I’d go with the Dead Kennedys covering *Three Ravens.
*
Karen Carpenter covering “Dog And Butterfly”.
I think this has come up before. I definitely recall mentioning that I’d like to hear Peter Murphy or Bauhaus do Jefferson Airplane’s/Great Society’s “Somebody to Love”
(Though Queen’s would be interesting too)
I like it - if I close my eyes I can almost hear that. I actually did see Norah Jones live about 8-10 years ago and she closed her set with that song. It actually worked pretty well.
I’d like to hear Patty Griffin cover Tom Petty’s “American Girl”, a little slower tempo and infusing a little more pain and regret into the lyrics.
Prodigy doing MacArthur Park
138 BPM, man!
Nirvana’s “About a Girl” done by the Beatles, circa 1963. (Either you’d need a time machine, or have one of the better Beatle cover bands do it, maybe Rain.)
Kurt Cobain wrote the song after playing the CD “With the Beatles” over and over for an entire night, and it shows. His songwriting style naturally tended toward the early Lennon/McCartney approach to chord patterns, verse/refrain/bridge patterns, etc., but it’s more evident in this particular song than in most.
I always wished Frank Sinatra would have covered Steely Dan’s Deacon Blues.
I should have added that what made Cobain most like other great songwriters (including Lennon and, especially, McCartney) was his feel for melody, especially vocal melody. Unfortunately, few of Nirvana’s imitators shared this skill.
Or a Turtles version of Daydream Believer.
Now that you mention it, I always wished that someone would have done those British new wave songwriters (Costello, Nick Lowe, Joe Jackson) as orchestrated sixties style pop tracks. Could you imagine Lesley Gore doing “Cruel To Be Kind” or Petula Clark on “Accidents Can Happen”?
Actually, the cover song I’ve most wanted to hear is actually recorded, but I’ve never been able to find a copy.
The “Kiss My Ass” tribute CD, a tribute to Kiss, had some great songs, but there were several that didn’t make the final cut. Most notably:
Soundgarden covering “War Machine.”
Peter Gabriel covering Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms.
[Slow clap]
I can see that, but he’d lost the best of his voice by the time that song came out. An early-60s Frank could have done interesting things. A late-70s one would have done a Shatneresque “reading” full of pauses that would have sounded like a bad parody of himself.
Jimmy Buffett could still do a killer rendition of “Hey Nineteen,” though - better now than any prior era, perhaps. I’d love to hear a slow, solo acoustic version and a jacked-up live version, maybe in a duet with… Maria Muldaur.