← Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
Gotcha Covered Edition Part 1
00:53:42
A smash remake of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” has reminded us of the power of cover songs. But why are hit covers so rare today?
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You're listening ad free on Amazon Music. Hey there Hit Parade listeners. What you're about to hear is Part one of this episode. Part two will arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month. Would you like to hear this episode all at once the day it drops? Sign up for Slate Plus. It supports not only this show, but all of Slate's acclaimed journalism and podcasts. Just go to slate.com hitparadeplus you'll get to hear every Hit Parade episode in full the day it arrives. Plus Hit Parade the Bridge, our bonus episodes with guest interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics, and pop chart trivia. Once again to join, that's slate.com hitparadeplus thanks and now please enjoy part one of the of this Hit Parade episode. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanfy, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One series on today's show? Just last month at the 2024 Grammy Awards, this simple, heartfelt duet became the most acclaimed Grammy moment of the night. It was current country star Luke Combs and performing on TV for the first time in nearly a decade, folk singer songwriter Tracy Chapman teaming up to sing Chapman's classic single Fast Car. More than a month month later, this performance is still garnering buzz. Just a couple of weeks ago, in the wake of the Grammys performance, Chapman's original recording of Fast Car made a brief comeback on the Billboard Hot 100. Back in 1988, her single reached number six on the big pop chart. But the reason Chapman was even on this year's Grammys in the first place was that Luke Combs had scored a smash in 2023 with his countryfied cover of Fast Car. Combs version not only reached number one on the country chart, it also crossed over to the Hot 100 pop chart and actually peaked higher than Chapman's original did, climbing all the way to number two. The most remarkable thing about Combs Fast Car cover is that it exists at all. Straight up covers. I mean direct remakes of previous hit songs are becoming increasingly rare on the hit parade. At the dawn of rock and roll, covers were commonplace. They even helped define new megastars in the public's mind. From the 50s. To the 60s, Through the 70s and 80s. And right up through the 90s, Some songs were so sturdy they were able to top the Hot 100 in their original version, Then top of the chart again in a cover version. It's happened a remarkable number of times. Just keep me hanging up but while the advent of rap produced its own share of hit covers, Soon enough hip hop pioneered a new kind of remake, built around samples and interpolations, reboots that were so all encompassing you were meant to think of them as covers in all but name. And decades later, when a number one hit sounds familiar, chances are its title and lyrics are not the same as the previous hit. It's very intentionally borrowing from. Today on Hit Parade, we will consider the songs so nice we made them hits twice or three times or four. Whether it's a sturdy composition that stands up to reinterpretation or a hook so catchy it came back under a rapper's bars, Cover songs serve as our common musical language, and the most impressive are the ones that make us forget they ever existed before. Like, for instance, the recording that Rolling Stone magazine named the greatest single of all time. And that's where your hit parade marches today, the week ending June 3, 1967, when Aretha Franklin's cover of Respect topped the Hot 100. That's right, I said cover. Were you even aware the Queen of Soul's biggest hit, the feminist anthem where she demands that you give her her propers, was a reinterpretation and of a song by a man. His prior version was even a top 40 hit, but it's not remotely as famous today as the reboot. We've got a bunch of hits you maybe didn't know were remakes, and we'll explain how sometimes reinterpretations can be true inspirations. So shake it up baby and find out what it means to be a first rate retake. No matter what era we've gotcha covered, Stick around.
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And guess what, so is My money.
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As we were preparing this episode of Hit Parade, this song went to number one on Billboard's country airplay chart. As of this week, it's got the biggest audience on country stations across the U.S. it's by Kane Brown, who has scored multiple chart toppers on Billboard's country charts as well as the occasional crossover pop hit. And if something sounds uncannily familiar about Kane Brown's hit, you're not imagining that maybe that opening drum break tipped you off. Or the song's title, I Can Feel It, Brown sings that phrase multiple times in a melody that might trigger your brain. And then if it's still not obvious when he gets to the song's bridge, Brown makes his inspiration plain. Yep, Kane Brown's I Can Feel it is a For now let's call it a reboot of Phil Collins 1981 rock classic in the Air Tonight. But what should we call Kane Brown's reboot? Brown's producer doesn't sample the original Collins track, and the Brown song's tempo isn't remotely the same as Phil's sinister slow burn. You could almost do a country line dance to Brown's I Can Feel It. It's much peppier and a lot of the melody is different. Brown and his team basically built a new song out of the bones of in the Air Tonight. However, as per common songwriting law, Phil Collins did receive a co writing credit for I Can Feel it along with Kane Brown and his Nashville co writers and team. Brown absolutely wants you to notice that he's paying homage to Colin's old hit. The technical term for a song like this is an interpolation, parts of an old song repurposed for a new composition. It's not a sample. Brown doesn't use any of Collins's old recording and it's not exactly a cover. But we're playing this to give you a sense of what's happened to the COVID song. In the 21st century, few reboots of old songs are straight note for note replays and more. Yet these reboots are often really close close to being covers. This 2018 number one hit by rapper Cardi B, for example, it's titled I Like it and it's got new vocals by Carti and Latin megastars Bad Bunny and J. Balvin. But in essence it's a remake of Pete Rodriguez's 1967 Boogaloo Salsa Jam I Like it like that. Again, no one is hiding this. If you have fond memories of I Like it like that, which is an all time Latin pop classic, the Cardi B song sounds warmly familiar if you're a zoomer who's never heard I Like it like that, Cardi's reboot feels feels fresh and catchy. It's a win win for multiple audiences. And it's a win win for multiple bank accounts. Not only did the songwriters of Pete Rodriguez's I Like it like that get credit for Cardi B's I Like it, so did Cardi B and Bad Bunny and J. Balvin who co wrote their vocal segments, and nearly a dozen other songwriters who all collaborated in the studio with Carti Bunny and Balvin, a sample or interpolation based cover like this one is a rising tide that lifts many boats in the streaming music era when instant familiarity is vital and profits are collected in fractions of a penny. For the record, I like Cardi B's I like it. But I'll admit, and this shows my age, I have nostalgia for the traditional cover. For example, 30 years ago, I Like it like that was given a major 90s makeover by a team of Latin music legends including Tito Puente, Ray Barreto, Tito Nieves, and even drummer Sheila E. Who called themselves the Blackout All Stars. Recorded for the soundtrack to the 1994 film I like it like that, the Blackout All Stars, I Like it reached number 25 on the Hot 100 and became Gen X's favorite version of the Nuyorican standard. But for all its innovations, the thumping club beat, its hip hop conversant swing, this 1994 remake was at heart, an old fashioned cover song. FYI, the only credited songwriters on the 1994 version were original 1967 songwriters Manny Rodriguez and Tony Pabon. The 90s cover took a classic song and made it fresh again without further fundamentally changing the composition. That said, I like all kinds of covers. Later in the show, I'll play some 21st century smashes that do very clever things with old hits freshening and maybe even improving upon them.
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You used to, you used to.
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Yeah. But of course our primary focus will be on traditional cover songs. The history of covers is too vast for me to cover all of them. When you're done listening to this podcast episode, I'm sure you'll think of many I've left out. Heck, I'm not even going to be able to get to all of my own favorite cover songs, So feel free to write me or post on social media about your favorite covers. What I'm aiming to do today is trace the through line of the COVID how we got from Hound Dog to Hotline Bling for now, let's go back in time to the middle of the 20th century and the early days of the Hot 100, and even a bit before to the era of Tin Pan Alley. In a time when rock and roll was still getting off the ground and pop music usually involved an orchestra, covers were everything.
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Sneaking round the corner. Could that someone be Mack the Knife?
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By the time Bobby Darin topped the Hot 100 with Mack the Knife for nine weeks in the fall of 1959, this jazzy murder ballad written by Kurt Weil and Bertholdt brecht for the 1928 German proto musical the Three Penny Opera had already been recorded countless times. Indeed, it hadn't even been that long since Mack the Knife had made the charts. After the song was translated into English. As recently as 1955 and 56, Mack the Knife had made the top 40 multiple times in renditions by everyone from Lawrence Welk to Billy Vaughn to Louis Satchmo Armstrong.
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Someone sneak in around the corner. Is there someone Mac the Knife.
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Mack the Knife was, in other words, a pop standard, and songs like it were common currency on the charts. Back then. The song peddlers of Tin Pan Alley, the colloquial term for the array of New York City songwriters and music publishers that dominated US popular music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were at root hucksters who wanted their compositions monetized by recordings from as many hit acts as possible.
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Back in town.
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Bobby Darin scored his big smash after the birth of rock and roll. But before the rock era, in the time of the crooner and the big band, it was not unusual for a hot song to hit the charts in multiple recordings virtually simultaneously. In 1946, for example, three versions of to each His Own, penned by the veteran songwriting duo Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, topped Billboard's pop charts. Back to Back.
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To each His Own, to each His Own and My Own you.
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The Eddie Howard Orchestras to each his own hit number one first late in the summer of 46. Then Eddie Howard was replaced at number one by a version of to each His Own by Freddie Martin and his orchestra.
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To each his own, to each his own.
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Then just a fortnight after that, the vocal group the Ink Spots took a turn at number one with to each His Own. In that case, a black vocal quartet was replacing a pair of white big bands.
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To each his own, I found my own, One and only you.
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This cross racial interpretation is a key part of the story of COVID songs, especially in the early years of rock and roll and R B. For example, the doo wop classic Earth angel was first recorded by black quartet the Penguins in 1954. Their rendition was an instant R B chart topper by early 55.
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Earth Angel, Earth angel, will you be mine?
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However, on Billboard's pop charts, a cover by white vocalists the Crew Cuts was the bigger hit, reaching number three in 55. It charted alongside the Penguins version, which peaked at number eight.
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Pop Earth angel, earth angel, will you be mine?
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Another doo wop classic that quickly became a standard for covers was why Do Fools Fall in Love? By the black and Latin quintet Frankie Lyman and the teenagers in 1956. Their original versions reached number six. And was followed into the top 10 just weeks later by a cover from white soloist Gail Storm. Her rendition reached number nine.
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Why do they fall in Love?
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In both cases, Earth Angels, angel and why Do Fools Fall in Love, the black fronted original became the standard. Decades later, these songs would be taken back into the pop top 40 in faithful R B covers by New Edition and Diana Ross respectively. Before we leave the 1950s, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the most infamous cover singer of black hits for for pop crossover. Pat Boone, the white bread teen idol re recorded R B classics by the likes of Fats Domino and Little Richard. Just a couple of weeks after Richard cracked the pop charts with his legendary barn burner and veiled sex anthem Tutti Frutti, Pat Boone debuted with his watered down version. The Boone rendition of Tutti Frutti peaked at number 12 on the pop charts, Little Richards at number seven. Among the many things notable about Tutti frutti in the 50s was that little Richard had written it himself with a sanitizing assist from lyrics editor Dorothy Labostri that distinguished Little Richard's recording career from the prevailing song for hire model. By the 60s, the tin pan Alley approach would face a much greater challenge from a British forson from Liverpool who wrote much of their own material. When the Beatles debut album Please Please me arrived in 1963, more than half of its tracks were written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, a virtually unprecedented achievement for a rock and roll group. However, the Beatles had made their bones with COVID songs and they were fans of certain pop standards and especially RB girl groups. Cause Baby it's you. Like the Shirelles on their debut lp, the Fab Four covered three songs made famous by girl groups including Chains Boys and Baby it's you. But the most famous cover on the Beatles debut album was a party record that had already lived multiple lives. Twist and Shout, penned by songwriters Phil Medley and Bert Russell, was first recorded in 1961 by R B troupe the Top Notes. Their version wasn't a hit. The song then made its way in 1962 to Cincinnati Legends the Isley Brothers. This version of Twist and Shout, which the Beatles would later imitate, especially its ascending harmonies, made it to number 17. Pop number two R B. By the time the Beatles recorded it, Twist and Shout had evolved into a full on rock and roll rave up. Their version would eventually reach number two on the Hot 100. At the height of American Beatlemania and before they left England for the State's in late 63, the group famously closed their set with it at Queen Elizabeth's Royal Variety Performance. Once the Beatles broke on the charts, soon they were the Ones writing songs that other artists wanted to cover. The 1965 number one hit Yesterday, penned and recorded by Paul McCartney, Yesterday All.
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My Trouble Seemed so Far Away has.
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Reportedly been covered more than 2200 times. Among those many covers of yesterday, in 1967, Ray Charles's version cracked the top 40, reaching number 25.
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Oh, I believe.
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Yesterday. The other major source of covers in the 60s was folk rock legend Bob Dylan. In fact, unlike Lennon McCartney the quirky voiced Dylan's compositions often did better on the charts when someone besides him covered them. Dylan's classic Blowin in the Wind, for example, did not chart in 1963 when he issued it as a single. But later that same year, when co ed folk vocal trio Peter, Paul and Mary tried it, the answer My Friend Is Blowing in the Wind, their single reached number two on the Hot 100. A similar fate befell Dylan's Mr. Tambourine man in 1965. It was not a hit for Dylan. To be fair, he didn't issue his version as a single. But just weeks later, the Byrds recorded their chiming folk pop version and took it to number one. To this day, Mr. Tambourine man remains Bob Dylan's only Hot 100 chart topper as a songwriter. And three years after that, Guitar God Jimi Hendrix scored the only top 40 hit of his lifetime with his cover of Dylan's elliptically poetic all along the Watchtower. Moving into the 70s, covers were still commonplace on the charts. Janice Joplin's only number one hit, 1971's Me and Bobby McGee, was written by Kris Kristofferson and previously recorded not only by Christofferson, but also by Roger Miller, who'd had a country hit with it, and Gordon Lightfoot, who'd cracked the Canadian charts with it. But as we discussed in our spirit of 71 episode of hit Parade, Janis Joplin's version, recorded just days before she died, became a posthumous smash.
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Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
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Covers were also an easy way to get 70s teenagers idols onto the charts. There were hit remakes by such pinups as Donny Osmond, Michael Jackson, David Cassidy and his half brother Sean Cassidy, who took his cover of the Crystals 1963 hit De Do Run Run to number one in 1970. More remarkably, in the 80s were the songs that New Wave acts plucked from obscurity and turned into smashes. In our One Hit Wonders episode of Hit Parade, we talked about how the British duo Soft Cell took this obscure 1964 Northern Soul B side by Gloria Joney. And turned it into a synth pop classic. Soft sells 1981 cover of Tainted Love climbed all the way to number eight on the Hot 100 in 1982. Soft sells only US hit.
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All.
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Around the same time. This deep cut from 1974 by veteran singer songwriter Jackie DeShannon, a slap happy piano pop Diddy called Betty Davis Eyes. Was transformed by husky voiced singer Kim Karnes into shimmering new wave. Carnes's electrified cover of Betty Davis Eyes topped the Hot 100 for nine weeks and was the number one song of 1981. In 1982, former Runaways guitarist Joan Jett decided to reboot the this 1975 barn burner by British band the Arrows. Their single hadn't charted in either the UK or America, And Jett turned it into her signature song. I Love Rock and Roll, covered by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, spent seven weeks at number one on the Hot 100. Perhaps Most improbably, in 1983 Cyndi Lauper heard this obscure song by Pennsylvania new waver Robert Hazard, a song by a man about the frivolousness of women, And she decided decided she could turn it into a feminist anthem. Lauper's total reboot of Girls Just Wanna have Fun reached number two on the Hot 100 in early 1984 and launched Cindy's hit making career. More in a moment. The pivot from traditional covers to song interpolations began with the rise of hip hop. Of course, from its very beginnings, rap often reinterpreted prior material, such as the borrowed chic bassline that powered rapper's delight. But it's particularly notable that Rapp's first big pop crossover hit in the mid-80s was a straight up word for word cover of a 70s rock song. As we discussed in our Def Jams edition of Hit Parade, when producer Rick Rubin chose Aerosmith's 1977 top 10 hit Walk this Way and convinced Run DMC to cover it, he was deliberately trying to cross rap over with a mainstream white audience. If anything, Rubin's gambit succeeded all too well. Run DMC's cover of Walk this Way, featuring guest vocals and guitar from Aerosmith's own Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, was a number four hit in the summer of 1986, In the immediate wake of Walk this Way. Other rap covers of rock songs hit the Hot 100, like the Fat Boys remake of the Surfer, Safari's Wipeout or Run DMC's take on the Monkeys. Mary Mary. But rap's future was not in direct covers. It was in sampling and by the 90s rappers began sampling prior hits so prominently, their new tracks might as well be covers. And often these rap reboots did better on the charts than the single sampled originals had. For example, Rick James's funk classic Super Freak had only reached number 16 in 1981, but when MC Hammer transformed it into the unabashed homage you can't touch.
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This music Hit me so hard Makes me say oh my Lord, thank you.
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The 1990 Hip Hop Jam reached number eight. Or consider the dramatic 1981 duet Under Pressure by British rock legends Queen and David bowie. In early 82 it peaked in the US at a modest number 29. I probably don't need to remind you what became of that iconic bass line in 1990, except to say that Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby went all the way to number one on the Hot 100. Even a big pop hit could be turned into a bigger rap hit. In 1983, the stylish British new romantic group Spandau Ballet took their plush ballad True to number four. Then in 1991, PM dawn made true even bigger, transforming it into the number one smash set Adrift on memory Bliss, Spandau Ballet lead singer Tony Hadley gave his endorsement of the rapper's reboot by appearing in PM Dawn's music video. The clever and perhaps crass trick of these interpretations compilations, and it holds true to this day, is that the new artist leverages the warm familiarity of an old song but then adds their own personality to it. Not incidentally, the new artist usually gets to keep a portion of the new song's royalties, taking credit for the part they added. The interplative reboot has most of the upside of a straight cover, plus some fringe benefits in terms of branding and making bank. Mind you, rap interpolations didn't dethrone the old fashioned cover right away. At the turn of the 80s into the 90s, several straight covers reached number one, including Florida freestyle group Will to Power's bubbly 1988 medley of Peter Frampton Baby I Love youe Way and Leonard Skynyrd's Freebird. Sinead O' Connor's Totemic 1990 cover of Prince's Heartbreak Ballad Nothing Compares to youo.
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It's Been 7 Hours and 15 Days.
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And George Michael's Live 1991 cover of Elton John's Don't Let the Sun Go down on Me, featuring vocals by Elton himself. Their duet remake topped the Hot 100 in early 92, just a few weeks after PM Dong topped it with their Spandau Ballet Interpolation. But by the late 90s, it seemed like the hip hop interpolation was indeed winning out in the hands of producer MCs like Sean Puff Daddy Combs. Samples were getting bigger and more brazen, and the refashioned hits would even take their titles from the original song being sampled, further implying that the new hit was a de facto cover of the old hit. For example, The 1997 Puff Daddy and Mace hit Can't Nobody Hold Me down was built out of two prior hits, and it borrowed its title from one of the songs, Puffy Is Interpolated, Matthew Wilder's bouncy 1984 hit Break My Stride, in which Matthew, too sings that nobody's gonna hold him down. Sean Combs improbably paired this lyric with a sample of an early rap classic, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5's socially conscious 1982 single the Message. For those keeping score, the Message was only a number 62 hit in 1982, and Matthew Wilder's Break My Stride hit number five in 1984. And what about Puff Daddy's Can't Nobody Hold Me Down? It spent six weeks at number one, a hip hop Frankenstein's monster composed of spare parts. Was it a cover of Grandmaster Flash of Matthew Wilder? Yes, and it was bigger than both of them.
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Can nobody Hold Me Down? Oh, no, I got to keep on moving.
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Within months, Puff Daddy was back on top with a notorious big smash that was an even more obvious reboot. Combs flipped Diana Ross's 1981 number five hit I'm Coming out. Into Biggie's ghetto fabulous number one blockbuster, Mo Money, Mo Problems. Within a few years, the interpolative reboot had migrated from rap to R B and pop. Even a young Beyonce was getting in on the action. In 2001, her trio, Destiny's Child, licensed the guitar hook from Stevie Nicks's number 11 hit from 1982, edge of 17, And turned it into Destiny's number one smash, Bootylicious. And by the way, like Tony Hadley In 1991, Stevie Nicks endorsed this 2001 pseudo cover by appearing in Destiny's music video. By the dawn of the 21st century, it seemed the only way a straight cover could draw attention anymore was a total reimagining of the tone and even the tempo of the original song, stripping it down to a haunting skeleton. Welcome to the era of the bummer cover. In 2001, for the soundtrack to the psycho thriller indie film Donnie Darko, composer Michael Andrews and vocalist Gary Jules recorded a spooky, glacially paced cover of Tears for Fear's 1982 single Mad World. Even in its original version, Mad World had been lyrically dark, but with its pinging synthesizers, Tears for Fear's recording had a driving and much peppier tempo. Two decades later, the Donnie Darko cover matched the brooding lyrics with a haunting arrangement punctuated by Gary Jules's frail voice. This Mad World set a template for years of slowed down covers that spread through movies and TV shows. Around the same time, a bummer cover by country legend Johnny Cash became truly iconic, and it once again involved producer Rick Rubin for the American Recordings album series Rubin was curating for Cash. Reuben proposed that Cash cover a sinister lacerating ballad called Hurt penned by industrial rocker Trent reznor for a 1994 Nine Inch Nails album.
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My Empire of darts.
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In 2003, Cash's version of hurt became a cultural moment both for the recording and for its music video, which captured Cash in the final months of his life. Reflecting on his well publicized demons as well as his storied career, Trent Reznor said of Cash's cover quote, that song isn't mine anymore.
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I will let you down I will make you hurt.
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These early aughts covers of Mad World and Hurt did have considerable cultural impact. In the uk Mad World reached number one and in the US Hurt won the Country Music Association's Song of the Year prize. But neither recording was a major radio or US chart hit. The covers that were connecting on the airwaves were glossy interpolations by the likes of Kanye west, Who built his two 2005 number one smash gold digger out of a chopped up sample of Ray Charles's early R B classic I Got a Woman. Some covers were even spawning reinterpolations of their own. In 2006, Rihanna scored her first of many Hot 100 number one hits with SOS, a thumping club track that remixed Soft Sell's aforementioned cover of Gloria Jones's Tainted Love. Rihanna's version of Soft Sell's version of Gloria Jones was like musical Russian nesting dolls. The 2000 and tens. The main genre still regularly generating hit covers of prior hit songs was rock, alternative or even hard rock. At a time when traditional guitar music was being crowded off the radio by hip hop and electronic dance music, a cover of a familiar hit was the last surefire way for a guitar group to top the charts. Among the bands topping Billboard's rock charts with covers were Disturbed's 2016 take on Simon and Garfunkel's 1965 number one, the Sound of Silence and the vision that.
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Was planted in my brain.
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Bad Wolves 2018 cover of the Cranberries 1994 modern rock number one Zombie, recorded in memory of Cranberry's lead singer Dolores O', Riordan. And also in 2018, Weezer's cover of Toto's 1983 Hot 100 number one One Africa, which by the way, was recorded simply because a 14 year old Weezer fan tweeted at frontman Rivers Cuomo that the band should record Africa. It became Weezer's biggest rock radio hit in a decade. All of these rock covers may have reimagined the song's arrangements or tempos, but at root they were old school remakes. Whereas on the pop charts Moving into the 2020s, the post hip hop interpolation reboot is far more common. Just in the last five years, pseudo covers that have hit number one on the Hot 100 include Ariana Grande's new take on Rodgers and Hammerstein's Sound of Music classic My Favorite Things, reimagined by Ariana as Seven Rings. Drake's reboot of wright said fred's I'm too sexy as way too sexy to accept requests jack harlow's restyling of fergie's glamorous as his new banger first class. Yet another take on Rick James's Super Freak, this time by Nicki Minaj, who offered up Super Freaky Girl. And just six months ago, a thumping retake on Dionne Warwick's 60s classic walk on by transformed by a pugnacious doja cat into Paint the Town Red. Once again, to reiterate something I said at the top of our show, this makes Luke Combs cover of Tracy Chapman's fast car a unicorn by mid-2020s standards. A very traditional cover and a very big pop hit. How big Again? Combs cover reached number two on the Hot 100, topping Chapman's original, which peaked at number six. So you may be wondering, does a number one pop hit ever lead to a number one cover? The answer is yes. In fact, it's happened on the hot 100 no less than nine times. But you may have trouble guessing what those double number ones were. Well, today is your lucky day. I'm going to run through all of them. When we come back, I walk through the songs, both originals and covers that topped the hot 100 twice. A couple of those covers are good, even great. Some are terrible or just forgettable, but they all reveal something about what makes a cover connect. And while we're at it, I offer a short list of the best covers that exceeded their originals on the charts. Non Slate plus listeners will hear the rest of this episode in two weeks. For now, I hope you've been enjoying this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melant. That's me. My producer this month is Olivia Briley. Derek John is executive producer of Narrative Podcasts, and we had help from Kevin Bendis and Joel Meyer. Alicia Montgomery is VP of Audio for Slate Podcasts. Check out their roster of shows@slate.com podcasts. You can subscribe to Hit Parade wherever you get your podcast podcasts, in addition to finding it in the Slate Culture feed. If you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us while you're there. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. We'll see you for part two in a couple of weeks. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Melanthi.
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Sam.