music video
57 tracksA short film made to accompany a song. Since MTV it has shaped how songs are remembered, and on YouTube it is often the main way a song is heard.
Culture
cover version
21 tracks.
What it is
A new recording of a song by an artist other than the original. A cover can be faithful or transform the song's genre and meaning.
Read more on WikipediaRelated concepts
interpolation
3 tracksRe-recording a melody or lyric from an existing song inside a new one, instead of copying the original recording as a sample does. The borrowed tune is performed again by the new artist, and its writers are usually added to the credits.
live recording
12 tracksA recording made in front of an audience rather than built in a studio. It captures energy, improvisation and the sound of the room, and often differs from the studio version.
remix
56 tracksA new version of a recording made by reworking its parts: changing the beat, harmony, tempo or structure, often by another producer. A remix can turn a ballad into a club track.
Hear it in these tracks
TEEMID, Joie Tan
Crazy (Radio Mix)
Gnarls Barkley's frantic classic slowed into a hazy deep-house lullaby: TEEMID and Joie Tan make Crazy sound like a confession whispered at four in the morning.
Jan Blomqvist
Big Jet Plane
Jan Blomqvist slows Angus & Julia Stone's folk lullaby into a long, glowing melodic-house drift, his weary vocal hovering over the pulse like a plane above night clouds.
Jan Blomqvist
Big Jet Plane (Animal Trainer Remix)
The Zürich duo Animal Trainer fold Jan Blomqvist's hushed 2011 cover of Big Jet Plane into a rolling, late-night deep house remix, released on the Berlin label Dantze, where a longing vocal drifts above a patient, pulsing groove.
Gabriella Cilmi
Cry Me A River (Live Version)
A sixteen-year-old Gabriella Cilmi takes Justin Timberlake's 2002 break-up hit into smoky, live soul territory with a three-piece band: a 2008 B-side recorded by Xenomania, her husky voice carrying all the hurt.
filous, LissA
Feel Good Inc.
The Austrian producer filous strips the Gorillaz classic down to a delicate xylophone, plucked strings and airy beats, and LissA's light voice turns the old windmill anthem into a hazy daydream.
Clea Vincent
All that she wants
Cléa Vincent turns Ace of Base's 1992 hit into breezy, homespun French synth-pop, trading its reggae-pop strut for a dreamy, lo-fi groove closer to hip-hop and R&B.
Blankets
The Hanging Tree
Blankets carries the Mockingjay murder ballad out of the woods and onto the dancefloor: a 2015 French electronic cover that keeps the song's hummable, unsettling melody and sets it to a pulsing beat.
Avicii
Feeling Good
Avicii wraps the standard Nina Simone made famous in soft, swelling synths and lets Audra Mae's smoky, soaring voice carry a song about new dawns, recorded for a 2015 film about his own recovery from years of touring.
Chicks On Speed
Euro Trash Girl
Munich art collective Chicks On Speed turn Cracker's 1990s alt-rock road song into a deadpan electronic cover: an early electroclash single, first pressed on their own Go Records in 1998.
Mélissa Laveaux
Needle in the Hay
Mélissa Laveaux, a Montreal-born singer-songwriter of Haitian descent, recasts Elliott Smith's bleak 1995 song for percussive finger-style guitar, double bass, claps and drums on her 2008 album Camphor & Copper.
The xx
Crystalised
'Crystalised', The xx's 2009 debut single, is minimal indie pop at its most intimate: a muted guitar riff, a sparse beat by Jamie xx, and two voices, Romy Madley Croft's and Oliver Sim's, answering each other verse by verse.
The Police
Roxanne
Sting wrote 'Roxanne' after seeing street workers near the band's Paris hotel in 1977: a plea to a woman to leave that life, set to off-beat reggae guitar and a tango-like rhythm, the A&M debut single that became the Police's signature song.
Lucky Luke
Cooler Than Me
The Lithuanian producer Lucky Luke's 2019 electro-house reworking of Mike Posner's 2010 debut hit, released on Columbia/B1: a song about feeling snubbed, turned into a laid-back club anthem that became a radio hit in France a year later.
Gabriella Cilmi
Cry Me a River (Cover)
A teenage Gabriella Cilmi takes Justin Timberlake's 2002 break-up hit out of Timbaland's beatbox-and-clavinet production and sings it as a stripped-down soul lament, her husky voice carrying all the hurt.
AnnenMayKantereit x Parcels
Can't Get You Out of My Head (Cover)
AnnenMayKantereit and Parcels join forces on a stripped-back cover of Kylie Minogue's 'Can't Get You Out of My Head', trading the original's cool electronic pulse for Henning May's rough voice and close band harmonies.
Roseaux
Walking on the Moon
The French collective Roseaux and the American soul singer Aloe Blacc turn the Police's 1979 reggae hit into an unhurried soul song, the most famous track of their 2012 album of covers.
Pomplamoose
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
Pomplamoose's 2019 cover of Daft Punk's 'Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger': a robot anthem built from a sample and a vocoder, replayed by a live band with real keys, bass, drums and human voices, and filmed so that everything you hear, you see.
Nancy Sinatra
Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)
Nancy Sinatra's 1966 version of Sonny Bono's song, built on Billy Strange's haunting tremolo guitar, is a hushed ballad of childhood love and betrayal that Quentin Tarantino revived over the opening credits of Kill Bill.
Nouvelle Vague
Too Drunk to Fuck
Nouvelle Vague turn the Dead Kennedys' punk satire into a hushed bossa nova sung by Camille, a 2004 cover whose softness makes the lyric more absurd and more unsettling than the original's noise.
Dead Kennedys
Too Drunk to Fuck
Dead Kennedys' 1981 single sets Jello Biafra's satire of a moronic party over East Bay Ray's breakneck surf-punk riff, and became the first UK top-40 hit with the word in its title, despite a BBC ban.
Björk
Kata rokkar
Before her solo career, Björk sang Icelandic popular songs and jazz standards with a veteran piano trio: Kata rokkar, from the 1990 album Gling-Gló, is a short, playful glimpse of that side of her voice.