets covered about as much as any songwriter alive, and about as well too.

Neil hasn’t slowed down in his own age, and neither has the flow of new covers. Some of the covers below came out near 50 years ago themselves. Others only landed in the last year or two. No doubt another contender will arrive tomorrow. Neil never stops, and, thankfully, neither do covers of his songs. Continue reading »

Oct 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!

The importance of Neil Young‘s 1977 career retrospective Decade, released thirty-five years ago this month, cannot be overstated. It served to establish Young as a major artist in the canon of rock, and was so full of transcendent moments that it needed three albums to hold them all. It offered unreleased tracks at a time when that Just Wasn’t Done, and the quality of those tracks conveyed the impression that Young wrote so many masterpieces he could afford to keep most of them locked away. It gave real insight to the creative process, with Young’s handwritten liner notes saying more in three lines than his critics could in three paragraphs. Its summing up a career with hits, rarities, and deep cuts selected by Young himself made it a sort of Mesozoic box set, one whose template wouldn’t be followed for years but is now de rigueur. Most of all, it’s a way to get some of the greatest music of the ’60s and ’70s in one place – and since Young’s range is so great, there’s always something on it that you’re in the mood to hear. Continue reading »

Jan 312012
 

They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with other people singing his or her songs. Let others do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

Oh, the dark deeds that must occur on the birthday of the spiky-hair-crowned prince of punk. How does one fete a man whose very name conjures smoking images of filth, fetidness and psychopathy — Decorate a cake with rancid raspberries spilled over the Union Jack? Present a champagne flute of fermenting trash juice to pour on DVD copies of the Queen’s Christmas address? Continue reading »