What even is a cover version? At face value there seems to be a fairly obvious answer to that question: a performance of a song originally performed by someone else. When the term first became popularised in the 1950s, it used to mean a rival version of a current hit song, rushed out to take advantage of its’ popularity, but it came to mean any subsequent version.

I suppose a better question might be when did a cover version become a notable thing, when did it become the exception, rather than the norm? In many (most?) musical traditions it is totally normal for musicians to perform songs written and first performed by others. Folk singers sing ballads from hundreds of years ago. Jazz musicians perform interpretations of all kinds of songs from all kinds of genres. Classical orchestras throughout history have played music composed by Mozart or Beethoven or Bach.

It was only during the 1960s that there was a massive surge in the quantity of artists performing their own songs, with the success of The Beatles and Bob Dylan having a huge impact. Both started out playing covers, but became the most successful artists of the era by writing their own songs. Mick Jagger explicitly said in a recent documentary that the Rolling Stones started writing their own songs mainly because The Beatles did. For many bands and singers it started to feel as if they had to also be songwriters to be taken seriously as artists (the additional income from songwriting royalties probably helped as well).

The change was faster and deeper in some genres than others. In soul music it was (and remains to some extent) more normal for many artists to perform versions of the same song. Is Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ a cover for example? I have never really though of it as one, but it is, written and first recorded by Otis Redding. Aretha’s version is so perfect, so distinctive, that it doesn’t really seem like the same song. Creating the best version of a song was still seen as more important than being the first to release it.

However, across most genres there has been a trend towards artists either writing their own songs, or having new songs specifically written for them. In the early 90s when I was first seriously getting into music, there were still an awful lot of covers in the charts, including some of the biggest selling records (Whitney’s ‘I Will Always Love You’, Wet Wet Wet’s ‘Love Is All Around) and terrible novelty dance tracks (Undercover’s ‘Baker Street, KWS’s ‘Please Don’t Go’). Nowadays it’s relatively rare to hear a cover version on Radio 1 (although there are plenty of songs sampling early 2000s UK Garage hits).

Myself, I’ve always loved a cover version, and have had a tendency to seek out whole albums of them. Some of which have been very good (Adem’s ‘Takes’), some very bad (Duran Duran’s ‘Thank You’) and most a mixed bag (Tori Amos’s fascinating ‘Strange Little Girls’, where she performs songs written by men, about women. It is a fascinating concept with some wonderful songs on it, but also an extremely bizarre version of Eminem’s ’97 Bonnie & Clyde which you probably won’t thank me for bringing to your attention).

I’ve always felt that bands who never do covers take themselves a bit too seriously, as if they’re saying that every song of theirs is better than every song ever written by anyone else. Even if you don’t want to put one on your album, at least you could put some in your live set or as a b-side (note to self – check if b-sides are still a thing). The songs a band chooses to cover can tell you a lot about them. Who their influences are, what music they themselves love. It can also introduce you to music that you may otherwise never have heard.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the inspiration for this article. Kill Rock Stars is one of my favourite labels of all time, putting out the likes of Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith, The Decemberists & Bikini Kill, not to mention reissues of The Raincoats, Delta 5, Kleenex/Liliput & more. Over the course of 2021 they put out a 64 track covers album, with current label artists and friends of the label doing versions of songs from the labels history. There are loads of great songs on there, but the one that particular stood out was Shamir’s version of Laura Veirs ‘Where Gravity Is Dead’.

Now, I absolutely love Laura Veirs. I have most of her records, and have seen her live plenty of times. Year of Meteors, which the original song is from, is one of her very best records, but I’d never really noticed this particular song. I’d heard it, but I hadn’t heard it, if you know what I mean. It was only when I heard Shamir’s version that I really got it. The stripped down arrangement and the fragility in Shamir’s voice, for the first time, and with total and immediate clarity made me realise that this was not just a good song, but one of the best songs, poignant, beautiful, stunning. Stripped away from the context of it’s album, no longer just one of many excellent Laura Veirs songs on an excellent Laura Veirs album, I heard it for what it really was. When I went back and listened to the original, I couldn’t believe that I’d never really noticed it before.

That’s what makes for a great cover version. It’s not about making a bad song good. It’s not even about doing a better version of an already great song. It’s about recontextualising the song, revealing something about it that was there all along but you’d never seen, like an art restorer clearing away dirt and damage to reveal the beauty of the original painting. A great cover version is not just a wonderful piece of music in its own right, but a celebration of the original that makes you fall in love with it, whether for the first time or all over again.