The Best Cover and Tribute Albums of 2018

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Dec 142018
 

Follow all our Best of 2018 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.

best covers albums 2018

Two of the albums on this year’s list have similar titles: This Is Not Our Music and These Are Not Mine. Clever titles for collections of cover songs, sure, but misleading. Not your music? Why not? Songs are anyone’s for the singing. Even if a song’s lyrics or chord sequence didn’t first spring from a certain performer’s brain, that doesn’t mean he or she has any less claim. The great cover performers make the songs theirs, no matter whose they were before.

The twenty records below each contain numerous examples of artists doing just that. The songs may not have started out as these artists’ – but they are theirs now.

– Ray Padgett, Editor-in-Chief

Start the countdown on the next page…

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In Memoriam: Pete Shelley

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Dec 122018
 

In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.

pete shelley covers

The world of rock lost a uniquely talented songwriter on December 6th, when Pete Shelley died of a heart attack, aged 63. He was best known as the lead singer, guitarist and principal songwriter of Buzzcocks, a late-’70s Manchester band that brought the fierceness of punk to catchy guitar pop, or possibly the other way around.
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Phoebe Bridgers Strips The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love” Bare on Stunning Cover

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Dec 122018
 
phoebe bridgers the cure

Our 50 Best Cover Songs of 2018 post goes up Monday and, as always, the cuts to get it down to size were brutal. I know it’s going to rough going when the painful cuts begin when the list is still pushing 100. The final and toughest cut of all – the 51st Best Cover of 2018, as it were – came last: singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers’ mesmerizing take on Tom Petty’s “It’ll All Work Out.” It still hurts that that one didn’t make it, so I’ll give it a little extra shine here (go listen to it here!).

Bridgers’ cover of The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love” might have been a year-end contender too had it come out a month ago. Just as she did with the Petty deep cut, she strips all the production away, leaving only a spare keyboard and layers of ethereal harmonies. “Friday I’m in Love” gets covered far less than comparable Cure hits, sometimes derided as a less artful pop-radio play (it didn’t even rank in Rolling Stone’s fan-voted Best Cure Songs list). Bridgers redeems the song on her stunning cover, recorded for a new Spotify Single, and will hopefully inspire more closet “Friday I’m in Love” fans to cover the song. Continue reading »

Cover Classics: Cat Power’s “The Covers Record” and “Jukebox”

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Dec 072018
 

Cover Classics takes a look at great covers albums of the past, their genesis and their legacies.

Black Friday may have gone, but here’s a twofer bargain.

Cat Power, aka Chan Marshall, has produced two near-full album cover classics in her career (so far), which doesn’t even begin to fully address her never-more-quirky approach to the songs of others. Not that she is lost for any words of her own! She’s got a back catalogue stretching across many styles and many genres, from raw scratchy indie through slinky southern soul, a touch of electronica and back again, yet always unmistakably herself. Her career has seen her seemingly beset by internal demons; many had written her off until her triumphant return this fall with Wanderer, containing ten of her own songs, and one contender for our Cover Songs of the Year post.

But it is back to 2000 we first go, to The Covers Record. Allegedly a disappointment to her record company, who had appreciated this was an artiste worth their investment, but even with lackluster promotion it became a slow burning triumph. Praise and plaudits accumulated over the years, not least as box set dramas required ever more diverse musical accompaniments.
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Cat Power Gets Jazzy on “What the World Needs Now Is Love” Cover

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Dec 052018
 
cat power jackie deshannon

We’ve got a big feature on Cat Power due to land this month, and – spoiler alert – she may just make an appearance on our year-end list (she did last year). But the prolific cover artist is hard to keep up with. Hot on the heels of her Rihanna cover, she’s tackled a very different sort of chanteuse: Jackie DeShannon. Cat Power picks a song by a man we’ve recently written about extensively, Burt Bacharach’s standard “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” penned with Hal David. Continue reading »

Walker Lukens’ Cover Strips the Cheese from “I Want a New Drug”

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Dec 032018
 
walker lukens cover

Wrapping up a 2018 that saw him release the critically acclaimed album Tell It To The Judge and open for Spoon at Nashville’s iconic Ryman Auditorium, Austin singer-songwriter Walker Lukens recently played a concert for local radio station KUTX. Before the show, the station polled their listeners on what song Walker and The Side Arms should cover. The Huey Lewis and the News hit “I Want a New Drug” was the clear audience favorite, winning over Fiona Apple’s “Sleep to Dream,” “Cinnamon Girl,” “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” and “Crazy in Love.” Continue reading »

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