Top Ten Favorite Cover Songs

I can’t say that cover songs are my favorite things in the world—most of them are sacrilege because of how embarrassingly bad they are.  Most of the cover songs I hear sound stolen and recrafted for the purposes of getting more mass appeal, rather than being respectfully covered.  However, there are some good cover songs out there. 

When working on independent music projects (and when I was in a band) I’ve often been tempted to cover certain songs because I felt like the lyrics spoke to me, or that the song really embodied a part of my life in a very personal and touching way.  So I can definitely understand why a band would cover another band’s song.  I think a good cover song tackles the difficult task of sounding like it still belongs to the original artist, but also to the artist who is covering the song.

Here is a list of my top ten favorite cover songs:

“The Blood” covered by Fahrenheit 451 (originally by The Cure)

“I Wanna Be Your Dog” (banjo version) covered by Uncle Tupelo (originally by The Stooges)

“In Every Dream Home a Heartache” covered by Jared Louche and the Aliens (originally by Roxy Music)

“Hurt” covered by Johnny Cash (originally by Nine Inch Nails)

“Baby Doll” covered by Laether Strip (originally by Soft Cell)

“I’ll Come Running” covered by The Murder City Devils (originally by Neil Diamond)

“Age of Consent” covered by Grant-Lee Phillips (originally by New Order)

“Fear of Trains” covered by Love, Execution Style (originally by The Magnetic Fields)

“The Choke” covered by Element (originally by Skinny Puppy)

“A Hit” covered by Sebadoh (originally by Smog)

"Age of Consent" by New Order

"Age of Consent" covered by Grant-Lee Phillips

Note: I had a really hard time finding the music videos I wanted to display on this blog for both the original and cover songs.  I really want to show the Roxy Music video for "In Every Dream Home a Heartache", even though the cover version of this song performed live by Jared Louche isn't downloading properly from youtube.  Despite being anal and only wanting to display videos for original-cover pairs, I love the original version of this song so much, I just have to post it, even without its accompanying cover song...