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Tue 20 May 2025 18:00, UK
Playing a good cover remains one of the most challenging things that an artist can do. On the one hand, some people want to play a song completely faithfully. Then, you have other occasions when people decide to take a song and give it their own spin. The two approaches have been used for songs by many, ranging from Bob Dylan to The Rolling Stones, and despite the years of examples, there still remains a solid approach towards what the perfect way to cover a song is.
People can play a well-loved song and give it their own twist, which is a welcome approach by a lot of modern artists. For instance, many indie fans were put on to the music of Drake when Arctic Monkeys decided to cover his hit ‘Hold On, We’re Going Home’. Equally, a lot of hip hop lovers suddenly became lovers of Otis Redding when A$AP Rocky decided to cover ‘Sitting on the Dock of the Bay’.
While this approach to the cover might be taken by many modern artists, it isn’t new. For instance, Vanilla Fudge is famous for being a covers band that gave Motown songs a psychedelic twist. Other artists, such as Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, and Guns N’ Roses, have also taken classics and tried to show them through a different lens.
Occasionally, the new, revamped versions of songs are preferred to the originals. For instance, Jimi Hendrix covered Bob Dylan’s serene song ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’, and injected it with hard guitar lines, riffs and packed choruses. Despite being wildly different to Dylan’s original, the world loved it, and Bob Dylan even changed the way that he played the song live because he preferred the way that Jimi Hendrix structured it.
“I liked Jimi Hendrix’s record of this and ever since he died I’ve been doing it that way,” said Bob Dylan when discussing Hendrix’s cover. “Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.”
While it might be tough to imagine a cover of one of Bob Dylan’s songs being better than the original, there are occasional moments when an artist pulls something magical out of the bag and manages to improve a song that didn’t feel as though it could be improved. Another artist who managed this was Linda Ronstadt, who famously took The Rolling Stones’ song ‘Tumbling Dice’ and improved it.
The story goes that Ronstadt and her band would soundcheck with the song; however, it was always a haphazard sound check as she didn’t know the words. Ronstadt had a vocal versatility that took the world by storm, and it meant that she could jump in and out of different styles of music effortlessly, because of this, putting setlists together was near-impossible. After an interaction with Jagger, he told her that her set needed more rock ‘n’ roll, and so she asked for the lyrics to ‘Tumbling Dice’.
“When Mick walked backstage at my Amphitheatre show, he told me, ‘You do too many ballads in your show. You should do more rock ‘n’ roll,’” recalled Ronstadt. “I told him I thought he should do more ballads, and we teased each other about it. But I made him write down the words to that song for me so we could do it.”
She started playing the song during her sets and included a recording of it on her 1977 record, Simple Dreams. Simply put, the reason why she was such a dominant vocalist is present throughout the entire cover. While the song structure is left unaltered, she managed to claim the lyrics as if they were her own and delivered a much more moving rendition of the song.
Mick Jagger himself admitted that he preferred her version. The band had her perform with them during a show in Arizona. While there is no recorded proof of her introduction, those attending the gig recalled Jagger saying that while they might have written the song, Linda Ronstadt owned it.
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