Oldies With A Twist

Artists make their own unique versions of classic songs all the time. Ranging from covers of the Indigo Girls to Earth Wind & Fire, these are some of the best covers and adaptions of classic songs.

1989 was the year that Billy Joel released the first version (and, at the time, the only version) of "We Didn't Start the Fire," which proved to be a massive hit for Joel. Punk rock band Fall Out Boy decided to take the song into their own hands and create an updated version, covering over thirty years of "newsworthy items" since Joel's version. Some fans of the song took issue to the fact that the lyrics aren't in chronological order, unlike Joel's version. In an interview with BBC 2, however, Joel stated that "Everybody said, ‘Well, aren’t you going to do a part two?’ I said, ‘Nah, I’ve already done part one.’ So, Fall Our Boy, go ahead. Great, take it away." This isn't Fall Out Boy's first trip around the block, however, as they've had four top-ten Billboard hits and over 20 songs to reach the Billboard charts.

Taylor Swift has grown into one of the most popular artists in the world, but her version of "September" wasn't incredibly popular with fans of the original Earth Wind and Fire version. Swift's version, released as a part of the Spotify Singles collection in April of 2018, received backlash from one of the writers of the Earth Wind and Fire song. The writer, Allee Willis, said "...I felt it was as lethargic as a drunk turtle dozing under a sunflower after ingesting a bottle of Valium, and I thought it had all the build of a one-story motel, but, I mean, the girl didn’t kill anybody. She didn’t run over your foot. She just cut a very calm and somewhat boring take of one of the peppiest, happiest, most popular songs in history." Despite Willis' opinion, the song has managed to rack up over 56 million streams on Spotify, one of the few places that the song is available (which is why it doesn't appear on the Pandora version of this playlist).

This cover of the 1989 Indigo Girls song "Closer To Fine" brings a slower and acoustic feel to the song, while still maintaining the song's emotional depth. Brandi Carlile covered this song with her wife, Catherine, marking the first time that the 9x Grammy Award winning artist has credited her wife as a featured artist on one of her songs. The song was released as a part of the "Best Weekend Ever Edition" of the hit soundtrack to Greta Gerwig's 2023 "Barbie" movie.

Stevie Wonder + The Beatles = "We Can Work It Out." Wonder released this cover as a part of his 1970 album "Signed, Sealed & Delivered." In fact, the song peaked at number thirteen on the Billboard charts in 1971, spending eleven weeks on the charts. U Discover Music's Paul McGuinness says that "There’s a very strong argument to be made that Stevie Wonder’s 1970 cover of 'We Can Work It Out' is not only the greatest Motown cover of a Beatles number, but that it’s a strong contender for the best cover of any Beatles song by anyone, ever." Wonder earned a Grammy nomination for the cover, and performed the song at the White House in 2010.

The Crash Adams song "California Girl" starts off with a modernized lyrics of Rupert Holmes' 1979 hit "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)," and morphs into an upbeat song about a girl who moves to California with "...the weight of the world and the bleach blonde hair." Crash Adams is a Canadian duo who made it big on the social media platform TikTok, and have gone on to release many songs under Warner Music. The duo said in an interview with ET Canada that the lyrics of the song describe parts of their experience moving to L.A. and the experience of deciding to "chase that dream that we wanted to chase." They certainly made the right call seeing as one of their songs, "Give Me A Kiss," has accumulated over 49 million streams on Spotify.

Although this is likely the version of this song that you know, it isn't actually the original. In fact, the first version of "Always Something There to Remind Me" was performed by Lou Johnson in 1964 after the song's initial composition by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Shortly after Johnson's release of the song, singer Sandie Shaw released her version of the song, which became massively popular in the United Kingdom. Naked Eyes, however, were the band who made the song hugely popular in the United States. In an interview with Jonas Wårstad, Naked Eyes member Pete Byrne said "We decided to do a cover while working at Andy's studio, and I had always loved this song, so we called a friend who had the record, he read the lyric over the phone and we put it together from memory..." "It was the first time I have ever recorded a vocal in one take, and probably the last!" Their 1982 version of the song reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100, being just one of over 160 covers of the song made.

"I'm Good (Blue)" by David Guetta and Bebe Rexha features the piano riff from Italian group Eiffel 65's "Blue (Da Ba Dee)," released in 1998 to Skooby Records. Guetta and Rexha's version, released in 2022, has over 1 billion streams on Spotify and wasn't even originally supposed to be released. In fact, this song was recorded in 2015 and was meant to be a demo. After TikTok viewers begged for the song to be released in full, it was. The song has since gone on to hit the Billboard charts in many countries, from Canada to Nigeria and the U.S. and many more.

Dublin-born singer Imelda May released this song, "Tainted Love," in 2010 on her album "Mayhem." Second Hand Songs rates this version as the tenth best recording of the song, which was originally released by Gloria Jones in 1965. The song went on to become a hit with U.K. group Soft Cell, hitting number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 in the early 1980s. May's version is an upbeat and rockin' version of what became a timeless classic in the 80s.

Huey Lewis & The News, although most famous for their music from the 1980s, songs like "The Power of Love" and "I Want A New Drug" being staples for the band's success, also recorded a series of cover songs in the 1990s, including the release of their album "Four Chords & Several Years Ago" in 1994. Their a cappella cover of the 1963 song "It's All Right" was released as a part of their greatest hits album and was originally released on the album "People Get Ready - A Tribute to Curtis Mayfield," Mayfield being the writer of the song. Although not nearly the group's most popular, the song has still received notable listenership (roughly three million streams) on Spotify.

Nearly everybody knows the Simon & Garfunkel classic "The Sound of Silence," and many also know the Disturbed version of the song. Disturbed is a hard rock band from Chicago, Illinois, and was formed in 1994. They've had six songs on the Billboard Hot 100, and five number one albums on the Billboard 200. One of their Hot 100 songs was their take on "The Sound of Silence," which has accumulated over 694 million streams on Spotify. Medium's Daniel Goldman says "While it’s true that we wouldn’t have any version, without Simon and Garfunkel, Disturbed’s version matches the lyrics better. It shows an entirely different emotional profile than the original." The song exhibits much more emotion that the original, likely reaching a whole new audience that Simon & Garfunkels's hit may not have ever reached.

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