Songs For Your Day

Ok, we are going to talk about it, yes the dreaded cover song. Nothing is worse then some young band attempting to cover one of their (and of course your) favorite bands. When I was much younger, in music years that is, I was suckered into buying a covers album of Weezer hits. Since I have always loved the first two weezer albums, I was excited to see some of the bands I was listening to at the time covering these songs. I walked out of the store, entered my car, tore the wrapper off the the cd and put it into the stereo. By song two I was forced to eject the album and quickly throw in the blue album just to make sure the original songs were still intact. I was a fool to believe that the original, simply catchy, songs could hold up in lesser musician’s hands. Rock Music: A Tribute to Weezer should have been titled Rock Music: A Travesty for Weezer Fans.

Now don’t get me wrong there are some covers I like, for example the Gourds (commonly referred to as Phish’s) Gin and Juice always makes me smile, and The Smashing Pumpkins version of Landslide is delicate and beautiful. But for the most part good covers are just fun distractions from the originals, easy to like but hard to love. It is rare that a cover can truly capture the essence of a musician daring to express there emotion through song. But as a way to make amends for every screamo version of My name is Jonas that lingers in the world, comes the covers that manage to “one up” the original. And that is what I want to really highlight today, those rare covers that manage to capture the true musical essence of a song.

So I now present you 5 songs that I feel undoubtedly fall into this third category, 4 being four sure classics, one being a new classic.

First four in no order

Jeff Buckley – Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen)

Johnny Cash – Hurt (NIN)

Soft Cell – Tainted Love (Gloria Jones)

Aretha Franklin – RESPECT (Otis Redding)

the new classic

The Antlers – When you Sleep (My Bloody Valentine)

I also want to include two videos that fall into a unique category; Covers that expose the appeal of certain songs. Unlike the third catagory, these do not capture the essence of a song, but rather allow us to question our original opinion of a song. I would like to title the duo,

“Top reasons to accept the beast that is Britney Spears into your life.”

I cite the second video as my reason for now liking the real version of toxic. Painful to say but non the less true.

_sk