- Focusing on a single classic song (Don’t Fear the Reaper) and all of its covers, in order to find the best one (for the record, still Gus’s, although I’ve heard rumours of a bootleg live version by Elliott Smith that could surpass it for sheer sentimental value, if nothing else)

- Discovering covers (Baby, More Time) by some of your favorite bands (Fountains of Wayne)

- Tribute albums (like Two Rooms or Legacy) or soundtracks (I Am Sam) can offer hours of debate in and of themselves (is the band worthy of a covers tribute? Should it be an album or selections from their discography?)

- Then there’s the covers by folk who are independently talented artists in their own right, but who initially came to the general public’s attention because of of those covers(Jonathan Coulton’s cover of Baby Got Back; Eva Cassidy’s cover of Fields of Gold)

- Sometimes there’s the cover songs that didn’t depart noticably from the original, but nevertheless stand out like an original by virtue of the voice delivering it (Amy Ray’s [of the Indigo Girls] cover of Romeo and Juliet).

- Finally, there is the rare category of an artist covering their own song years later, where the difference in voice and emotional interpretation makes the two seem completely separate songs by two different artists (like Marianne Faithfull’s As Tears Go By, first sung in 1964, and then rerecorded in 1988 for her Perfect Stranger anthology. Course, this song is special, anyway, in the covers universe because of its interesting backstory: Supposedly it was the first *original* song penned by Jagger and the Stones manager, to add to the Stones’ repertoire of covers(!) they’d been performing live up to then. Except that Faithfull, who was also known to the Stones’ manager, was given the song to record first (and had a hit with it), and so the Stones ended up recording it about a year or so later themselves, essentially making a ‘cover’ of what was supposed to be their first original song!)

Okay, I’ll stop there before MB pulls a bartender on me and cuts me off…

Big bluegrass fan, so really dug the Iron Horse cover.

And the Taha cover has everything - Algerian rocker in Mexico covering an English hit. I dig this planet, sometimes.

Even sub categories like covers that cross musical genres (”Top of the World”, “Roxanne”) are so rich, you could devote an entire article to just a fragment of it: like bluegrass and country covers of heavy metal hits.

Some of my favorites…

Cardigans cover Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzgZJEpLuw0

Iron Horse covers Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R-2Hi9j4yM

Rachid Taha covers The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DbFYsi9iSg

And something a bit in reverse, The Toy Dolls (Brit punk) covers Bach’s “Toccata in D minor” - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wNS7uqu1hk

…or if you prefer spoofs,

Bob Rivers spoofs “Iron Man” - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ4nndbOT6k

I refuse to be a (recruiting) tool!

Sorry about that, folks.

~

Still trying to figure out if the Shonen Knife cut adds to or diminishes the awfulness of the original.

(Incidentally, that show, or at least the first couple of seasons that I watched, was very fond of covers. There was a great Eva Cassidy cover of Time after Time, which *is* on the soundtrack. Man, that woman could sing.)