Welcome!
Feb 25, 2011 Uncategorized
Hello. Welcome to my little corner of the web.
The roots for my love of music came early in my childhood. My father had an impressive collection of 50s and 60s folk and country records bookended by albums full of Irish drinking songs. Our family would sing on long car trips and I learned the lyrics to songs like “If I had a Hammer” and “16 Tons” right alongside more traditional children’s songs. The first album I remember owning as a kid was “Chipmunks sing the Beatles Hits” which my brother and I used to play on a big, clunky, blue and white briefcase style record player. Then came a period of several years where everyone seemed to own ABBA albums and our family was no exception. Say what you want about the disco era those songs crawled into your head and set up camp forever whether you wanted them to or not.
In the early 80′s, I got a twin cassette deck boom box. Having a music player in my room allowed me to control the radio dial and I’d spend hours recording songs off the local top 40 radio station and making my own mix tapes. I bought my first cassette tape, the soundtrack to “Beverly Hills Cop” (a movie I strangely still have never seen) and developed an obsession with the band Genesis. I started tracking down all their old albums which were much different from the pop albums they were making in the mid 80′s. I discovered that my favorite tracks on these albums were nothing like what was played on the radio. I knew there had to be more music like this out there but had no idea how to find it. If it wasn’t played on the radio I didn’t know about it.
This all changed when bands like Whitesnake, Van Halen and Def Leppard hit the airwaves in the late 80′s. All of a sudden there was this genre of music called Heavy Metal that I’d never even dreamed of. I started reading metal magazines like Metal Edge and RIP, and created lists of bands I needed to check out. My musical tastes got heavier and heavier and I spent every extra penny on cassette tapes, often buying albums without ever having heard a single track. My friends started coming to me for advice on new bands which only fueled my need to know everything there was to know about every band out there.
My musical interests started expanding at a rapid pace. A girl I had a crush on started me listening to indie and alternative rock. My brother started listening to rap and hip-hip. A guy I worked with introduced me to Skinny Puppy and industrial music one day when he asked for my help trying to figure out the lyrics to a song. Another acquaintance turned me on to Black Flag and Minor Threat, the latter of which spoke to me like no other band before and songs like “Out of Step” became the soundtrack to my life.
I decided to go to college and major in Radio and Television Broadcasting. I joined the college radio station as a DJ and spent hours making tapes of songs from the station’s extensive library. One day when I was back at my parent’s house, I heard my youngest brother singing an old pop song that I was sure he couldn’t possibly be familiar with. When I asked him about it he told me that he had heard it on the radio and it was by a new rock artist. When I pointed out the true artist of the song he insisted that wasn’t correct. This prompted me to compile a double CD for him which contained one disc full of popular cover songs (including the one he’d been singing) and the second disc with the exact same tracks by the original artists.
I started making more of these double disc sets, and they became so popular that friends started asking for copies. I had to start actively searching out cover songs and managed to discover some amazing covers and amazing bands in the process. Now over fifteen years later, I have amassed a fairly large collection of cover songs and at the prompting of a few friends I’ve decided to start sharing some of what I’ve collected with the world.
This site will be devoted to cover songs. Some may be well known, others more obscure. Some may be works of pure musical genius, others not so much. In all cases I will attempt to give a brief history of the songs in question along with links to listen to not only the covered song but also the original if available. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy these as much as I do. See you in the comments section.