I love a Foo Fighters Cover. They always bring their best, putting their personality on the cover. This cover of Kim Wilde’s (I can’t believe I remembered her name without Googling) Kids in America sounds like a song that only Foo Fighters could have done.
This cover is pretty well known, there are no surprises here. But Marilyn Manson’s cover of the Eurythmics Sweet Dreams definintely meets all the criteria for an awesome cover. Funny story: years ago, I was working at a bar in Toronto called Savage Garden. This was at the height of the popularity of this song. The DJ played the original version of Sweet Dreams, and this dude leaned over the bar to say “I didn’t know Annie Lennox covered Marilyn Manson!” The bartender just walked away, shaking his head.
When you find out that Fall Out Boy covered Michael Jackson’s Beat It, hopes are actually pretty high. And the band doesn’t disappoint. The song is most certainly Beat it, but it also definintely sounds like Fall Out Boy.
When Walk off the Earth covered Gotye’s Somebody that I used to know, they rightly got a lot of attention. This is cover is a lot of fun to watch (though I always have to wonder how many takes it took to get it).
You know what I love about this cover? Its that Ben Folds has taken a song heavy on synthetic sounds, and has it played on real instruments. The drum on the original is a drum machine, and the beat is a perfect rhythm, but its the imperfection here that I really love.