by Matt Barr

Jai guru deva om

I spent last evening assembling a Napster playlist for my Creative Zen of good Beatles covers. I discovered something I suspected, which is that most people shouldn't cover Beatles songs. To get 17 or so good cover versions beyond what I already had on my player I probably had to sample five times as many songs. (Speaking of sampling, I did not include P.M. Dawn's The Beautiful, after much internal debate.) I ventured into their solo work, too. Here's what I came up with. Can you think of anything I missed?

1. Blackbird, Sarah McLachlan
2. Nowhere Man, Low
3. I've Just Seen a Face, Holly Cole
4. Across the Universe, Fiona Apple
5. Instant Karma (live), The Exies
6. I Want To Hold Your Hand, Al Green
7. Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth), Billy Preston
8. You've Got To Hide Your Love Away, Eddie Vedder
9. And I Love Her, The Holmes Brothers
10. Dear Prudence, Lisa Lauren
11. Here Comes the Sun, Nina Simone
12. In My Life, Renee Fleming
13. For No One, Rickie Lee Jones
14. Help!, Howie Day
15. Hey Jude, WIlson Pickett
16. We Can Work It Out, Heather Nova
17. Jealous Guy (live), Allison Moorer
18. Tnk (Tomorrow Never Knows), Phil Manzanera
19. Revolution, Grandaddy
20. Maybe I'm Amazed, Joe Cocker
21. Let It Be, Aretha Franklin
22. Grow Old With Me, Mary Chapin Carpenter
23. I Will, Alison Krauss/Tony Furtado

Websites that helped expedite this effort included Second Hand Songs, this five and a half year old Beatles covers list and the much more recent I Love Music thread.

Brief, general notes: the best songs on this list, by which I mean standalone recordings, are Fiona Apple's, Billy Preston's, Nina Simone's and Heather Nova's. The best reinterpretations of the original are Al Green's, Howie Day's, Wilson Pickett's and Grandaddy's. I'm surprised more people haven't covered John Lennon's posthumous Grow Old..., it's schmaltzy but when has that ever stopped anybody?

Most songs by girls on this list, Blackbird, Here Comes the Sun, Let It Be etc., are asexual, but I think oddly enough For No One loses something when sung by a woman. It's not that Paul McCartney is a master of plumbing emotional depths, but the "you" in the song is obviously supposed to be the "me" who's singing, and it helps add a depth of sadness to the song IMO.

There are very few cover songs of any stripe that are better than the originals, I've found, at least when you're talking about a decent song to begin with. The only ones on this list are Across the Universe and Help!. Fiona Apple executes the song beautifully and recognizes that its narrator has to balance being placid and obstinate for the song to work as well as it does. Help! always suffered from being produced as a jangly, poppy hit instead of a dark, disturbing, emotive song and Howie Day does it exactly right.

Five of these added to the radio.blog on my home page.

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