What Makes a Cover Song Great?: Our Favorites & Yours

Many years ago I tried to per­suade friends I played with in a local indie band to debut a coun­try-punk ver­sion of Wu Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” live. No one went for it, and look­ing back, I’m pret­ty sure it would have been a musi­cal dis­as­ter. That 90s hip-hop clas­sic deserves bet­ter than our Weird Al-meets-Ween-meets-Wilco approach, which is not to say that such a cov­er couldn’t work at all, but that Neil Young was more our speed.

Great cov­er songs come in all styles, and the world’s best musi­cians (which my friends and I were not) can take mate­r­i­al from almost any genre and make it their own (cf. Coltrane). For most peo­ple, the cov­er song is tricky ter­ri­to­ry.

Hew too close­ly to an icon­ic orig­i­nal and you risk a com­pe­tent but total­ly unnec­es­sary remake, like Gus Van Sant’s ver­sion of Psy­cho—“all that’s miss­ing is the ten­sion,” as Roger Ebert wrote of that 1998 endeav­or, “the con­vic­tion that some­thing urgent is hap­pen­ing.”

Stray too far from the source, as I near­ly dared to do with “C.R.E.A.M.,” and the effort can seem hokey, tone-deaf, dis­re­spect­ful, cul­tur­al­ly appro­pria­tive, and so forth. For some rea­son, old­er artists seem to have more grace with oth­ers’ mate­r­i­al, per­haps because they’ve lived enough to under­stand it inside and out. Many of my favorite cov­ers, and yours, are in this vein, like two well-known from film and tele­vi­sion: Charles Bradley’s cov­er of Ozzy’s “Changes” and John­ny Cash’s cov­er of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt.”

The fact that both of these soul­ful, raspy singers have passed on gives these songs an extra-musi­cal poignan­cy. They were also two singers well acquaint­ed in life with grief, loss, and hurt. Oth­er cov­er ver­sions that stick with me include Cat Power’s “At the Dark End of the Street” and R.E.M.’s cov­er of art-punks Wire’s “Strange.” What makes them great? I could go on about  the mer­its of each one, but I don’t have a gen­er­al the­o­ry of cov­ers. You’ll find such a the­o­ry in the Poly­phon­ic video at the top, how­ev­er, which asks and answers the ques­tion, “how does an artist nav­i­gate the tumul­tuous waters of cov­er songs?”

The nar­ra­tor admits the ambi­gu­i­ty inher­ent in judg­ing a suc­cess­ful cov­er. “I don’t think there’s a clear set of rules you can stick to that will guar­an­tee suc­cess. But I do think there are lessons to be learned from look­ing at the great cov­ers of the past.” He does so by ana­lyz­ing three of the most suc­cess­ful cov­ers, both crit­i­cal­ly and com­mer­cial­ly, ever record­ed: Jimi Hendrix’s haunt­ed elec­tric take on Dylan’s “All Along the Watch­tow­er,” Aretha’s anthemic trans­fig­u­ra­tion of Otis Redding’s “Respect,” and Cash’s open wound cov­er of “Hurt.”

All of these songs, in their own ways, trans­form the source mate­r­i­al com­plete­ly, such that each became a sig­na­ture for the artist. Dylan, for exam­ple, was so impressed with Hendrix’s cov­er that his live ver­sions began to resem­ble Jimi’s arrange­ment. “Strange how when I sing it,” he wrote in the lin­er notes to Bio­graph, “I always feel it’s a trib­ute to him in some kind of way.” That’s a rar­i­fied “endorse­ment of a suc­cess­ful cov­er,” if there ever was one, Poly­phon­ic says. But there’s more to it than earn­ing the song­writer’s approval.

To under­stand how a suc­cess­ful cov­er works, ret­ro­spec­tive­ly at least, we have to go back to the source and find the qual­i­ty the cov­er artist extrap­o­lat­ed and expand­ed upon. In Hendrix’s case, that was a “sense of ten­sion and desperation”—announced in his pound­ing intro, the first howl­ing line of the song, and, of course, in Hendrix’s slinky, spooky, effects-laden gui­tar runs. He trans­lat­ed the emo­tion­al tenor of Dylan’s orig­i­nal into a musi­cal vocab­u­lary that was ful­ly his own in every respect.

Cov­ers also evoke a host of per­son­al asso­ci­a­tions, as the video con­cedes, that are dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate to firm con­clu­sions about what makes one a suc­cess. We form life­long rela­tion­ships with cer­tain songs and may accept no substitutes—or we might, on the oth­er hand, be more drawn to cov­er ver­sions through a love of the orig­i­nal. That’s espe­cial­ly true with cov­ers that alchem­i­cal­ly change a song’s sound, mean­ing, tem­po, and feel while keep­ing its intan­gi­ble emo­tion­al essence intact. Leave your favorite cov­ers in the com­ments below and tell us what you think makes them so great.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 100 Amaz­ing Cov­er Ver­sions of Bea­t­les Songs

Icon­ic Songs Played by Musi­cians Around the World: “Stand by Me,” “Redemp­tion Song,” “Rip­ple” & More

With Medieval Instru­ments, Band Per­forms Clas­sic Songs by The Bea­t­les, Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, Metal­li­ca & Deep Pur­ple

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness