Covers are a huge part of popular music. Can’t think of a new song? Need some way to suggest that your band is as good as Dylan? Why not just borrow one of his songs?
Covers have become such a venerable practice that it’s not uncommon for artists to release entire albums made up only of covers. Even bands like Poison have been accorded this sort of recording industry honor, which presupposes two things: 1) Poison need another album even if the band can’t write a new song and, more importantly, 2) Bret Michaels and company have enough taste in music to choose an album full of songs to play.
Choosing a song to cover is a difficult thing to do. It requires balancing a number of important factors. At the most basic level, the song must be good enough to stand on its own, but a band must be able to put an interesting enough spin on it to make it their own.
Yet, you can take making a song your own a little too far. There are limits to which kinds of songs your band may cover. These are tantamount to moral limits. Go listen to Celine Dion’s cover of AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” right now. There is no better way to encapsulate the stakes here.
Choose the right song to cover and you can even make your listeners forget that you didn’t write it. Choose the wrong song and you’ll just leave them scratching their heads.
Unfortunately, these decisions must also often be left to record executives. How else does one explain that Hilary Duff was once allowed to cover “My Generation?” Just think about that for a moment. Let it sink in: “My Generation.” Hilary Duff.
Sometimes, the choice to cover a particular song can lead to greatness. I mean, who would argue that Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower” isn’t a masterpiece?
Let’s outline a few simple rules about covers:
1 Artists who are already terrible will not be made great by covering great songs. (When Poison covers “Suffragette City,” they somehow manage to debase both Bowie and Poison simultaneously.)
2 Covering a song note-for-note is not interesting. (No Doubt’s cover of Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life,” for example, just leaves you wondering why you aren’t listening to the original.)
3 Ironic covers only work if the artist respects the source material. (Go listen to Jonathan Coulton’s cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” for a hilarious affirmation of this point.)
4 Cover a song too far outside your oeuvre and you’ll lose your audience. (In 1995, the Meat Puppets promoted their breakout alt-rock album, “Too High To Die,” with a cover of Marty Robbins’ 1957 song, “A White Sport Coat.” No wonder sales of the album were slack.)
A carefully chosen cover can make or break an artist. The right song can send your obscure band rocketing to stardom and the wrong song can banish you forever to the bargain bin to be ridiculed.
Then again, I suppose that is not unlike any song. The politics of choosing a cover song just seem more apparent because you didn’t write it.
However, covers can never really be the bread and butter of a great band. All our Rock Band and Guitar Hero fantasies aside, you will never get famous as the world’s greatest cover band. Still, covers are a venerable institution and they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. As long as artists have the option for the cover as the quick fix to flagging creativity or an homage to their favorite influences, they’re going to keep using it. Let’s just hope they use this great power wisely.
You can reach this columnist at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
