Random Blender of Randomness

Once again, blogging has fallen by the wayside as I've recently found myself spending unhealthy amounts of time in the wide world of Red Dead Redemption while also plowing my way through the third part of Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Blah Blah Blah trilogy (this time she kicked the hornet's nest!). The continued DMCA crackdown and migration of mp3 bloggers off of Blogger also does little to muster my waning enthusiasm.

Anyway, here's a grab bag of covers that have caught my attention recently. The Boss covering Bryan Adams? Kenny Loggins covering Feist? Joseph Gordon-Levitt covering Tom Waits? I'm not making these artist-cover combos up!

Bruce Springsteen - Cuts Like a Knife (live) [originally by Bryan Adams]
Last month, an all-star cover of Don't Stop Believing by Springsteen, Lady Gaga, Elton John, Sting, and others made headlines. Lost in all the OMGs and LOLs was that it was 80s nostalgia night at Sting's Rainforest Fund benefit and there were a bunch of random cover pairings such as Elton John doing a Material Girl/Like a Virgin medley, Sting dong She Drives Me Crazy, and perhaps the least likely, Bruce Springsteen adding horns and a rambling story about a girlfriend who left him to a nearly 10-minute version of Bryan Adams' Cuts Like a Knife.

Garfunkel and Oates - One More Minute [originally by Weird Al Yankovic]
Garfunkel and Oates (AKA Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome) were recent guests alongside Weird Al on an episode of the Comedy Death-Ray Radio podcast. In tribute, they performed a cover of one of Weird Al's best originals, One More Minute, with added cussing.

Kenny Loggins - 1234 [originally by Feist]
Finally got a listen of Kenny Loggins' All Join In album from last year, more or less a cover album sung more often than not with his kids. On the whole, the album may be a little too saccharine (it is on the Disney label after all), but I do enjoy how the coda to his Feist cover gets the Beatles treatment, incorporating bits of Penny Lane, All Together Now, and Two of Us, the latter two of which were also covered on the album.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt - Blind Love [originally by Tom Waits]
Admittedly there's a huge hole in my music upbringing when it comes to Tom Waits, so I don't really know how this rates as a cover, but it sounds pretty decent to me. I am super stoked for Gordon-Levitt's turn in Inception though!

Keller Williams & The Keels - The Switch and the Spur [originally by The Raconteurs]
Keller Williams recently released Thief, a bluegrass cover album with an eclectic tracklist from Amy Winehouse (Rehab) to Marcy Playground (Sex and Candy) to The Presidents of the United States of America (Bath of Fire. Major kudos for covering this sweet track from The Raconteurs' Consolers of the Lonely.

The Oneups - Rainbow Road [originally from Super Mario Kart]
Last month, video game cover band The OneUps released their long-awaited (by me) Super Mario Kart cover album. Ah, Rainbow Road sure brings back the memories.

Evelyn Evelyn - Lean on Me (live) [originally by Bill Withers]
Via krewechief's Live Music Blog, the conjoined twin cabaret act Evelyn Evelyn fittingly covered this classic song live in Toronto. The twins are the brainchild of Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley and ironically I've seen them each "separately," so I was totally bummed to miss their Vancouver show while I was in Toronto.