I have been earwormed by Memphis Tennessee, which in turn led me back to this John Cale cover. Thing is, it isn’t a great cover at all - but Memphis Tennessee on the viola?
It’s not great but it is extraordinary. For TL;DL, the viola kicks in at around 1.15.
j
The indie rock band The National did a pretty neat cover of the Rains of Castamere.
Not sure if it’s technically a “cover” since it’s actually on the show’s soundtrack.
I saw Rodrigo y Gabriela do this cover of Metallica’s ‘Orion’ live:
Was actually at this concert on Governors Island where O.A.R. did a cover of Billy Joel’s ‘Downeaster Alexa’.
A few nominations from me:
Despite featuring in the mostly forgettable Super Troopers 2, I honestly like The Eagles Of Death Metal’s cover of Blinded By The Light better than the Manfred Mann version:
The Art Of Noise covering Peter Gunn with Duane Eddy is amazing too - and you get bonus Rik Mayall in the video, too:
Ninja Sex Party have done a lot of very good covers but I think their cover of Starship’s We Built This City is particularly good because they lean into the 80s™ aspect of the whole thing (both musically and stylistically) so you get a get a fun, upbeat cover of a song that’s often criticised for being a cynical effort to make a McSong.
The Toadies cover Blondie’s Heart of Glass:
WOW!
And a quirky version by Nick Shoulders:
Enjoyed that, thanks!
Damn…Still bums me out to hear The Rains Of Castamere! The “Red Wedding” scarred me for life!
Thanks!
Do you mean a cover or a reinterpretation?
Covers are for wannabees replicating other people’s records. I have zero interest whatsoever.
Reinterpretations are really cool but rare nowadays. I’m talking radically changing the feel of the song to give a different perspective. A great example of this is Steve & Eydie’s take on “Black Hole Sun.”
Wow. I’m never leaving the house again. Thanks, River. 
Do you have cites for these definitions? Because in my research I can’t substantiate them.
Wikipedia says, “In popular music a cover version, remake , cover song, revival , or simply cover , is a new performance or recording by someone other than the original performer or composer of a song”. You might not like Wiki, but in this instance the rest of the internet pretty much agrees with that definition.
Stackexchange says,
" A cover usually refers to a reinterpretation . This might take the form of creating an acoustic version, a different arrangement, or even just taking the lyrics and coming up with an entirely new melody.
A remake is an attempt at reproduction , playing the song the same way it was originally played. The remakers might put their own twist on it or they might get very technical and try to be exacting, but ultimately it’s the same style as the original.
And so on. I think the offerings in this thread fall squarely under the heading “cover”.
“Cover” is the musician’s Dirty Word. I know this from being in the trenches for years. It’s incredibly offensive to a professional musician to put all that work creating a new environment for a song (re-composing it) and then be told it was a “cover.” Jazz musicians don’t cover things for example … they play standards or in the vernacular, “play from the book.” In all professional circles I’ve ever been in people reacted being told they were “covering” something as though you’d used a racial epithet at them. It’s essentially saying “you have no talent or originality of your own” to them. By contrast “hey, I like how you made that tune yours” is a high compliment.
This is one of those things that escapes the layperson. I think of it like people who think two notes played together constitutes a chord – 2 notes played together is an interval, 3 notes or more are a chord – just can’t think on that 2nd level. Start throwing quartal harmony (the essence of my music) at them and watch their minds melt trying to name the chords vertically rather than hearing the way voices move in time horizontally.
Wikipedia’s chief flaw is that it’s editable by anyone. In my experience the Wikipedia version of just about anything is about as wrong as academia can get, and nothing is written in such a way to provide actual information about the subject. You have to already be familiar with the subject to get anything out of it.
The other thing that’s wrong with the term is that it implies recorded media. Music isn’t somehow validated because it was offered for sale as a bunch of 0’s and 1s or stamped into plastic. Most people can’t talk about music at all if it’s not in reference to something they bought.
In the 90’s when there were many tribute albums around, I heard one – I think they were tributing Hüsker Dü, a band I like well enough. I heard about half of it in a record store. I was so glad when they changed it because it was boring. It was band after band wanting to be Bob Mould when they grew up. There was also that Bettie Serveert album something like Bettie Serveert plays the Velvet Underground Songbook Live At The Dramminshollins … or whatever it was. I heard that one in a record shop too and that truly deserved to be called “a cover album” in the nasty sense of the term. I thought “what’s the point? Who is this aimed at? What could I possibly get out of this?”
There’s a big difference between these idealistic definitions and what it’s like in the trenches. Everyone who has ever held a straight job can understand this: There’s the info you got in training (the idealism) vs. that same info applied to the actual workday. I’ve never had a straight job where everyone worked 100% by the idealist setups. Part of your value in that situation is your willingness and ability to deal with anything out of the box. Living outside of the box is the mark of a creative musician.
Could you give us examples showing this? It may be necessary to start a new thread to really discuss this in any detail. I don’t find this to be true. I often think that the subject a Wikipedia article is discussing is something that can only be understood by reading an entire book about the topic, but I don’t think the article is wrong.
I have a hard time believing musicians are such pretentious snowflakes. Well, some, obviously, but I’m going to give them more credit than that in general.
Pick a franchise entertainment, preferably one you’ve never experienced anything from, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.
One big part of the issue is that it plays on multiple meanings of a word as though that meaning were the only meaning. For example as you read the article on noise music, notice that it plays on that word “noise” as “unwanted or unpleasant sound.” I’ve never heard anything that was in the genre that wasn’t utterly pleasant. It also has a whole section on so-called “experimental music” – as though the creator didn’t know what was going to happen upon combining certain sounds. I maintain there’s no such thing as experimental music – they know what they’re doing.
And just what are the musicians pretending?
Say nighty night and kiss me…
Just heard this for the first time. I like it
Warran Zevon “Back in the Highlife Again”
(he also does an amazing version of Knockn’ on Heaven’s Door
Huh. We called them all “covers” in the (rock) music scenes I ran and played in. A straight-ahead cover that adds nothing new was just called, simply, “a straight cover.” A reinterpretation was still a cover and we’d all talk about our favorite covers, and they would pretty much all be stylistically shifted from the source material. For example, something like Devo’s “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” would be a great cover of the Stones, but it’s a complete reinterpretation. Maybe all the musicians I hung out with were not as nit-picky with their terminology but I’ve honestly never known one until this thread to explicitly and narrolwy define a “cover” as being a straight aping of the original material rather than the broader sense of doing your own version of a song already recorded, whether it involves interpretation or not.
(In the rock/pop context, of course. We don’t talk about covers in classical or jazz.)
Yeah, same here.
Now, a perfect re-creation of exactly the same song we called a “pointless cover”. One that wasn’t as good as the original was a “stupid pointless cover”. A cover like Johnny Cash’s Hurt we called a “fukkin’ awesome cover, man…”
eta:
Oh, a cover that was a complete reinterpretation (Disturbed’s Sound of Silence, Nina Gordon’s Straight Outta Compton, Ryan Adams doing a whole Taylor Swift album) was called a “Dude, listen to this” cover.
(Those are the ones where I can feel whole new pathways in my brain being formed…)
Yes, exactly used like that around my peers. For an example of “pointless cover” see Weezer’s version of “Africa,” of course.
Or Tom Petty’s cover of “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better”. But though that’s virtually a one-to-one copy, I still like it.