Vitamin String Quartet Archives

Cover Me Q&A: What is your favorite cover of a deep cut?

Posted by Staff at 12:00 pm 1 Response »

May 142025

Welcome to Cover Me Q&A, where we take your questions about cover songs and answer them to the best of our ability.

Here at Cover Me Q&A, we’ll be taking questions about cover songs and giving as many different answers as we can. This will give us a chance to hold forth on covers we might not otherwise get to talk about, to give Cover Me readers a chance to learn more about individual staffers’ tastes and writing styles, and to provide an opportunity for some back-and-forth, as we’ll be taking requests (learn how to do so at feature’s end).

Today’s question, courtesy of staffer Hope Silverman:

What is your favorite cover of a deep cut?

The 20 Best Iron Maiden Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 9:00 am No Responses »

May 022025

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

Up the irons! Iron Maiden turns 50 this year. They’re still going strong too, releasing music, playing shows, engaging in mock sword battles with a towering Eddie. So we felt it was time to honor them with a Best Covers Ever. Personally, I feel the list should rightfully be 666 covers long, but that seems like a lot of blurbs to write.

We haven’t done that many heavy metal bands in these lists. The reason is simple: Metal bands often only get covered by other metal bands. This is particularly true for bands that are either a) niche or b) extremely technical. Iron Maiden is neither. Like Metallica, who we tackled a few years ago, their songs are versatile enough to be easily covered in any number of genres. You don’t need to know insane time signatures or ridiculously complicated riffs to find a way in. Many are essentially pop songs in metal garb—well, pop songs about the number of the beast, that is.

A few of the covers below come from metal acts, but most don’t. Nevertheless, we recommend headbanging to them all. Even the klezmer one.

Netflix Show ‘Bridgerton’ Is Overflowing with Classical Covers of Modern Pop Hits

Posted by Ally McAlpine at 2:00 pm No Responses »

Jan 122021

If you are currently binge-watching the Netflix show Bridgerton, yes, that was an orchestral cover of Ariana Grande’s “Thank u, next” you heard. The soundtrack to Bridgerton,a Shonda Rhimes 1800s period piece filled with wealth, lust, and betrayal, is overseen by composer and musician Kris Bowers. Bowers worked with Alexandra Patsavas, who is responsible for the six pop covers scattered through the series. Patsavas told Parade “the choices and their respective placements are each very deliberate, and that the Grande and Swift covers specifically ‘were able to tell the musical story and amplify a female perspective.” Continue reading »

Full Albums: Gwen Stefani’s ‘Love Angel Music Baby’

Posted by Sara Stoudt at 3:00 pm No Responses »

Dec 062019

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

Last week Gwen Stefani’s first solo album, Love Angel Music Baby, turned fifteen. In celebration, the album was remastered and reissued. Gwen Stefani even performed a medley of the album’s greatest hits on The Voice, her latest venture, complete with an appearance from Eve for her iconic rap in “Rich Girl.”

The album has plenty of haters (Pitchfork’s review was especially brutal), and the Harajuku girl motif had cultural appropriation written all over it. However, I tend to agree with the take from Hazel Cills of Vice:

What keeps me going back to Love. Angel. Music. Baby. time and time again is how, in all of its racism and spliced-up electronica madness, Stefani inadvertently made a classic. You can call it silly, you can call it bad, but you can’t deny that Stefani aced her retro hodgepodge. It’s a “problematic fav,” but it’s difficult to not sing along to Stefani’s kitschy new wave homage.

Whether you unabashedly love these tunes or love to hate them, these covers will take you back to your early-aughts self.

Full Albums: The Decemberists’ ‘The Crane Wife’

Posted by Jordan Becker at 5:00 pm 4 Responses »

Aug 292014

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

Are the Decemberists a band that “craft theatrical, hyper-literate pop songs that draw heavily from late-’60s British folk acts like Fairport Convention and Pentangle and the early-’80s college rock grandeur of the Waterboys and R.E.M.,” as described by Allmusic, or are their songs an “unbearable exercise in indie high-quirkiness, with each new release deepening the impression that Meloy thinks he’s Edmund Spenser or, at least, the only rock singer smart enough to keep a copy of The Faerie Queene on his bedside plinth,” as writer Jody Rosen wrote in Slate?

Although I lean toward the former, I can understand believing the latter.

There can be no doubt that the Decemberists’ focus on tales of pirates, highwaymen, shape-shifters, and interpretations of myths and legends from around the world, plus primary lyricist Colin Meloy’s empty-the-thesaurus writing style, not to mention their practice of performing live historical reenactments in their shows, set them up for being mocked by some, and beloved by others. And that is what makes life interesting.
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Five Good Covers: Ooh La La (Faces)

Posted by Jordan Becker at 5:00 pm 1 Response »

Feb 282014

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

Some articles are written because of a great love for the subject. Some are written because they are timely. Some are written because there is a need. This article is being written because of fate. When you write about music, sometimes the world conspires to suggest a topic. “Ooh La La,” by the Faces, is one of those songs in the classic rock canon that pretty much anyone of a certain age knows. Its bouncy, wistful chorus makes it memorable and recognizable, even if it might be hard to immediately place the unfamiliar voice or recall the actual title. And when, in the period of a week, the song appears first on the radio, then on satellite radio, then on TV, and finally on a list of potential article topics circulated by the Cover Me editorial staff, it was clearly time for me to take a look at this song, through its covers.
Continue reading »