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Hey, it's Alan and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music. Early and ad free on Amazon Music included with Prime. The world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 copilot refreshing wild cherry
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There's something fun about learning to play while one of your favorite songs for yourself. You know, learning the lyrics, figuring out the chords and the rhythm, and deconstructing all the constituent parts. Then you get deeper. You begin to appreciate how everything fits together. The artistic's decision made by the songwriter, what kind of musical skill is required, the sort of production that was employed and all that. And by the time you've learned the song, you've learned a whole bunch of other things as well. And you're probably a better musician as a result. This is why learning to play other people's music is so important. Now let's look at it from the other side. If a song can be interpreted multiple times by many different people and still sound good, then you could call that a great song. The best compositions not only sound great when played by a full band, but could also sound great when performed by one person around a campfire. And finally, there's the fan aspect of all this. People love to hear songs done in different ways by different artists. Sometimes the COVID is even better than the original, or at the very least is revealed to be something more, or at least something different in the hands of someone else. With all this in mind, I've assembled a list of COVID songs. We're going to go through all of them to determine what makes them and the original so great. This is the ongoing History of New Music Podcast with Alan Cross. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross, and there isn't a single original song on this program. These are all cover songs, examples of recordings made by someone who did not write the song. And each of these songs comes with a story. This isn't any kind of definitive list. These aren't the best or the worst or the most popular or anything like that. And yeah, there are hundreds, thousands of songs that we could talk about, but we only have so much time. So these nine we'll have to do for now. Our first story involves the first rock song to be declared platinum in 2018. It's Bad Wolves and their version of the Cranberries 1994 monster song Zombie. Now, Bad Wolves are from LA, and I guess we can call them a metal supergroup because they feature members of bands like Devil Driver, Snot, Bury youy Head and a bunch of others. They performed in 2017 and set about gathering material for a debut album. In November 2017, they recorded a version of Zombie and were pretty chuffed with the way it turned out. There were a few lyrical changes. The reference to Drones is probably the best example, but other than being a little heavier than the original, it was pretty true. Bad Wolves record label is called 11 7. One of the guys who worked there, a guy by the name of Dan Waite, was a friend of Cranberry singer Dolores o'. Riordan. Why didn't you send her a copy and see what she thinks? He said. I mean, how could that hurt? When it comes to covering songs, you don't have to ask permission of the original artist. But you know, in this particular case, they thought it'd be kind of cool to get Dolores blessing. Sure, why not? Turns out that not only did Dolores love the Bad Wolves version, she offered to come into the studio with them in London to contribute some sweetening to the final version. Maybe a little guitar, maybe some background vocals, you know, that kind of thing. They had no idea what she planned to do, only that she wanted to participate in some way. Arrangements were made for some studio time in London for Monday, January 15, 2018. The night before, she left a voice message saying how excited she was about the project and that she'd see everybody the next day. But as we all know, at around 9 that morning, Dolores was found dead in her London hotel room. Apparently, she'd been drinking heavily the night before. Lots of mini bar bottles and an empty bottle of champagne was found in her room. And then, apparently in her pajamas, she drew a bath, laid down in the tub, passed out, slipped below the surface of the water and died. No evidence of any drug abuse was found. Bad Wolves were understandably shaken up by this, but what should they do with the recording? It already had Dolores approval, but would that be in bad taste? Would that be exploitive? What should they do? In the end, they did release it, promising to give all profits to Dolores. Three children. The first check was for $250,000. If you've seen the video for this version, the woman in gold is not Dolores, but it sure looks like her from the original video in 1994. And the numbers she smears in the glass are 1, 15, 18. The day Dolores died. Our next cover is by Eddie Vedder. In 2006, his buddy Sean Penn started working on a movie called into the Wild. It told the true story of Christopher McCandless, a guy who survived in the Alaskan wilderness back in the 1990s. A okay, spoiler alert here he dies. Penn wanted Eddie to do the soundtrack. He'd contributed some songs to a couple of Penn's movies and thought it would be great if Eddie could do the whole thing this time. Oh, penn said. I want you to consider this song that I found. I think it'll work out great. Penn handed Eddie a long out of print CD from a Canadian artist who went by the name Indio. This was Gordon Peterson of Dundas, Ontario. Eddie In 1989 he issued a record on A and M Records in Canada called Big Harvest, and its main single was a song called Hard sun and it became a top 10 single. And then Gordon just walked away from the music industry. He didn't like how it worked, how it treated people, how it made them feel. So he quit. Big Harvest went out of print and was mostly forgotten. Yet somehow Sean Penn found a copy someplace. Eddie had never heard of Indio or Gordon Peterson or the Big Harvest album, but he did love the song, and he agreed to include it with all the other songs that he wrote. He even brought in Corin Tucker of the Riot Grrrl band Sleeter Kinney to sing backup when the movie came out and the soundtrack was released in September 2008. Eddie's Hard Son was the single and it became a hit. This came as a big surprise to Gordon Peterson. Again, I have to stress this, you do not have to ask a composer's permission to cover their song. All you have to do is give the original artist the proper credit so they can be paid royalties. This is the concept of the blanket license that applies in the music industry. And all was just fine for the first 18 months or so. It generated some good money. But Peterson then sued Eddie for a not getting permission to cover the song and b eroding the integrity of the song. The by changing some of the lyrics. Now the original goes like when she comes to greet me, she is mercy at my feet. When I stay to pillage her she just throws it back at me, Eddie sings. When she comes to greet me, she is mercy at my feet. I see her inner charm. She just throws it back at me. So there's that change and a couple of others like it. But Eddie kept the general structure and melody of the song pretty much exactly the same. The case wound its way through the courts until April 2010, when a judge ruled that Eddie did not materially infringe on Peterson's song. Meanwhile, though, the checks just kept on coming to Gordon, and his big Harvest album was reissued after decades of being unavailable. It was really one weird situation. There's a big. A big heart, sun beating on the big people. Our next cover is actually a cover of a cover of a cover. In 2001, Marilyn Manson was asked to contribute a song to the soundtrack of Not Another Teen Movie. Instead of writing something original, he decided that given the nature of the movie's plot, a version of the 80s hit Tainted Love was in order. Now, Tainted Love was best known as a product of the English techno pop group Soft Selling. They released it as a single from their Non Stop Erotic cabaret album in 1981, and it was a massive hit. It entered the charts on four different occasions over the next decade or so. It sold millions, which is not bad for a recording that they banged off over a day and a half. But that too was a cover. Tainted Love was written in 15 minutes by a guy named Ed Cobb. Back in 1964, he gave it to a singer named Gloria Jones, who released it in May 1965 as get this, a B side to what was supposed to be a big single called My Bad Boys Coming Home. Both of those songs, side A and side B, were a total flop and the record disappeared. But then in 1973, a British club DJ named Richard Searling was on vacation in the US looking for some interesting soul music. There was a tight scene back in England called Northern Soul. This was a dance movement centered in northern England that worshiped American black soul music in Motown. Searling started playing Tainted Love as part of his set at a couple of clubs and it set the dance floor on fire. Word got back to Gloria Jones who re recorded the song and it failed again. By this time though, she was the girlfriend of Mark Bolan, the famous British glam musician and friend of David Bowie. And this was all fine until September 16, 1977, when she was driving Boland's mini home from a night out and something went wrong over a small bridge and. And the car went out of control, hit a fence post and then a tree. Mark Boland was killed instantly. Again, Boland owned the car, but he never learned how to drive. Why? Because he was afraid he'd die in a car accident. And he had bigger cars they could have been driving. An old Mini was a tiny, fragile thing. He could have had Gloria drive his Rolls Royce, but he had lent it out to another band that night. All this tied to this one song. And here's Manson's cover of it. Marilyn Manson covering Soft Sal, who covered Gloria Jones, a song that dates all the way back to 1964. In a moment More interesting cover song story starting with a song that works great despite a very big change of mood and demeanor.
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Welcome back to this look at some great cover songs. Again, there is nothing definitive about what we're listening to, but all these cover versions are undeniably great and they take the original song in new directions and they always come with great stories. Now let's go to 1983. Tears for fears released their debut album that year. It was called the Hurting and at first it was treated as basically another techno pop project of that era. But the more you listened to the record, the more you realized that this was something much more than that. Roland Orzabel and Kurt Smith were onto something really different, really interesting. A single called Mad World was released the previous fall. This would be September 1982 and it became an across the board hit. New wave and alternative rock, pop, the whole works. Roland wrote the song and Kurt the bass player was the singer. Roland was deep into psychology and psychiatry at the time. He was particularly fascinated by the teachings of Arthur Janoff, the guy behind Primal Scream Therapy, a type of treatment where patients are encouraged to dig deep into their psyches in order to uncover what was really bothering them. John Lennon and Yoko Onna were deep into this. Then we have to Fast forward to 2001. That's when a San Diego musician named Michael Andrews was contacted by director Richard Kelly, who was working on a movie called Donnie Darko. If you know the film, it's about a guy named Donnie who was compelled to follow some pretty apocalyptic visions. Andrew thought that Mad World would be perfect for the soundtrack. It was one of his favorite songs as a kid, but he knew he couldn't use it in its original form. It just wasn't quite right. So he reached out to his favorite singer, Gary Jules. The two of them had once been in a band together. Andrews stripped the song down to its basics, just piano, a mellotron and a few other flourishes. This was partly for artistic reasons, but it was also for budgetary ones. Andrews didn't have a lot of money to work with, so he couldn't use too many other musicians. He also slowed the tempo down about 50%. This version of Mad World was issued on the official soundtrack of the movie and on dvd. And from there, though, it kind of took on a life of its own. It was released as a single on December 15, 2003, and immediately raced to the top of the British charts, becoming the Christmas number one that year. Children waiting for the day they feel good Happy birthday Happy birthday. This next cover is one of my personal favorites because it again illustrates how if a song is truly great enough, it can withstand any kind of interpretation. This is a collaboration between the Flaming Lips and another Oklahoma band called Star Death and White Dwarfs. We'll just call them Star Death. Just easier. The lead singer is the nephew of lip singer Wayne Coyne. Stardeath is best described as experimental, meaning that they'll try just about anything once, and for them, that means a lot of COVID versions. Back in 2009, they helped the lips cover Pink Floyd's dark side of the Moon album in its entirety. They also released a song by song cover of a King Crimson album called in the Court of the crimson king from 1969, and they did the same thing with the Stone Roses debut album. In the spring of 2009, Stardust and the Flaming Lips released a split 7 inch single with the Black Keys. This was for Record Store day. It all came on green vinyl. The Keys covered a Captain Beefheart song, while the Lips and Stardeath went with, well, just listen. Wayne Cohen and I once talked about this song. And I think we both agreed that what makes it so interesting is the same thing that we saw with the Tears for Fears cover. Sometimes to make a song even better than the original, you just gotta slow things down a bit. Let me be I don't wanna be your prisoner so baby, won't you set me free The Flaming Lips, along with Stardeath and white dwarfs covering Madonna's borderline that was released in 2009. You see what I mean about the slower tempo making it work? And it's the juxtaposition of having two very avant garde bands cover such a mainstream pop song that somehow makes things. I don't know all that much more satisfying. Here's another example of the same sort of thing. In the fall of 1978, Gloria Gaynor released a glorious breakup disco song called I Will Survive. It became a dance hit and an anthem for female empowerment and was embraced by gay culture. Here's a little taste in case you don't remember, That song was such a big hit that in 2016 it was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry of the United States. Huge honor. What people forget is that I Will Survive was a B side. The proper single was a cover of a Righteous Brothers single entitled Substitute, but it stiffed. The good news was that DJs had discovered I Will Survive on the other side. They started playing it in the clubs and the rest is history. It's since been covered dozens of times by artists around the world. Which brings me to cake. In 1996, I will survive was recorded for an album called Fashion Nugget. Gloria Gaynor, by the way, hates this version because Cake decided to include a swear word in the first verse that wasn't in the original. If you've heard the song on the radio at any point since 1996, there was an edit with the bad words snipped out. Now, Gaynor's opinion aside, I think the Cake version works. It flips the gender role and is played slower. And it's also an enduring alt rock hit. Here, Cake and a quirky alt rock version of a disco anthem from 1978.
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Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new case.
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last name the Snake Dream Team. The New Habitats Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. Zootopia 2 now available on Disney. Rated PG and right now you can get Disney plus and Hulu for just $4.99 a month for three months with a special limited time offer. Ends March 24. After three months, plan auto renews and $12.99 a month, terms apply. We're going through a collection of COVID songs done by alt rock bands that highlight how great the originals are. No matter what you do to the original, no matter how much you fold, spindle and mutilate, it will stand up to any interpretation. One of the great cover songs of the second decade of the 21st century involves Weezer and their version of Africa. And before we go any further, we have to have some backstory on this. Africa was a single from Toto's fourth album back in 1982. Toto was made up of some of the best session players in the world. For example, guitarist Steve Lukather plays the guitar on Michael Jackson's Beat it while the drums are by Jeff Piquero. Toto was what we used to call a corporate rock band, the kind of project put together with the express purpose of being mainstream and selling as many records as possible. In other words, it was really highly uncool to be a corporate rock band, certainly to a specific segment of the rock audience, including the alt rock crowd. You were not supposed to like Toto, but if you stand back and you shed all your prejudices and biases, Africa is a pretty fine piece of music. The performances, the arrangement, the production. From a musical point of view, this is really solid stuff. It was released as a single and became a huge hit. Even though Toto didn't really believe in the song all that much. They thought it was okay, but certainly not the hit that it became. Fast forward to 2018. Weezer had just celebrated their 25th anniversary on tour. They often get playful with covering other people's material. Poker Face from Lady Gaga, Song two by Blur, Nirvana, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, the Clash, Green Day, Beach Boys, Coldplay, dozens of covers. They'd become rather famous for doing this sort of thing. Meanwhile, Toto's Africa had become something of a meme, especially after it was featured in the Netflix show Stranger Things. And if there's one thing Weezer is, it's that they're very plugged into memes. But for whatever reason, they seem to have missed this one. Back in September 2017, a 14 year old girl from Cleveland named Mary Klim started a Twitter campaign under the name eazercoverafrica. She heard the song on Stranger Things and became obsessed with the idea of Weezer covering it. I have no idea why. She just wanted it to happen. So she started sending Rivers Cuomo tweets like, it's about time you bless the rains down in Africa. This campaign built slowly and a following was created by, but no response from Rivers or Weezer, which I guess is not entirely true. Drummer Patrick Wilson had the only response. He tweeted, I laughed. That's all he said. I laughed. Otherwise, nothing but crickets. But then Suddenly, in mid May 2018, Weezer dropped a Toto cover online. It wasn't Africa, but it was Rosanna, the other big single from that same Toto album. The message seemed to be, you want to troll us? Okay, we'll just troll you back. Weezer let that sink in for about a week and then suddenly posted their version of Africa. And it just blew up. It soared to the top of the itunes charts, all kinds of radio stations all over the world started playing it. And in fact, this became Weezer's biggest hit in more than a dec. Weezer's version of Africa and Toto, the original band behind the song, is absolutely thrilled about what Mary Klim of Cleveland did for the song. Steve Lukather even sent her a video message thanking her with the Ringo Starr goofing around in the background. It's a really great story. Now on to Dolly Parton. Okay, stay with me on this. She is one of the greatest songwriters of all time. No woman has been honored more in the realm of country music than her. She's had at least one Grammy nomination and some wins from each of the Academy Awards, the Grammy Awards, the Tony Awards, and the Golden Globes. In the fall of 1973, Dolly released a song called Jolene. And the narrator pleads with another woman not to take her man. It was inspired when her real life husband started flirting with a local bank clerk. The visual image of Jolene is based on a red headed young fan with eyes of green who asked her for an autograph around the same time. This was a big hit for Dolly. It won a Grammy and was covered many times. The song also had a great fan in Jack White of the white stripes. In 2000, a studio version showed up as a B side of a single called hey Operator which came from the Distill album. And then it showed up as a live track on the film and album under the Great Northern Lights, which documented the Stripes tour across Canada. Here is that original studio record. This was again a B side from 2000, The White Stripes with a B side that eventually became a concert face favorite. Their version of Dolly Parton's Jolene, originally released in 1973. One more and this could be one of the greatest covers of all time in the history of the universe. In the early 2000s, Johnny Cash's career had run aground. Not much was happening for him. But then he connected with producer Rick Rubin and came up with the idea of Cash covering contemporary songs in his own way. The result was American 4 the Man Comes Around, Johnny Cash's 87th studio album. It features material written by Paul Simon, Depeche Mode, Sting, the Beatles, the Eagles, a duet with Nick Cave, and most importantly, a rendition of Hurt from the Nine Inch Nails album the Downward Spiral. The result was one of the most painfully honest recordings of all time, especially when you see the video which intersperses shots of Cash in his prime with the older man that he'd become. Cash was 71 at the time the video was shot, and he was in very poor health. The video drove Reznor to tears and it turned Cash into an alternative hero. The original man in Black, his hurt, sold nearly 3 million downloads, tens of millions of YouTube views, a ton of music awards from both the rock and country establishment, and it was the biggest hit of his career. Cash died seven months after the video was shot. The house in the video, the cash home for 30 years and then a museum in Hendersonville, Tennessee, was in really rough shape. It burned to the ground in 2007, and the chair in which we see Johnny sitting in the video is on permanent display behind glass at the Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville. I will let you down I will make you. I'll say it one more time. A great song will stand up to any interpretation by anyone, anywhere, in any era, in any genre. There are thousands of songs that we could have looked at, so we'll have to revisit these recordings and their stories again sometime in the future. There is a podcast that goes with this radio program. It's also called the Ongoing History of New Music. Most people seem to go to itunes to get theirs, but you can subscribe on any platform that's serves up podcasts and that includes Spotify, Stitcher and Google Rate. Review and remember to subscribe. We're posting new episodes every week. I have a website, it's called thejournalofmusicalthings.com I update it every day and there's a free newsletter that keeps you abreast of everything that's going on. Just like the podcast. It is also free to subscribe and you should and we can also connect through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google. I'd love to talk to you. My email is AlanLancross CA Technical Productions by Rob Johnston I'm Alan Cross. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
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