Norah Jones covering I’ve Got a Feeling from the “rooftop” of the Empire State Building. I haven’t heard many covers of that song, but its quirkiness works well with a jazzy/gospel arrangement.
I love that!
I submit to the thread jazz-pop vocalist Julie London’s sultry, slowed down 1968 rendition of the Doors’ “Light My Fire”.
Here is one with at least a little bit interesting story. This one is a Metallica song…yeah.
Ride The Lightning from Megadeth
What makes it interesting is that:
- It’s the final song on Megadeth’s final album
- Dave Mustaine, the main member of Megadeth, claims to have written the song back when he was in Metallica, some 40+ years. He would have expected almost sole credit for it if he was in the band when they recorded it…
Now, Metallica has always credited it to their members…and Mustaine. They claim he wrote one riff. At one point in history, Dave Mustaine claims to have written a lot more than one main riff.
Megadeth, on the final album, also credits it to the other Metallica guys and Dave.
On some level, there is a peace offering with this cover. Metallica never sued or pressed any type of falsehood claims against Mustaine…they added his name even though he’d left the band before the album came out.
Now Dave includes their names and does his version on the final Megadeth album.
Megadeth’s version is actually excellent. Dave finally records this song he…wrote…most?..some?..a bit?
This one may border on sacrilege, but the Gram Parsons song “Return of the Grievous Angel” isn’t nearly as good as the cover by Counting Crows.
Here’s Dutch singer Danny Vera performing a Dylan-style acoustic folk-country cover of Heart’s “All I Want To Do Is Make Love To You” from a male POV.
Speaking of Counting Crows, Adam Duritz has always had a good ear for making a cover “his”. Another sounds-like-sacrilege: he upped the desperation on his version of Warren Zevon’s Carmelita.
Not sacrilege at all, Gram was the daddy and a killer songwriter but others have done justice them. For example, Elvis Costello’s version of ‘Hot Burrito #1’ (I’m Your Toy) is better I think than Mr. Parson’s version.
You want a deep dive of an Adam Duritz cover? While it’s not better than the original, his version of “You Might Think” by The Cars is pretty decent.
I’ve got a bootleg of a Counting Crows concert I went to in 2002 where they inserted a cover of “Oh Susanna” into the middle of “Rain King”. It remains the first and only time I’ve actually heard anyone perform all three verses of that song.
This cover of From the Beginning popped up in my FB feed today.
Danny Carey started the set like THIS…This lady is a rival for Barbara.
I may have to search online and see if I can locate that. Counting Crows are one of those bands that at least tacitly endorse bootlegging.
They had (maybe still do) a tape-trading forum on their website at one point. I got this bootleg by mailing some blank CDs to a guy who’d taped the show, and he burned them onto the discs and mailed them back to me.
This isn’t the same concert I went to, but it’s from the same tour;
The show I went to in Hollywood in 2002 was one of the last ones they did with their original drummer, Ben Mize. Partway through the show, he had some kind of medical emergency and they had to take him to the hospital. Adam Duritz stalled for time by having a roadie bring him his songbook and a music stand and played a few songs solo acoustic, then brought the rest of the band out to do some acoustic songs with no drummer. At some point, it turned out that the drummer for Cake was in attendance because Hollywood, and he agreed to drum for them for the last few numbers, and then Toad the Wet Sprocket, who had been the opening act, joined them onstage to jam with them for “Hangingaround”.
It was a pretty bizarre show and one of the few concerts I’ve been to where proceedings went completely off the rails and “the show must go on” took over.
For a number of years I’ve been noticing that young girls and women are keeping older music alive.
I’m going to include two clips here; they’re not great covers, in the sense that they are adding new stuff or innovating very much on the original versions. In fact, they are pretty close to the originals. But still. Sina Döring rented Abbey Road and put together a whole bunch of people to essentially play live• what the Floyd recorded there about 50 years earlier.
I don’t know much about Kawehi. Her version of Kiss doesn’t add very much, it’s competent. But I find it amazing to see what a one woman band can do with modern technology. AFAICT, she’s doing it in one take with looping technology. Bonius points for the purple dress and lighting.
•Lots of takes, obviously.
What a strange night. I saw them somewhere around the same time frame, when they toured with Live as co-headliners. One night Counting Crows would be the feature act (there was a band called Unified Theory that was the opener) and Live would close. Then next night, the roles were reversed, and the Crows would be the closing band. They’d have Live and Unified Theory join them for “Hangingaround.”
I found an old LA Times article about the incident, even, though it doesn’t mention the Cake drummer volunteering. It sort of reminds me of the infamous incident in the '70s where Keith Moon passed out during a Who concert and Pete Townshend recruited an audience member to take his place.
You know, I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but your linked article’s reference to Toad the Wet Sprocket (along with the subject of the thread) reminded that TtWS have actually provided the worst cover I’ve ever heard. Their cover of KISS’s “Rock & Roll All Night” is just mind-numbingly awful.
I appreciate an artist trying something different in a cover song, but a high-energy anthem slowed down and sedately sounding was just a horrible take for this song.
Heh. I love that cover!
If I were gonna nominate a worst cover I’ve ever heard, it’d probably be Nelly Furtado’s cover of Rush’s “Time Stand Still”. It just drains all the emotion out of it and sounds like bad video game music.
To get back to the actual topic of the thread, though, here’s British industrial artist PIG performing a weird goth-jazz cover of NIN’s “Head Like a Hole”.
