Cover band. Those two words are often enough, on their own, to cause a music snob to turn up his nose and rush off to type scathing entries in a (probably unread) music blog.
To those people, I heartily advise a voluntary 15-minute timeout to chill out.
While I don’t have as much creative respect for covers as I do for original material, there are times when a cover song can give you a fresh perspective or even – gasp – improve on the original.
For whatever reason, my ears have been perking up to interesting covers lately. Some I’ve heard have turned the original song on its head. Some stuck to the framework of the original but are just better performed. Others are so popular I long confused them for the original until research taught me otherwise.
For all these reasons, here are a few of my favorite covers (in no particular order).