A Girl Like You - is a nice little pop song by Wolfgang Press.
And here is the Tom Jonesified cover…
This seems to indicate you think Reznor was just writing the song and singing it without feeling. That is very far from the case. As he himself says in the same interview where he lauds the Cash version: " I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone."
Personally, I greatly prefer the NIN version.
These days, I would wager this is the version most people think of when you mention “Blue Monday.”
I highly doubt that.
Keeping with NIN, they had a small hit from this cover of a Joy Division B-side, “Dead Souls”. It didn’t hurt that the cover was featured in the movie, The Crow.
Joy Division sounds a bit like a early 80s version of the Velvet Underground trope: they didn’t have many fans, but everyone of them started a band. Not that they were around very long before Ian Curtis’s suicide.
Milow’s cover is better.
No, simply no. You would lose that wager heavily I suspect.
Depending on what musical subculture you’re from, Patti Smith’s cover of “Gloria” might be more well known to you than Them’s original.
One of my favorite Carpenters songs was the lengthy “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”
I only recently found out that that was a cover of the original by a group named Klaatu, a suspiciously below-the-radar group that was shrouded in controversy as being The Beatles incognito in 1976.
And it’s easy to hear Beatles influence (and a dash of Pink Floyd).
I like this version, though the Carpenters’ version is the one I grew up with–Karen Carpenter’s angelic voice could have made a phone book sound amazing.
Well, I’m a New Order fan, so naturally I think of them first. Frankly, I’ve never heard of the Orgy version.
They were actually quite popular in their genre. Their singles were number ones on the Indie charts.
Yeah, I’ve never heard that version, either (nor have I heard of that band – and I was in college from 1993-1998, so should be the sweet spot for remembering these things.) Meanwhile, today, driving at around 11 a.m. in Chicago, New Order’s “Blue Monday” played on 93.1FM WXRT. It’s a staple song there.
In the US, maybe. In their home country, not so much. Both their studio albums hit #1 on the UK Indie charts and hit #5 and #6 on the general charts.
And the first recorded release was by the fantastic Limeliters.
The lyrics are taken almost verbatim from the book of Ecclesiastes.
This thread and the other proves that anyone who sez “Oh, it’s just a cover” is being a snobbish idiot.
Originally the term cover was used when a white singer/band would do a version of a song first made into a hit by Black artists. Many radio stations wouldn’t play music by Black artists, so a white artist would be hired.
That has gone away, thankfully, so there should be anything wrong with a new recording of a song.
Besides, the music industry hasnt even greed exactly what a “cover” is: Is the original the first recording? First played? First hit?
I recently made a playlist of covers for a MS Teams music channel hosted by a coworker.
Do you have a source for this, out of curiosity? (Not saying that white artists didn’t remake Black music; just curious as to whether that was the original source of the term.)
Well, I definitely think of the Orgy version when I think of “Blue Monday”.
The original Soul version of Knock on Wood by Eddie Floyd was a decent hit back in 1966
But I’m going to suggest the 1979 Amii Stewart disco version is better known (and it was certainly a bigger hit)
TCMF-2L
Wiki contradicts that, at least for the original use of the term. Of the two earliest examples they cite, Paul Williams’ Hucklebuck in 1949 and Hank Williams’ Jamabalaya in 1952, Paul Williams was black and Hank Williams was white.
Certainly in the rock and roll era many white musicians covered songs by black ones, but that’s not the origin of the term. Elvis covered songs by both black musicians like Hound Dog by Big Mama Thornton (though it was written by two white songwriters), but also by white ones like Blue Suede Shoes by Carl Perkins.
Bruce Springsteen wrote and recorded Fire in 1977 but decided not to release it. He gave the track to Robert Gordon who gave it the Rockabilly treatment in 1977/8
The massive version was The Pointer Sisters effort of 1978 which reached Number 2 in the US charts
Bruce had always played the song in concert and eventually released his own live version in 1986 when it was a modest hit
According to Wiki, Bruce initially thought to offer it to Elvis Presley and sent him a demo but sadly Elvis died before it arrived.
TCMF-2L
No love for Robin Williams’ version?