Favorite Song Covers | The Boneyard

Favorite Song Covers

Chin Diesel

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Can't really call this a "best" thread; more about covers you like.

Some covers try to stay faithful to the original, some repurpose the original and then you have straight up cover bands which cover all types of music.

I'll start off with one of each.
 

Chin Diesel

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This has gotten some airplay as a car commercial. Lemmy must be rolling in his grave. Or, maybe laughing and giving us the finger.

Regardless, tough to out riff the Stones and tough to out do Mick on lyrics, bit Motorhead nails this version of Sympathy For The Devil.

 

Chin Diesel

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And, from the cover and genre, out of Brazil, Milk 'n Blues covering CeeLo.

 

8893

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This is my favorite in the “repurposed” category:
 
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Here comes the sun- Richie Havens
Don't Let the sun catch you crying - Rickie Lee Jones
Sweet Jane - Multiple versions and bands


But my Favorite -
 

Gutter King

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Bob Carpenter probably would have made it big, but decided to fight the label...and of course lost. So his stuff has gotten buried/lost until recently.

Marlon Williams is a brilliant New Zealander who may be best known in the mainstream from this scene in A Star Is Born:



Marlon has one of the best voices I've ever heard. Here he did a great cover of Carpenter's Silent Passage:

Marlon Williams - live session @ Motel Mozaïque 2016
 

storrsroars

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Good thread.

I get a kick out of listening to "tribute albums" as sometimes the covers are just amazingly bad, or the artist adds absolutely nothing to the original, covering it virtually note for note and even trying to do a (usually poor) impression of the voice. "The Art of McCartney" is a good example. Lots of straight covers that kinda suck (you'd think Alice Cooper doing "Eleanor Rigby" would be anything but a straight cover, right?), but then there are gems, like Dylan's I-don't-give-a-single-f cover of "Things I Said Today" or even KISS showing off latent pop sensibilities in covering "Venus and Mars", about which my wife said, "I didn't know those guys could actually sing and play music...".

I often find tribute albums at my library and will give them a listen even if I don't even enjoy the original songwriter/performer all that much. It's just interesting to see how others interpret the lyrics/music and if they can make it "their own".

Couple of covers I go back to often are the very obscure Norman Kapayos (a guy who routinely covers Hendrix/Prince) and band doing an acoustic version of Queen's "Drowse" and Willie Nelson covering the big band classic "Caldonia" with Wynton Marsalis.

But I think my all time favorite is one I've been listening to for 30-odd years. I love it for the sheer audacity of using Steve Wickham's violin in place of a legendary guitar solo, and for the balls of even thinking about doing it while the original was still fresh, not to mention as your show closing encore when you're headlining Glastonbury 1986:

 
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Swedish band Bathory doing Back Sabbath's War Pigs
 
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Sonata Arctica doing a different Gary Moore song
 
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Finnish band Amorphis covering the Doors' Light My Fire

 

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