The Kinks sure aren’t covered often enough. Here’s a good one:
And Neil Young to do “Sweet Caroline”, LOL
I hope this is a joke; it’d be a bit like not realizing Madonna’s 2000 cover of American Pie was a cover of Don McLean’s classic… Now let us never speak of it again.
Here’s another blasphemous “dance remix” of a Neil Young classic: After The Gold Rush by The Time and Space Machine, 2008. Brrrrr. (The St. Etienne cover was “interesting”, this one I feel is just “bad”; the arrangement totally doesn’t fit the lyrical imagery.)
Just remembered another favorite cover rendition, Guns ‘n’ Roses doing Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.
Yet I didn’t really care for the G-n-R cover of Sympathy For The Devil.
Sorry, you probably can’t. That’s what happens when I post at 4 in the morning. I blame Auto-Correct.
Musically, it reminded me of Joni Mitchell’s classic Big Yellow Taxi (“don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got 'til it’s gone - they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot…”).
It made me remember that Amy Grant had a minor hit covering this in the 1990s (with slightly altered lyrics), but surprisingly, the highest pop-chart position version is the 2008 cover by Counting Crows f. Vanessa Carlton.
That was a fun one. I noticed, now that you can actually understand the words being sung, the lyrics mostly fit very well in the context of a 40s big band song. Wouldn’t have expected that from Ozzy song lyrics.
Here’s Neil Young’s When You Dance, I Can Really Love done in a country/banjo style by the Paula Boggs Band.
Or, way better: Rockin’ In The Free World, which has been covered extensively by Pearl Jam and The Alarm such that it’s in their standard set, here performed as a global collaborative jam with an awesome array of musicians contributing.
You know, I don’t think my kids know the Ozzy original… Gonna put this on a few times, then play the Ozzy one, and see their reaction, LOL. It might be like suddenly hearing Black Sabbath doing a Cole Porter song.
That was genuinely awesome (see my other post about how I think my kids will totally believe it’s the original version)…
But thanks to YouTube’s side bar of related links, I have now also heard Eminem’s classic Lose Yourself done as a Gypsy Jazz/swing cover and I will need 30 minutes or so to recover from this.
Here’s the link so you can listen: https://youtu.be/3CACWj18ruk
Squire plays Bernstein at 1:44–1:50.
OK I’m just going to say that PMJB is going to win this as a category… I’ve just been listening to their collection on YouTube for the past hour-plus and at least one song sounds like it should always have been a jazz standard, The Cardigans’ Lovefool:
Nope. And I’m speaking of it…
It felt vaguely familiar that I’d encountered the idea of its being a Neil Young song - or that there was a Neil Young version - when I read your post, but no, that’s a Saint Etienne song to me. And presumably to many others. Google included. I just googled the title, first result: “song by Saint Etienne”, image of their single, link to their YouTube video. The entire first page is Saint Etienne references (although Neil C. Young is listed in the ‘other recordings’).
Not really the same ballpark as Madonna vs. McLean.
Could be because I’m UK based?
Hil St. Soul covering the Isley Brothers’ “For the Love of You”
Yesssss! I love this: the main reason I watched Jam & Jerusalem, to be honest. I’d never heard the Kinks original before that; it never had much airplay really, and I get the impression that interest in it was rekindled by the Kate Rusby version being so deservedly lauded.
Using DuckDuckGo.com after purging my cookies and browser history, I got a mix of Neil Young; Neil Young lyrics; St. Etienne, Wikipedia entry mentioning both performers;Youtube video links for Young, St. Etienne, and Everlast; Gene Pitney’s “Only Love Can Break a Heart”: and a young adult novel.
Young probably got most of the action because he was prioritized in Wikipedia and in the lyric sites, but St. Etienne was well represented.
Switching over to a United Kingdom area search, St. Etienne upped their game — mostly by appearing in more Youtube listings and lyrics sites — but still slightly trailed Young.
If your Google search was totally dominated by St. Etienne it seems likely that the results were influenced by your browser history. Possible?
That needs a link. 
I suppose it’s not impossible, but it seems unlikely. I mean, I quite like Saint Etienne when their stuff is on the radio, but I can’t see how my browser would know that. I’m not a major fan or anything.
Apparently not…
I’ve known the Neil Young song for most of my life - I mean, the song is from 1971, basically the same age as I am - yet only heard the St. Etienne version (an artist I had never heard of, either) for the first time this year, and boggled that someone made a 90s-style dance remix of it. “Eh, it kind of works, and it kind of doesn’t; forgettable except for the novelty.”
So there is a good chance that back in 1992 I did hear it once or twice, had the same reaction of “WTF? OMG? OK, that’s kind of an interesting twist on the song, not terrible, but I don’t care to hear it again” - and then never did, for 28 years.
If I look at Wikipedia, yes she’s mostly a UK based artist, and that cover version did do better there, versus having only fleeting/moderate attention in the US in 1992 (peaked at #97 of Top 100!). It says it did somewhat better on the “(US) Hot Dance Club Play” chart but I was definitely not guilty of being a “Hot Dance Club” frequenter in 1992. (Or any year.)
BUT, if I Google “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”, just like you the top result is the St. Etienne cover, with links to play it on Spotify or to buy it on Apple Music. That’s probably because it’s 20+ years more recent, even though the Neil Young version reached #33 to her cover’s #97 in the US.
I probably like these because of the context:
Eidelweiss from Man in the High Castle
Ryan Reynolds singing The Pokemon Theme Song
I’m a little surprised I don’t know Neil Young’s original; I’m a bit younger than you but my folks were really into all sorts of music, including a lot of hippy folky stuff. My Mum worked across the pond in the early '70s and lived with a load of draft-dodgers, and our record shelves when I was a kid were stocked with Dylan, Baez et al.
But, as I learned about a year ago, my Dad hates After The Gold Rush. So: not much UK airplay and a family moratorium for the original, and I was a teenager in the 90s…so actually it’s pretty understandable.