For as long as I’ve been listening to music, I have loved creating lists, mixes, and organizing my music collection in arcane ways that make sense to me (if noone else). Over the next few posts, I’m going to explore some of the threads that weave through my favorite music.

Unlikely Covers

I love when someone pulls a great song out of one sphere of music and into their own. Sometimes a great cover leads me to appreciate the songwriting of an artist I had never really paid attention to, like Warren Zevon covering Prince’s Raspberry Beret. Sometimes the brilliance of a cover is the way the song has been translated to a different genre,  like Luther Wright & the Wrongs’ brilliant take on Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd (which happens to come from their hugely enjoyable album, Rebuild the Wall, which bluegrassifies Floyd’s whole album song-for-song). The joy of a cover can come from an unlikely pairing that  works better than would seem possible, suchn as Johnny Cash doing Hurt, originally by Nine Inch Nails. Now granted, Bob Rock was intentionally feeding Johnny an eclectic mix of songs to cover on those last few albums, but the power of the sone and the lyrics about addiction gain a real beauty and gravitas when sung by a man in the last years of a long, troubled life.  

My final and favorite example of what makes a great cover song is when an artist finds a song that so matches their persona, it seems like the song should have been theirs in the first place. I never, ever tire of hearing the Ramones rip out the theme from the 60′s TV theme to Spider-Man.

Two minutes of joy.