ribble's Best Covers

I've been listening to odd foreign band Nouvelle Vague and thinking about some of my long-held opinions about what makes a great cover.

I think the key to a good cover is when a band reinvents a song in their own image. To do this properly, a band needs to have a strong identity coming in. In the best cover songs, I feel like I can recognize both the identity of the band and the contours of the original songs.

I first started thinking about this back in the late nineties when I was hanging out with an unrelated group of odd foreigners and listening to a lot of Ben Folde Five. Here was a guy with a diverse but very recognizable musical identity - I saw Folds at a college concert and he half-joked that his whole career he'd just written the same seven songs over and over.

If you can find some of the Ben Folds covers, though, they're pretty genius. It's the sort of thing where you start listening and then you say to yourself "oh, yeah! That's what this is!" (for the record, She Don't Use Jelly is one of my favorites.)

The best covers may be better than the originals, but it's like comparing apples and oranges. It's the same song in an alternate universe.