Three Rules For Successful Cover Songs

3 June, 2010

I have an awkward admission today. I love cover songs. There is something so satisfying about hearing a good song take on a new sound or feeling. It may be that I grew up playing Jazz where 85% of everything I played was a Jazz Standard that had been recorded, performed and reimagined by most of the important cats out there. But unlike Autumn Leaves and All The Things You Are, which are great songs weather performed by Billie Holliday or your local junior high lab band, I hold pop covers to a much higher standard, requiring certain conditions to be met for me to consider it successful.

The funny thing is that while I like covers, I hate cover bands*. This is partly because the role of the cover band is to play top 40 songs more or less how they sound on the radio. In fact, that's more or less it. Cover bands are like live radio that play songs people want to hear while giving the venue 'cred' for having a live band. These are not the covers I'm talking about.

My three rules for a successful cover song are as follows:

1. Make the song different
2. Make the song your own
3. Shed a new light on the subject

These may or may not seem self explanatory. There are plenty of bands who fail at pulling off good covers. In the next week or so I will be going into each one of these rules in detail, providing examples of successful covers that I feel represent each one. Until then, you can check out my favorite cover-song themed podcast, Coverville to start appreciating covers while considering these principles.

*This is only a general rule. There are a handful of cover bands I have seen, Rage Against the Supremes comes to mind, that mingle enough brazen satire and self-aware awkwardness to make it worthwhile.