I was recently corresponding with somebody who had unkind things to say about Britney Spears’ musical talents. It made me want to post covers of songs by my favorite pop tarts.

The BossHoss “Toxic” (Britney Spears)
Yes, Britney Spears is a freakshow with no discernable talent. She’s not even hot any more. But many of her songs are well-crafted pop tunes written by talented professionals.

This one holds up well to the (literally) galloping country and western treatment by The BossHoss. It freaks me out to think that these guys are German.

Seether “Rehab” (Amy Winehouse)
My wife likes the original version of this song. I think that Amy Winehouse is okay but a tad overrated. The fact that she’s another train wreck meth skank only adds to her appeal. But if you really like young British woman singers Joss Stone has much better pipes.

Alert Reader Dexter pointed out the video of this song to me. I peeled off the audio so I could share it with all of you.

Detholz “Like A Virgin” (Madonna)
The roots of pop-tartdom reach back at least to Joey Heatherton, but Madonna was the first modern (or is that postmodern?) pop tart. Madonna’s early-Eighties persona seems almost quaint today. Now she has to wrest African children away from their parents to get the attention she seeks.

Something For Kate “Genie In A Bottle” (Christina Aguilera)
Rub-a-dub-dub me, baby. A nice earnest acoustic version.

Luna “Straight Up” (Paula Abdul)
Paula Abdul sounded pissed off, this guy just sounds confused. Really great washes of atmospheric guitar float through the whole song.

This comes from the very excellent Guilt By Association compilation CD recently put out by Engine Room Recordings. It features independent artists covering their favorite “guilty pleasure” songs.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been doing this for a year. I appreciate everyone who reads what I post and enjoys the songs. I also appreciate the kind words and cool covers I’ve gotten from readers over the past year. Cover Freak has turned into a very fun hobby.

Since a fair number of readers subscribe to the RSS feed and probably don’t visit the actual website I want to call your attention to the Make A Donation button on the right side of the page. If you would like to contribute to the care and feeding of this site I’d sure appreciate it. If not, that’s cool too. I promise not to mention it again for at least another year. I don’t want this to turn into an NPR-style begathon.

So here are some of my favorite songs that I’ve posted during Cover Freak’s first year.

The Blues Magoos “Heartbreak Hotel” (Elvis Presley)
This is not the Blues Magoos of “(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet” fame. The only original member in this lineup is the singer, Peppy Castro. Peppy really gives this song everything he has, spitting out the line about the desk clerk wearing black. This song also features one of the great vibe solos in rock history.

Wendy O. Williams and Lemmy “Stand By Your Man” (Tammy Wynette)
It’s sad that Wendy O. Williams is not as well known today as she was in her heyday. She was one of the few notable women in the punk/metal scene. The Plasmatics’ “Masterplan” is one of the hardest-rocking songs ever. I find it very sad that she ultimately took her own life.

Albert Kuvezin and Yat-Kha “When The Levee Breaks” (Led Zeppelin)
This is still one of the weirdest songs I’ve ever heard. Mr. Kuvezin is a throat singer from the tiny Asian country of Tuva. Throat singing is a technique that allows a person to sing multiple notes at the same time.

Mr. Kuvezin has done a great job of combining traditional Tuvan music and Western rock and roll into something electrifying and new. If you ever get the chance to see him perform live, do it. He’s albsolutely mesmerizing.

Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme “Black Hole Sun” (Soundgarden)
This song was released around the beginning of the ironic-hipster lounge revival. I’m not quite sure what Steve and Eydie were after here. Were they trying to appeal to a younger audience? Was it all a big fuck you to the grunge scene? Were they trying to show what two pros could do with any material? If you ever see them ask them for me.

The Blacks “Goin’ Out West” (Tom Waits)
There are lots of Tom Waits covers out there, but this is my all-time favorite. The music is absolutely fierce and I love to hear Gina Black sing “I’ve got hair on my chest, I look good without a shirt on.” I bet she does, too.

David Byrne “Don’t Fence Me In” (comp. Cole Porter)
A joyous, rhythm-crazed version of a very well-crafted pop song. This orginally appeared in my well-received Cole Porter tribute post.

The Beat Farmers “Karma Chameleon” (Culture Club)
When I was a college radio disk jockey I was the guy who played weird music on Sunday night. I got very few phone calls when I was on the air, sometimes I’d go weeks between calls. It made me wonder if anybody was listening.

But when anybody else covered my air shift for me they would always tell me after the fact that they got dozens of calls from people wondering where I was. I came to the conclusion that people were listening to my radio show just to hear what I was going to play next. Which I guess made my show a success.

I bring this up because this is the only song that anybody asked me to repost. Hopefully there’s more than just this one guy reading my blog. I’m pretty sure there is. I first posted this song in my very first Cover Freak post, a tribute to the musical genius of Country Dick Montana.

Little Richard “I Feel Pretty” (From West Side Story)
He should feel pretty. He is pretty. He’s also probably the only man who could sing this song and make it convincing. This apparently comes from a tribute to West Side Story compilation that I haven’t been able to track down.

Cake “I Will Survive” (Gloria Gaynor)
I never really thought much about the original version of this song. It was disco and disco sucked, at least to a young rocker in the disco era. Cake really made me hear the heartbreak turn to strength in the lyrics. And it’s got a killer trumpet solo.

Anthony Newley “Within You, Without You” (The Beatles)
I really think that this is the Worst Beatles Cover Ever. The mewling, over-emoting singing style makes my brain hurt. This is taken from a television special entitled “Beatles Forever.”

Next week will mark the one-year anniversary of Cover Freak. I’ll have a special best-of post then. If there’s something from the past year that you would like me to repost, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do.

In the meantime let’s listen to some maudlin tunes where the singer looks back longingly on misspent youth.

William Shatner “It Was A Very Good Year” (Frank Sinatra)
It was also a very good year for bad actors who don’t pretend to be able to sing and just recite lyrics over musical beds. When this song hit the shuffle play on my iPod I knew that I had to do a post of similar songs for Cover Freak’s anniversary.

Nirvana “Seasons In The Sun” (Terry Jacks)
Kurt Cobain sounds so… weary. I don’t know when this was recorded but it’s pretty creepy when you realize that he ended up killing himself.

En Vogue “Yesterday” (The Beatles)
I don’t like the Beatles all that much and I’ve never liked this song. So I was prepared to hate this version of it. I was shocked. I kind of dig it. The trilling diva vocals serve the song well.

Tursias “Those Were The Days” (Mary Hopkins)
Death-metal cossacks remember how back in the day they rode their steeds over the steppes and trampled everybody in their way. Good times.

Marc Almond “Yesterday When I Was Young” (Charles Aznavour)
I just love Soft Cell, especially their song “Sex Dwarf.” Here we have their singer delivering a spendidly overwrought reading of the French favorite. It’s from a CD of French songs that Mr. Almond (no relation to Mr. Peanut) put out called Absinthe: The French Album. He also recorded an album of Jacques Brel songs that I need to track down someday.

This is another of those songs that has really annoying lyrics. “Life was sweet like rain upon my tongue?” Honey, sure. Sugar, of course. But rain? Maybe it’s a French metaphor that doesn’t translate well.

As I was preparing next week’s post I wrote about how bad the lyrics are in one of the songs. That got me thinking about clumsy songwriting. Here are some of the songs whose lyrics really annoy me.

Alanis Morrissette “My Humps” (Black Eyed Peas)
“You love my lady lumps.” That’s so poetic. Alanis does a great job of deconstructing this bit of nonsense into a poignant piano ballad. The video for this one is hysterical.

Anita Baker “My Favorite Things” (From The Sound of Music)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Brown paper packages tied up with string are nobody’s favorite thing. Then there’s the part about when you’re bitten by a dog you should just think of your favorite things and everything will be cool. I’m sorry but when a dog bites me I think about whether it’s up to date with its rabies vaccination.

Tiny Tim and Brave Combo “Stairway To Heaven” (Led Zeppelin)
The record label gave lots of cocaine to lots of disk jockeys. That’s the only way this incoherent lyrical trainwreck ever got on the radio. Tiny Tim really swings hard on this song.

The Loud Family “A Horse With No Name” (America)
Was this song actually written in English? “The heat was hot.” They aren’t that sharp on the Weather Channel. And of course there’s this evocative description of the desert: “there were plants and birds and rocks and things.” He could be talking about Nebraska.

Goober and the Peas “MacArthur Park” (Richard Harris)
Pure gibberish. Why did someone leave the cake out in the rain? What cake is he talking about? And why won’t he have the recipe again? I just love this version for the way the singer enunciates “a stripe-ed pair of pants.”

Administrative Note: The last time I took a short vacation I arrived home late Sunday evening to find an email from a concerned reader wondering if I was alright. While it’s nice to know that somebody’s worrying about me besides my mother I don’t want anybody to worry unnecessarily. So be aware that I’m taking another short vacation and probably won’t post next week until Monday or Tuesday.

I want to let you know about a couple of new cover blogs. Covering The Mouse specializes in covers of Disney songs, at least until Disney’s lawyers shut them down. Check them out on Tuesday to read a guest post from yours truly.

Cover Lay Down features folk songs. Go there to find covers of folk songs and folk covers of songs from other genres.

This week I turn the spotlight on another of my favorite songwriters, Randy Newman. These days he’s known as a composer of film soundtracks, especially sappy stuff for Disney movies. But back in the day he released albums of very funny, charmingly composed, blackly cynical music. One of my all time favorite songs is Newman’s “Burn On” about the Cuyahoga River catching fire. I’m disappointed that I couldn’t find any covers of that one.

The Bobs “Lonely At The Top”
Richard Bob has a freakishly low voice. Even when you’re just talking to him his voice rattles your breastbone.

Mr. Newman wrote this song for Frank Sinatra, who rejected it because he thought people wouldn’t get the irony. That was probably a good decision since I don’t think the Chairman of the Board was well-equipped for irony.

The Silos “Mama Told Me Not To Come”
A little less wacky, a little more rocking than the Three Dog Night version.

UB40 “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today”
Not too long ago I posted Leonard Nimoy’s timeless version of this song. Here’s a breezy reggae version by real musicians. I like how the chipper music contrasts with the lonely lyrics, much like the balance of sweet and tart in a good key lime pie.

Dana Fuchs “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind)”
One of Mr. Newman’s most cynical songs gets a scorching blues treatment. I think I’m in love.

Tom Jones “You Can Leave Your Hat On”
This post started out as a Tom Jones tribute. After I realized that I had TJ covering both “You Can Leave Your Hat On” and “Mama Told Me Not To Come” I decided to switch gears and do a Randy Newman tribute. But at some point I will post five covers by Tom Jones. It’s inevitable.

Whoever “they” are, they don’t know what love is. Tom Jones knows what love is.

Randy Newman “Every Man A King” (comp. Huey Long)
Since he’s such a big-shot composer, Mr. Newman rarely covers other people’s songs. But here he is singing a campaign song written by Louisiana governor/senator Huey Long. It’s from his album Good Old Boys, which is sort of a Southern Gothic concept album. Special thanks to George Blowfish for his help in bringing this song to you.