Welcome to our first installment in our series on Cover Songs. In this issue we’ll be focusing on just a few girls that have covered songs by guys.
I really don’t think there’s that many people you can say have as much on-stage presence and energy as Iggy Pop, but Peaches is definitely one name that comes to mind for me. Whats more, they’ve worked together before.
Search And Destroy was originally performed by The Stooges, and the title of the song is from an article Iggy Pop read in Time Magazine on the Vietnam War. The song can be credited with influencing decades of punk bands, and Peaches’ cover contains all the emotion of Iggy’s original release. Stripped down even further than the Bruce Dickinson 1997 re-release — to just a drum machine and a couple of layered Synth tracks — I love the simplicity of it, and feel it does great homage to one of my favourite Punk groups.
Patti Smith has released so many beautiful albums, and has written some of my favourite songs — yet it was with her album of cover songs — Twelve — that I realised the variety she is capable of. Although I’m concentrating on Smells Like Teen Spirit here, the album contains covers of artists from Bob Dylan to R.E.M. to Tears For Fears.
Almost universally, the initial listen of this song is met with an exclamation of “Wow, I never realised he was actually singing words!”. For the record, my favourite Nirvana album is With the Lights Out: a vast collection of studio sessions, boombox recordings, and live performances that show depth and talent you wouldn’t imagine from listening to the studio albums, and I feel that Patti Smith captures this intensity almost perfectly.
E.S.L. are a quartet of Canadian gypsies that make their living performing orchestral cover versions of artists such as Neil Young and The Velvet Underground. For this cover song, they’ve taken a brilliant Beastie Boys number from their first album: License To Ill.
On an album filled with such classics as Paul Revere, Hold It Now, Hit It, Brass Monkey, No Sleep Till Brooklyn and of course (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party), Girls at first seems like an odd choice to cover. However, E.S.L. take a catchy song and turn it into a brilliant and funny little number.
Cat Power is well known for her cover songs. In fact, her album — The Covers Record — is entirely a collection of covers recorded at various sessions between 1998 and 1999, the very best of which I feel is her cover of The Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. A song that was written by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger as a response to the rampant commercialism that they had seen in America.
Cat Power’s cover takes a song that was originally penned as a folk song, and strips it back to it’s roots. In fact, she goes so far as to remove the chorus from the song entirely — it’s so different in feel to the original that I had to give it a couple more listens before I could be sure that it was indeed a cover of The Rolling Stones’ song of the same name.
The Weight has to be one of the best-known songs by The Band, best described as a critically acclaimed and extremely influential Canadian-American rock and roll group of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Aretha Franklin is probably best known to many these days for her role singing Think in the movie Blues Brothers.
The Weight is said by Robbie Robertson to be influenced by the movies of Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel:
In Buñuel there were these people trying to be good and it’s impossible to be good. In “The Weight” it was this very simple thing. Someone says, “Listen, would you do me this favour? When you get there will you say ‘hello’ to somebody or will you give somebody this or will you pick up one of these for me? Oh? You’re going to Nazareth, that’s where the Martin guitar factory is. Do me a favour when you’re there.” This is what it’s all about. So the guy goes and one thing leads to another and it’s like “Holy Shit, what’s this turned into? I’ve only come here to say ‘hello’ for somebody and I’ve got myself in this incredible predicament.” It was very Buñuelish to me at the time.
Aretha has one of the strongest voices I’ve ever heard in a female vocalist, and she uses it to her best in this striking cover, which has nearly as high a rotation in my play-lists as the original.
Annie Lennox has a beautiful voice, as heard on Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Walking on Broken Glass, Why, and many more.
The original was written by Neil Young, and in describing it he says “Here is a new song, it’s guaranteed to bring you right down, it’s called ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down’. It sorta starts off real slow and then fizzles out altogether.”
Annie Lennox’s cover may start off just as slow as the Neil Young original, but it’s much more grandiose in scope, with trademark Annie Synths and drum machines mixed with gorgeous backing vocals and a single piano.