I love covers of stuff.  I love acoustic versions of stuff.  Put simply, I love hearing alternate versions of songs.  The other day, My friend reminded me of an awesome acoustic cover of Hey Ya (originally by Outkast) done by some guy named Mat Weedle, who apparently normally performs with the band Obadiah Parker.  I had heard it a couple of times on The bi-weekly radio KoL broadcasts by the devs of Kingdom of Loathing, but I had never actually taken the time to seek it out until now.

You know how sometimes you can look for one single small thing on Wikipedia, and it turns into an hour-long dive into a pool of pure fantastic information?

That pretty much just happened to me, only in about 10 minutes.  I’ve found 4 different blogs to check out, a piano artist on Youtube who knows his shit, and a couple of different covers of great soungs already.

(dammit, just looking at this comic, I had to go check to make sure that fatal laughter actually exists. It does.

the Outkast cover is, in and of itself, utterly fantastic.  Adding to that, I noticed on the ‘related videos’ tab, that someone had added piano to it.  In my opinion, it makes the song even better.  Pianomusings has simply played the piano over the recording, but it really serves to make the song even more exciting.

Looking at a bit more of Pianomusings’ stuff, he’s got a lot of potentially good stuff that I didn’t listen to, but I did happen to click on the link  for his medley of superman, how to save a life, and She will be loved.  It is a wonderful, wonderful thing: everything ties together perfectly, and the transitions are seamless.

Looking for an mp3 of the Hey Ya cover, I came across a blog for ametuer covers, that I have now sadly lost somewhere in my list of closed tabs.  The blog that it linked to, however, provided me with even more fodder for this post: Cover Me.

I’ve gotten so many covers to listen to already, that I really don’t want to take the time to list all of them, but here are a few that stood out:

Van Canto is a german band.  I don’t know what they normally do, but in this case, they did a cover of the metallica song ‘battery’.  It’s an acoustic cover of a metal song.  This alone got me to watch part of the video.  I didn’t like the song, but seeing a proffesionally shot music video for a cover song was intriguing enough for me to link it here.

I never liked Limp Bizkit, but that was only by association.  For whatever reason, I associate him with crappy music.  He just blew my mind with an amazing cover of ‘behind blue eyes’. It gets kind of weird in the middle, but other than that, it’s an utterly fantastic cover, from an unexpected source.

Lowry is responsible for this cover of Africa.  frankly, I want to hate it, but part of me just won’t stop listening. It’s an interesting twist, if nothing else. incidentally, I just realized that the line is ‘rises like Olympus above the serengeti,’ which is awesome. never realized that.

Boyce Avenue, which I did not just discover, deserves a mention here.  They have made countless awesome covers of acoustic songs, including a bearable version of Umbrella, an pretty OK version of How to Save a Life, and a cover of Mr. Brightside that I consider to be better than the original (more singing, less talking, you see.)

Speaking of Mr. Brightside, in searching for that link, I came across this cover of it, which would be unremarkable, if not for the interesting harmonies.

Finally, I can’t talk about covers without mentioning what may be my favorite cover of all time: Rumal Noorkuu’s cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit.  Ring ding g-dang g-dang indeed. (The page also has a link to a very weird and interesting version of ‘across the universe, if that’s your thing’) I once again have the fine fellows at Assymetric.net to thank for this. It used to be one of the regulars on the thursday radio show.  Something else that I just discovered while looking for a link: Tori Amos’ cover is cool and different and cool too.

I’ll get back to you after I’ve dug through some more of these covers.