Cover songs can sometimes sound surprisingly better than the original — or at any rate, become significantly more popular. Take Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah”, Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along The Watchtower” for example — but there are dozens of other such intelligent covers that have made it to the shelves of musical classics. Over the past few years, the rise of online platforms such as YouTube and the increasing accessibility to recording devices has led to cover songs becoming somewhat of a musical genre in its own right.
BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge, for instance, records well-known artists covering the songs of other artists of a completely different genre. The Arctic Monkeys covered Girls Aloud, Queens Of The Stone Age took on Robin Thicke. Choosing a song and transforming it to make it sound at the same time completely different, yet recognizable, is a good reminder that hits are just a succession of chords and lyrics, and that anyone can have a go at making LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” slightly more listenable.
In Nashville, Tennessee, a musician called Ernie Halter just successfully funded his project via the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform: an album consisting solely of 90s RnB accoustic covers. “I present to you “Acoustic Throwback.” Naked versions of your favorite 90s RnB jams. Let’s take a ride on a six-string time machine, back to when MTV still had videos, and you still had a landline phone (and an answering machine),” says Halter. Here’s a good sample of his work — a cover of TLC’s “Waterfalls”. Worth the listen:
