Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with coversongs

What are your lesser-known or weird ways of looking for new music?

querty — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:05:21 -0800

What are your lesser-known or weird ways of looking for new music? Besides friends' recommendations, mix tapes, last.fm, review sites/blogs, TV/film song features, and late night talk show musical guests, what are some of your lesser-known or weird ways of searching for new music that others may not know about?

A few of mine:

- Sometimes I search for "recent favourite band + cover" on Youtube and sort them by views to find other new artists who very few people know. Those artists will usually have some of their own original songs available

- Search by lyrics to look for other bands/artists who have written similar words/lines/phrases, example

- Talk to touring bands after their shows and ask some of the band members what they're listening to on the road

Cover songs reworked in different time signatures.

querty — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:09:47 -0800

Looking for cover songs that have been reworked in a different time signature. I got the idea for this question when I came across this. The song you hear this band performing in the video is played in 3s (in a 6/8 feel), but on the album, the song is in 4/4 time.

So I wondered to myself, there must have been bands/artists in the past decade or two that have covered (famous) songs, but took the songs apart while keeping the original lyrics and put it all back together in a different time signature.

Youtube links would be great. 70s~90s pop/rock preferred. Would love to hear some Beatles songs redone in different time signatures. Bands have done this right?

When is a cover song not a cover song?

SansPoint — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 18:13:30 -0800

Is it still, technically, a cover song when the original songwriter records a track that they wrote for someone else? Take, as an example, Iggy Pop's "China Girl" - written by David Bowie for Iggy and recorded in 1977. In 1983, Bowie rerecorded it and put it on the Let's Dance album. Another example, slightly more obscure is "Video Killed the Radio Star" - written by Trevor Horn for Bruce Wooley and The Camera Club, and then re-recorded by Horn's group Buggles. We know which of those versions was better known.

There's other examples too. Are the re-recorded versions, then, still covers, or is there some other term for this?

Help me find some music?

bradth27 — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:23:19 -0800

I need some suggestions for covers or original songs by performers who are "out of their league." I need to find some music by performers who have either recorded a cover of a tune outside of their own particular style ( for example, Snoop Dogg's "My Medicine" or Faith No More's cover of "Easy.") This could include performers who take an original song and "turn it" into their own style ( Pat Boone's entire "In a Metal Mood" comes to mind, or many of the Cash covers that were put out on his last albums) or those who choose to keep the song in relatively original form.

I see that there have been previous questions about metal covers, but not really anything covering the whole spectrum.

What are your favorites?

Why aren't there any Rap covers by Rap artists?

ssmith — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 15:00:20 -0800

Why aren't there any Rap covers by Rap artists? This question was semi-inspired by the covers post the other day, but it's something that I've had on my mind for awhile. (Please note that I'm not talking about covers of Rap songs by non-Rap artists like Johnathan Coulton's "Baby got back", The Gourds' "Gin and Juice", etc.)

I find it fascinating that I can't come up with a single example of a Hip-Hop/Rap artist flat out covering another Hip-Hop/Rap artist's song. What is it about Rap that makes it run counter to pretty much every other genre of popular music?

What's stopping 50 Cent or Kanye West from ripping up "White Lines" or "Fight the power" and just making it their own?

Is the requirement for a mechanical license for (free) cover songs enforced?

advil — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 16:47:53 -0800

Cover songs, legal vs. practical: Is the requirement for a mechanical license ever enforced, especially for covers distributed for free over the internet? The legality of distributing covers has been asked about here, and it seems clear (or at least relatively clear for a music IP issue). Even if you're distributing a cover of another song for free, you're supposed to get a mechanical license and pay a certain (small) amount per copy distributed. I have a slightly different question: do companies like Harry Fox ever go after anyone for not doing this (or, have they ever done so), especially very small time cases? By "small time", I mean free, over the internet, with a low number of downloads. Pointers to articles about relevant lawsuits, or alternatively, explanations of why there are no such lawsuits (e.g. not cost-effective), would be ideal.

Incidentally I do realize that this has been discussed to a certain extent for music.mefi and that covers are condoned there (and mathowie hasn't been sued), but this question is not about music.mefi in particular. Also, this question isn't about live performance of covers.

Whoa-oo-whoa, listen to the music...no, really, LISTEN TO IT.

Vervain — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 14:30:02 -0800

Cover songs: specifically, cover songs that require you to reevaluate your opinion of the original. The vast universe of cover songs seems to sort itself out into four basic Mendel-diagram-ish categories:

Bad covers of good songs: New Kids on the Block covering the Delfonics' "Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time)" (!!!)
Bad covers of bad songs: Britney Spears covering Bobby Brown's "My Prerogative"
Good covers of good songs: Jimi Hendrix covering Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower"
And, of course, good covers of "bad" songs, which is what I'm looking for.

The backstory: I recently acquired a copy of the Isley Brothers' "3+3", which, apart from being insanely funky, has several covers of songs I would've otherwise dismissed as late 60's/early 70's schlock. Specifically, their versions of "Listen To The Music" (Doobie Brothers!) and "Summer Breeze" (Seals & Crofts!) have forced me to reevaluate how inherently sucky (or not) the originals were. Other, less extreme examples that come to mind: Isaac Hayes' "Walk On By" (a personal favorite), Al Green's "Pretty Woman", the entirety of Ray Charles' "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music," and a huge chunk of Nina Simone's work. It seems to be a reasonably common thread in soul music, though hardly exclusive to it--hell, Johnny Cash made a mint doing the American Music albums.

So, my fellow AskMefites: What covers are so transformative that they turn a bad-to-average song into a great one?

Si tu dois partir, c'est OK...

ITheCosmos — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 11:25:01 -0800

Cover songs translated from the original language... I've gotten slightly fascinated by these, thanks to, for example:

Bob Dylan's "If You Gotta Go" done by Lloyd Cole as "Si Tu Dois Partir"
the Pixies' "Where is My Mind" done by Koos Kreuk as "Waar is Mijn Hoofd"
Rachid Taha's Arabic cover of "Rock the Casbah"
Oh, yeah, and Seu Jorge, obviously.

Anyone know of any other interesting examples of this? I figure there's a good mix CD in here somewhere. I'm most interested in English songs covered in other languages, but if you can think of other examples, go nuts.

Looking for unusual covers of metal songs

gwint — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 08:35:37 -0800

I just discovered Sabbatum, an album of Black Sabbath covers-- in latin. I've been an Apocalyptica fan for years as well. Anyone know of other albums of metal songs covered in an unusual fashion? (Death Metal parakeets need not apply)