Rediscover Your Favorite Songs With the Lifehacker Cover Playlist
Before, all great singers had the same songbook: a canon of folk tunes, jazz standards, and borrowed Broadway numbers. Louis, Ella, Duke and Nina, and the boys and girl groups, they all shared the same songs until the middle of the last century, when everything settled down. We now think of popular songs as “owned” by one artist or another. In pop music, a lot of hits are written by the same two guys and Sia , but our culture encourages singers to write their own pieces, and once a performer makes a song famous, we consider it “ours” separating those “originals” from “covers. “
Covering someone’s song has a different meaning in every decade – a wayfor the Beatles to find their feet of the sea , for a 70s disco to make every hit danceable, for 90s indie artists to borrow (or use) other genres, for a small YouTube for artists to gain recognition,for Jay-Z to have fun with Oasis , for established artists to do justice to their influence. And from time to time, a song like Gnarles Barkley’s “Crazy” is covered so broadly and so lovingly that it feels like we’re back in the era of the Great American Songwriter .
Below, we’ve rounded up over 100 great covers from YouTube and Spotify playlists. (The YouTube version has a few add-ons that you cannot get on Spotify or Apple Music.) The Apple Music version is here. For any other services, use Tune My Music to rip from Spotify or YouTube and feel free to link to your copy in the comments! And, as always, we accept offers.