A reader writes:
Thanks so much for this cover series. The acoustic version of the metal tune “Jump” by Van Halen you posted yesterday reminded me of another band that covers metal songs acoustically, the Finnish group Steve 'N' Seagulls. Their version of Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper” is in my opinion superior to the original.
More covers from the Finnish band here.
(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here. Submit via hello@)
I’ve heard a ton of transformative cover songs over the years, especially since this reader series started a few months ago, but here’s a micro-genre I haven’t encountered before: American glam metal turned Scottish new wave:
Seeing “Hey Ya!” as yesterday’s Track of the Day reminded me of a great cover of a classic ‘80s song: “Jump” by Van Halen covered by Aztec Camera. The song becomes timeless with guitar replacing the very ‘80s synthesizer in the original. Aztec Camera’s first version (with vinyl pops, clicks, and hiss) finishes with an electric guitar solo, while the second [embedded above] is shorter with only acoustic.
(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here. Submit via hello@)
One of the great pop songs of the 21st century goes acoustic:
Chris Landry emailed it our way:
Allow me to express my (faux) outrage if you’ve neglected to give credit to Obadiah Parker for his sublime cover of Outkast’s “Hey Ya.” It’s simply amazing.
More on that 2006 viral video:
The performance was recorded at a local Open mic night, then obtained by a fan who mixed it with the original Outkast music video and uploaded it to YouTube. [Sadly that version seems to have been removed.] The song has earned nationwide media attention and radio play. It has been featured on The Howard Stern Show and Scrubs and was an answer to a question on Jeopardy!. It has reached the #1 spot on the iTunes Singer-Songwriter Charts in the UK, France, and multiple other countries.
(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here. Submit via hello@)
A reader recommends a cover song that doesn’t dramatically diverge from the original, but it’s an exceptional pick:
I’ve been liking your choice of cover songs lately, particularly the Lyle Lovett cover of “Friend of the Devil” (my dad was a deadhead). I’ve got a suggestion of my own, by my favorite artist of today on Austin City Limits, Jason Isbell: “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train.” That rapturous opening guitar especially.
Here’s the original from Guy Clark. And here’s a harmonized version from The Highwaymen—Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson. The Western Writers of America named “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train” the #45 Western song of all time.
Update from a reader, Jim Jolly, who helps with a clarification: The song was written by Guy Clark but first performed on an album by Jerry Jeff Walker, Viva Terlingua. Jim adds, “None of the other recordings comes close.”
One more reader, James Thoroman:
First time I heard this song was when I bought an album by Mallard, which consisted of several members of the The Magic Band who formed a group in England after they separated with Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart. Since I didn’t listen to C&W music, I always heard the great songs when they were covered by a group or offshoot that I followed. When I got the album, I expected and wanted more Magic Band-type tunes. At first I was perplexed by why they would include it. Over time, I’ve come to like it. It’s a great song.
(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here. Submit via hello@)
A reader sends a sensual song for Saturday night:
Choosing a sexy track is all SO subjective. But for whatever reason, pretty much all of Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy works for me.
More on the album from Slant’s Sal Cinquemani:
1994’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy marked the true arrival of Sarah McLachlan outside of her native Canada. Hers was a slow-burning success story and her third album’s lead single “Possession” was no exception. The single took its time fluttering around the bottom regions of the pop charts, but it ultimately became one of the biggest recurrent radio hits of the 1990s. McLachlan empathized with one of her crazed fans enough to write the song, an intensely dark account of a man (or woman) who becomes obsessed with a pop singer and ultimately finds satiation in dreams: “Nothing stands between us here/And I won’t be denied.” […]
Despite the semi-fictitious aspects of Ecstasy, the record is an irrefutably personal one. There are Bible-worthy allusions to forbidden love, temptation, sin and shame throughout tracks like the folky “Good Enough” and the propulsive “Wait.”
If you have a recommendation of your own, send it our way.
(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here.)
Bear with me: Coldplay is pretty dull, but if you take away Chris Martin’s whingeing singing, it’s redeemable. This is probably the weirdest song choice from a 2005 collaboration between Petra Haden and Bill Frisell. Haden, daughter of the great bassist Charlie, is a former member of the Decemberists who’s behind fascinating projects like a solo, a capella cover of The Who Sell Out. Frisell is a versatile jazz-ish guitarist. “Yellow” is already soft rock—might as well remove the bass and drums and strip it down to the basics, just Haden’s voice and Frisell’s multitracked, fuzzed-out guitar. It turns out there’s a great melody and chord progression in there.
To paraphrase my Coldplay-loving colleague Derek, this Coldplay song is awesome, if you ignore the lyrics.
(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here. Submit via hello@)
Is pop music getting worse? You might expect a 60-something guitar virtuoso, songwriter’s songwriter, and English folk-rock O.G. to be the sort of person who’d say so. You’d be wrong. In 2003, Richard Thompson released an album called 1000 Years of Pop Music, which is pretty much what it sounds like: A repertoire of Western vernacular, from the 13th century “Sumer Is Icumen In” through Abba, with stops in Henry Purcell, Lennon/McCartney, and Hoagy Carmichael. Your mileage may vary, but I think the best track is his rendition of Britney Spears’s 2000 hit.
“Oops!... I Did It Again” was actually written by Max Martin, the Swedish genius behind “I Want It That Way” and “Since U Been Gone” and “Blank Space” and about two dozen other songs you guiltily sing along with when you’re driving alone. In other words: disposable pop confections. Or maybe not. As Thompson’s rendition shows, these are meticulously constructed songs—compositions that can withstand removal from fresh-faced pop stars to grizzled old folkies.
(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here. Submit via hello@)
You probably already heard about the death of country music legend Merle Haggard. (Update: David just posted a tribute.) When I saw the NYT news alert this afternoon, I immediately thought of my grandfather, a huge country-western fan in general and of Haggard in particular. So I emailed Pop to see what his favorite Haggard song is and he replied with two: “All My Friends are Gonna Be Strangers” and “I Think I’ll Just Sit Here and Drink.” I went with the latter because it’s nearly happy hour, just in time for my grandfather’s vodka gimlet.
For more on Haggard, check out the essay Tony Scherman wrote for us back in August 1996 detailing how “Merle Haggard’s sandblasted truth has been eclipsed by the twinkly perfection of today’s country music”—more twinkly than ever today, two decades later. Here’s Scherman:
Before he stiff-armed the counterculture in 1969 with his hippie-baiting anthem “Okie From Muskogee,” Haggard was on his way to an unlikely apotheosis.
Rolling Stone critics lionized him as an auteur and an unlettered poet transcending the limits of a trashy genre. The genre itself fascinated hippies. The Grand Ole Opry, Goo-Goo Clusters, Tammy Wynette—wow! To the children of affluence, this was surreal kitsch, exotic yet on native ground. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda rode out to discover America in Easy Rider. Merle Haggard was the son of Dust Bowl refugees and sang about it; he was an ex-con and sang about that, too. “I turned twenty-one in prison / Doin' life without parole.” So what if the fellow wasn't a murderer? He was the real thing—ten times as real as Bob Dylan, that middle-class renegade.
But the real thing got nasty and bit the counterculture’s hand. Whether or not Haggard wrote “Okie” as a joke (he's never been very clear about this), it showed the hippies where his heart lay: with the hardhats. With the crackers who blew Hopper and Fonda away. With white working-class America, not romanticized à la Marcuse but in its red, white, and hippie-stomping blue. With the crowds of crew-cut flag-wavers who cheered Merle on all across America, in the autumn of 1969: "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogeeee . . . "
Recoiling, the longhairs vilified Haggard (“the Spiro Agnew of music,” one critic called him) and then forgot about him. Haggard shrugged and went on his way, singing for his faithful fans and slowly building what Down Every Road confirms is country music's greatest body of work since that of Hank Williams Sr.
(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here. Submit via hello@)
Some of the greatest covers are the ones that totally efface and replace the original. How many artists can do that once? Aretha Franklin has done it over and over—most notably with “Respect,” which at this point is so tied to her that many people forget Otis Redding wrote and recorded it, as a rather less gender-progressive song.
I heard her recording of “Border Song” on the radio and only realized years later it was by Elton John; I only listened to his rendition as I wrote this. Don’t bother: All you need is this version, which takes the ersatz gospel of the original and alchemizes it into the real thing. The main attraction is Aretha’s vocals, but the backing musicians bring it all together—Billy Preston’s organ, Chuck Rainey’s bass, Cornell Dupree’s chorus-drenched guitar solo, but especially the piano playing, which perfects the recording. Who’s that? Just a little-known studio musician named Aretha Franklin.
(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here. Submit via hello@)
A reader who grew up in eastern Montana flagged some sad news today: the death of Joe Medicine Crow. He was a Native American historian, the last war chief of the Crow Tribe of Montana, and the winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom:
Medicine Crow earned the title war chief “for his deeds in Europe in World War II, which included stealing enemy horses and showing mercy on a German soldier he could have killed,” Montana Public Radio’s Eric Whitney reports. He was also a living link to the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, having heard direct testimony from someone who took part in the battle and later chronicling it as a historian.
Our reader passed along this video of Medicine Crow talking about that fateful battle with General Custer, as well as recalling his deeds in WWII:
Joe Medicine Crow lived to the remarkable age of 102.
A few months ago, our Montana reader submitted a song from another member of the Crow Nation, rapper Chris Parrish, aka Supaman:
He’s a wonderful man and an inspiration and deserves all the success he can muster. In 2014 he was named Artist of the Week by MTV’s Iggy blog and has received multiple awards in native music, etc. If you like the track and can find a theme for it, please play it if you have a chance.
(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here. Submit via hello@)
For the Sunday sabbath, here’s a rock reimagining of a Bob Dylan song from reader Mikey:
So I’ve been through your complete archive of cover songs—some very interesting and unusual selections for sure—but I am stunned, gobsmacked even, by the absence of the Guns & Roses cover of Knockin' on Heaven’s Door. I’m eternally fascinated by the vastly different routes Bob Dylan and Axl Rose take to finally get to the same place. And the weird “telephone” monologue [starting at the 3:40 mark] was classic Axl genius …
I’m chuffed that our gobsmacked reader likes our series so much. Submit your own pick here.
(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here.)
A reader recommends several sexy songs for Saturday night:
Given that one song ain’t enough, I’m on an album tip here, and two that spring to mind are Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Stone Flower and Chet Baker’s Chet Baker Sings. The former because, after tiring of the familiar-to-the-point-of-
cliche Getz/Byrd and Getz/Jilberto, Stone Flower remains fresh and sexy as hell, and the latter because, jeez, the pants that came off to it in a more prudish time remain uncountable. YouTube gives a good start to each [Jobim’s video is embedded above—technically the first part of his album, not a single track—and Baker’s album is here], but just download or stream ‘em.
Jobim is also at the center of a classic Fallows thread on the singer’s widely covered “Águas de Março.” Our reader also emailed a cover song:
Not to flood your inbox, but this Miles Fisher cover of the Talking Heads’s “This Must Be the Place” is also great (and slightly NSFW—violence and simulated sex, if I have the MPAA terms right). It made the rounds at Esquire when I was there, because the blonde actress is Lydia Hearst, heir to the empire.
(Track of the Day archive here. Access it through Spotify here. Submit via hello@)
For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.
At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.
Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.
Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.
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On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log on to an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”
Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.
The age of the fare-gate society is here.
Vandals have done some senseless stuff on Bay Area Rapid Transit. They have removed the fire extinguishers from the station walls and sprayed them all over the place, for example. But what particularly vexed Alicia Trost, the chief communications officer for the train system that connects San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, was their destruction of map display cases at stations across the system: “You could not see the maps for years.”
Now you can. In August, BART completed the installation of new fare gates at station entrances and exits: Six-foot-tall saloon-style doors, made of plexiglass with metal frames, have replaced the waist-high barriers of the 1970s that were easy to duck or jump. The new gates have compelled more riders to pay their fare—revenue is projected to rise by $10 million a year. They have also led to an enormous drop in vandalism. Workers spent nearly 1,000 fewer hours cleaning up after unruly passengers in the six months following the gates’ installation, compared with the six months before. Crime on BART fell by 41 percent last year. Most fare beaters may be just trying to get a free ride, but most vandalism was apparently committed by fare beaters.
Donald Trump’s advisers are treating him like he can’t handle the reality of the war in Iran. They might be right—but that fact is a danger to the constitutional order.
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Earlier this month, top officials in the Trump administration were facing two problems—one distant and acute, one near and chronic.
The first was that two American airmen were missing inside Iran after their jet had been shot down. Commanders were scrambling to create and execute an operation to rescue both. The second was the president’s temperament. As plans developed and went into effect, The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, “aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said.”
Monogamy is one of the last bipartisan ideals—even if people struggle to live up to it.
People like to say that American culture has a puritanical streak: one that entails, among other things, a certain haughty piousness, instilled by the killjoys who reached New England’s shores in the 17th century. Yet the Pew Research Center, in a pair of reports released last month, asked participants in various countries about a host of moral issues—and found few in the United States that were widely condemned. Spanking children? Doctor-assisted euthanasia? Clear majorities said they weren’t morally wrong. Gambling? Marijuana use? Compared with respondents in many nations, Americans were notably permissive. The poll also revealed clear political divides: Republicans were much more likely to oppose homosexuality and divorce, for instance, and Democrats were more likely to reject the death penalty and extreme wealth.
America is more resilient than the pessimists think.
A reasonable rule is that once you begin making an argument ad Hitlerum—comparing some malevolent politician to Hitler or some malignant movement to the Nazis, or declaring a brutal (but non-eliminationist) war a genocide comparable to the Holocaust—you have lost the plot. The facile but extreme analogy is the first resort of the unimaginative alarmist.
To this we should now add the argument ad Orbánum, namely, the view that the Trump administration is just like that of the creeping, well-nigh unstoppable, and irreversible corrupt authoritarian ruler Viktor Orbán. In this view, the Hungarian prime minister’s version of illiberal democracy was coming for America, and would probably win—indeed, might have already won. In the wake of Orbán’s smashing electoral defeat on April 12, in a country whose experience of electoral democracy is recent and whose authoritarian past is dark indeed, the argument ad Orbánum looks pretty flimsy.
The document purports to show bias under the Biden administration—and fails spectacularly.
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The day that Donald Trump swore his second oath of office, he signed an executive order demanding “accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people.” Within weeks, freshly confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi had established a “Weaponization Working Group” aimed at rooting out supposed “abuses of the criminal justice process” under the Biden administration.
Despite this initial fanfare, the Weaponization Working Group has been largely quiet—until now. Last week, the group released its very first report, trumpeting its discovery of “shameful” abuses of prosecutorial power under Joe Biden against “pro-life Americans.” But the Weaponization Working Group has discovered very little “weaponization” at all. And whatever sins it does describe—both real and imagined—may serve as justification for perpetrating the very thing it decries. The weaponization report takes the form of a classic Trump two-step: First, claim that normal law-enforcement work, when directed against you or your friends, is illegitimate; then, use that supposed illegitimacy as justification for your own revenge. This is justice according only to the playground principle of “I’m rubber; you’re glue.”
Years before Mel Robbins published her best-selling self-help book, a struggling writer posted a poem with a similar message.
The year 2020 was a bad one for Cassie Phillips. Her husband had recently returned from an overseas deployment, and while he was away, she told me, she’d rarely heard from him. The pandemic began, and the family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where they didn’t know many people. Phillips felt isolated in her new home, and her marriage was falling apart.
Late at night, on her computer, she started writing out some lines—“If they want to go weeks without talking to you, LET THEM”; “If they want to follow the crowd, LET THEM”—to remind herself that she couldn’t control her husband’s behavior. The writing was an attempt to “get through the day knowing I didn’t have anybody but myself,” Phillips said; she was “learning not to give up on other people, but understanding I had to trust myself.”
Thirteen thousand miles. Infinite contenders. One beautiful loaf.
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Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain.
People scrutinizing influencers for their views should also hold them to account for their facts.
Last week, Pod Save America, the popular podcast founded by former Obama-administration staffers, hosted the influencer and leftist provocateur Hasan Piker. A charismatic and pugnacious socialist streamer, Piker has become a flash point in a broader debate among Democrats over how far their party’s big tent ought to extend. Unsurprisingly, Piker’s hourlong interview generated controversy. Critics on the right and left highlighted his refusal to condemn Hamas. Others were upset that the influencer said he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” even as he reiterated his reticence to back a progressive politician such as Gavin Newsom over J. D. Vance.
But a very different part of the podcast caught my attention, because it illustrates the problem with the wrangling over Piker: It revolves around his contentious opinions about a narrow subject—Jews and Israel—while giving short shrift to his broader worldview and his tendency to be wrong on the facts. The issue is not whether to engage with figures like Piker; it’s how to do so in a way that’s genuinely informative.
