The number of cover songs produced has never been as high as in 2011. New accessible digital platforms to broadcast music have resulted in a real outburst of cover songs, and we expect this trend to keep on increasing in coming years. A big challenge lays ahead for SecondHandSongs, the Internet-based reference cover song database, to keep up indexing these covers.
As we near the end of 2011, it’s time to analyse who managed to emerge from this abundance in cover songs. Listed below are the 5 artists who drew the most traffic with their cover songs on SecondHandSongs, the ones that mattered for our visitors:
Queens of what? At number 1? Far more than any other band in the SecondHandSongs database, the Queens of Dogtown sparked the highest interest. Ironically, they’re not a real band, but a fictitious grunge band made up for the comedy/drama series “Californication”. Interestingly, the lead singer is Zoë Kravitz, the daughter of Lenny.
From an artistic point of view their 80s and 90s cover songs (“Last Caress”, “Would” and “I Remember You”) have little to offer. Solid renditions, but too much “commissioned” to leave us with an indelible impression.
Eric Carmen’s evergreen, based on Rachmaninoff, pops up every year on charts all over the world. This time Charice, a young Filipino singer, who rose to fame thanks to YouTube, teamed up with music industry heavyweight David Foster. They bring a classic, clean though enjoyable version, avoiding the Mariah-Carey-pitfall: overdramatizing the song and by doing so killing it.
3. Jackie Evancho & Barbra Streisand - Somewhere
Jackie Evancho is an American child singer of just 11 years old, and blessed with an angelic voice. Picked up by David Foster (him again) she released the album Dream With Me which contains the “Somewhere” duet with Barbra Streisand. Though she hits all the right notes, this slick overproduced cover will not necessarily touch you.
4. The Word Alive – Over the Mountain
“Over the Mountain” was released this year on Punk Goes X – Songs From the 2011 Winter X Games, a rather opportunistic compilation that contained only 2 new songs. In covering Ozzy Osbourne, The World Alive made a good choice to avoid the obvious overly-covered Ozzy classics which spark little interest today. Instead, they went for “Over the Mountain” and translated it successfully to metalcore… if metalcore is your cup of tea.
Saving the best for last: Former child star Vanessa Paradis covers Alain Bashung, a French rock star who died in 2009. Her voice has nothing in common with Bashung’s dark and bluesy world, nevertheless she pulls it off brilliantly. Although her approach is very different from Bashung’s, she goes just as deep. A truly remarkable cover song.
Last edit: 2011-12-26 13:19:03 UTC by Denis
