Five cover songs that should be deleted from history
If it wasn’t for other people singing his songs, think of the cover versions from people like Peter, Paul and Mary and Odetta or The Byrds and Joan Baez, Bob Dylan might not have been able to carry on writing songs that long for a living.
Similarly, he never would have written his own songs in the first place if he hadn’t first done his time singing other people’s lyrics, from rock and roll numbers to centuries-old ballads, in the first place himself.
There’s been some debate online lately about the merits of people doing covers at all, but they are an essential part of any serious musician’s arsenal. Just imagine someone trying to make a movie without completely immersing themselves in cinema first, or someone trying to write a novel without first having climbed inside a thousand books, or taking up a paintbrush for the first time without immersing themselves in the worlds of Caravaggio, Edvard Munch, Marc Chagall, Frida Kahlo, Alphonse Mucha, Edward Hopper or Louise Bourgeois; there’d be no point engaging in any of their work, and the same goes for songs, as well.
You can always tell when a songwriter hasn’t done the legwork, cut their teeth or earned their chops by singing other people’s songs a thousand times before starting to write their own, because they have no reference points or sense of place in time.
Music is our common tongue, and songs are the language we trade in. We all have songs that hit us in certain parts of our hearts, songs that rewired our brains and took our breath away, ones that put our feelings to words in ways that we’d been trying to do ourselves for our whole entire lives and yet never quite managed to. That’s when we take up other people’s songs and sing them ourselves, and that’s why we have so many covers in the first place, because music is a communal, universal language.
Sometimes, a great cover can give a song a new life, a new meaning and a new audience. Sometimes, a great cover can act as your gateway to a new artist. Sometimes, a cover can eclipse the original so much that most people forget that it’s even a cover in the first place.
That’s not to say that all covers are good, though. The all-star singalong of ‘Imagine’ that took lockdown from bad to worse doesn’t really count as one, but if it did, it would take the number one spot on every single list of ‘The Worst Cover Songs of All Time’ (while we’re at it, let’s just consign the saccharine ‘Imagine’ to Room 101 and be done with it altogether), but there are no shortage of other contenders for the title.
Five cover versions that should be erased from history
‘Fast Car’ – Luke Combs (2023)
Original artist: Tracy Chapman
Everybody knows this song; singing ‘Fast Car’ is as universal an experience as breathing is, but that doesn’t mean that everybody should do it into a microphone.
Tracy Chapman’s eponymous debut album is about as perfect a record as you could ever hope to hear. It’s supercharged with blood, sweat and tears. It’s full of the beauty and the tragedy of life. Full of grit, heart and soul. It’s politically powered, and it’s powerfully political. There’s not a thing that you would want to change about songs like ‘Talkin’ Bout a Revolution’, ‘Across the Lines’, ‘Behind the Wall’, the gorgeous ‘Baby Can I Hold You’, ‘She’s Got Her Ticket’ or, of course, ‘Fast Car’.
The thing that you’d want to change least of all about any of these songs is Tracy Chapman, and that is probably why you could fill this whole list up with five separate covers of her best-known song. Luke Combs’ latest is particularly egregious, though, and strips all of the soul out of this soul-shattering song.
‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ – Nirvana (1995)
Traditional song, artist covered: Lead Belly
If there’s one good thing that came from Nirvana covering ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ on MTV, it was the fact that they would have brought new attention to Lead Belly, the incredible bluesman who, in the early 20th century, recorded the definitive versions of songs like ‘Goodnight, Irene’, ‘John Henry’, ‘Bring Me a Little Water, Silvie’ and ‘In the Pines’, better known as ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’. However, the way they play and sing the song certainly doesn’t have any musical merit of its own.
But it’s not really any wonder that Cobain and co couldn’t get anywhere close to the raw, visceral and elemental power that Lead Belly could sing the song with. Most people can’t get close to him in those regards. But the reverence around their version can be quite grating as, in their hands, the song is reduced to more of a whining, droning, self-sorry number than it had been before.
All the nuance, danger, deception, trust, lust and the precarious balance of power are stripped out as they take it through the motions. Hopefully, they turned more people on to the magic of Lead Belly, but equally, I worry that their famous version has obscured or hidden his own, far superior version underneath an enormous layer of mediocrity.
‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ – Guns N’ Roses (1991)
Original artist: Bob Dylan
If I were being completely honest, I wouldn’t only consign this sacrilegious cover to the dustbin of history, but the whole recorded output of Guns N’ Roses, as well.
Dylan’s original, written for the 1973 Sam Peckinpah film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, is a masterclass in understated emotion. In cutting right through you with seemingly no effort at all. In breaking your heart into a thousand pieces and tapping into a universal feeling of suffering, pain, dread and despair. Incidentally, the GnR version delivers a similar series of sensations, but only in the way that they manage to strip this incredible ballad of all its inherent emotion, and in the way that they strip it of all its meaning.
Dylan, who is never shy about heaping praise on the countless cover versions of his songs that he thinks are deserving of credit, seemed to feel a similar way upon hearing Guns N’ Roses murdering one of his best-known songs. “There’s something about their version of that song that reminds me of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers“, he has said of the cover.
‘Perfect Day’ – Various Artists (1997)
Original artist: Lou Reed
Have the children not suffered enough already?
Perhaps this one shouldn’t count as a cover, considering that Lou Reed himself was actually involved, but this one laid the foundation for that horrible version of ‘Imagine’ we unfortunately thought about a while back. That would have been grounds enough for its inclusion here, but really, this is just one of the most excruciating and unforgivable few minutes of ‘music’ you could ever hope to hear.
The only redeeming factor in the version is the fact that all the profits were donated to Children in Need. Alongside Reed himself, Bono, Bowie, Suzanne Vega, Elton John, Boyzone, Emmylou Harris, Tammy Wynette, Shane MacGowan, Dr John, Robert Cray, Gabrielle, Joan Armatrading, Tom Jones and a whole host of less memorable names came together to take something perfect and reduce it into something unlistenable.
‘Hallelujah’ – John Cale (1991)
Original artist: Leonard Cohen
Taken in isolation, this version of this song should not be anywhere near this list, let alone sitting up here in the number one spot, but it’s not about this song as much as it is about all of the versions that came after it.
John Cale wasn’t the first person to cover what was, up until relatively recently, a Leonard Cohen deep-cut, ‘Hallelujah’, (Bob Dylan performed a couple of staggeringly powerful versions of the song live in 1988), but his version was the first domino in a chain that ended up saturating society with a tidal wave of new renditions, each one further away from the heart of the song than the last. By the time that Alexandra Burke wrapped her voice around it, the song was already starting to stale. When she topped the charts with it in 2008, there were already 300 recorded covers of the song, and her success with it only spawned more and more and more, each one worse, more self-satisfied and self-indulgent than the last.
Even Leonard Cohen himself called for a respite when it came to people singing his song. “I was reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it, and the reviewer said, ‘Can we please have a moratorium on ‘Hallelujah’ in movies and television shows?’ and I kind of feel the same way,” Cohen told The Guardian, “I think it’s a good song, but too many people sing it.” Amen.
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