Skip to main content

The Covers Collection Vol. III

Fifty covers, and the through-line is nerve. Every artist here has taken on something they had no business touching and found a way through.

What a cover is for

A good cover is not a tribute; it is an argument. The interpreter has to find something in the song the original did not use, and the risk is total — if it fails, you have simply reminded everyone of a better record.

What makes this collection work is that almost every selection takes on something canonical. These are not obscure songs being rescued; they are records people already love, being reopened.

What to listen for

D'Angelo's "Can't Hide Love" live at the Jazz Cafe in 1995 is the standout. The Earth, Wind & Fire song is already a masterclass in vocal arrangement, and hearing a twenty-one-year-old D'Angelo take it apart in front of a London audience is extraordinary.

Alex Isley's "At Your Best (You Are Love)" carries real weight — the song is an Isley Brothers record, her father is Ernie Isley, and Aaliyah's version made it famous for another generation. Three claims on one song, and she handles all of them.

Amber Mark's "Love Is Stronger Than Pride" takes on Sade and gets somewhere genuinely different. Marsha Ambrosius and Anthony Hamilton's "As" takes on Stevie Wonder, which is close to reckless.

Usher's "My Baby Just Cares For Me" is the surprise — the Nina Simone standard, sung by an artist nobody associates with that repertoire.

Eric Benét and Faith Evans' "Georgy Porgy" reworks Toto, PJ Morton's "How Deep Is Your Love" the Bee Gees, and Alicia Keys' "How Come You Don't Call Me" is Prince.

Dwele's "Open Your Eyes" returns to Bobby Caldwell by way of Common, and Terrace Martin's "What You Won't Do For Love" goes back to the same well.

Troop's "All I Do Is Think of You" and After 7's "Sara Smile" are the vocal-group entries.

Go deeper

Go to the originals. Half the pleasure of a collection like this is the comparison, and several of these source records — the Isley Brothers' "At Your Best," Bobby Caldwell's "Open Your Eyes," Earth, Wind & Fire's "Can't Hide Love" — are better known now through their covers than in their own right.

D'Angelo's Live at the Jazz Cafe is the album that recording comes from and is one of the great live soul records.

And Alex Isley is worth following independently — Luxury with Jack Dine is genuinely lovely.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more