Tag: coverville

Coverville, Dreaming of WordPress

This is another post prompted by my favorite podcast, Coverville. Anyone out there with experience migrating blogs from Movable Type to WordPress, and with a love of cover versions? If so, please contact me or Brian. Brian (Mr Coverville) is having blog trouble.

I’ve just upgraded the blog to Movable Type 4.1… But for whatever reason, I can’t make the comments work…

Honestly, I’d rather move the whole blog to WordPress (which all of my other blogs are using), but I think that with the number of posts, comments and links I have, it would be a huge undertaking.

If you think you might be able to help, please contact me (andrew at thisblog) or Brian (and mention my name).

If you’ve read this far, you deserve some good music, so here’s Elvis Costello covering Tom Waits.

Coverville: Richard Thompson

My favorite musician, Richard Thompson, was 59 yesterday. In honour of the occasion, Brian Ibbott devoted the current Coverville to Richard. I recommend that you go listen to the show, and then come back here for a some stuff by the man himself.

Here are a couple of tracks from you? me? us? It’s a double CD, with one electric (“voltage enhanced”) and one acoustic (“nude”) disc. Here’s one track from each disc: “Bank Vault in Heaven” and “Cold Kisses” respectively.


ymu came out in 1994. So it must have been in that year that I met up with some other people on the RT mailing list, which I used to follow and occasionally contribute to. I remember driving back with a newly acquired tape of ymu, which had yet to be released at the time.

Warren Zevon, Covered Late

Warren Zevon would have been 61 today. I note from his Wikipedia entry that his dad was a small-time crook by the name of Stumpy Zivotovsky, his mother was a Salt Lake City Mormon, and he knew Stravinsky when he (Zevon, that is) was a kid. He managed to live up to that start in life.

Today is Zevon day at my favorite podcast, Coverville. Brian includes on the show the lovely cover of “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” by the wonderful Jill Sobule. I thought I’d previously blogged about this cover, and included a photo of Jill and Warren together, but I can’t find the post.

Coverville Countdown

‘Tis the most Coverville time of the year: Countdown time! For those not with this particular program, Coverville is a podcast focusing on cover versions, and the Countdown is a listener poll for favorite covers.

Looking at the list of nominees, I see three that I must vote for, and one that I should have nominated. One of the must-votes is Richard Thompson doing Britney’s “Oops!” This is something of a tactical vote, since I don’t think it’s Richard’s best cover, or even his best from the 1000 Years of Popular Music project. So I include another song from that project in the widget.

[sonific f9cabfa65ce68b101422c6658a8fdf3796c2d028]

The second must-vote is Jonathan Coulton doing Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.” Although it stands on its own as a music-only cover, I strongly recommend watching the original Mix-a-Lot video synchronized to Jonathan’s version. In order to find it, it’s probably best to go via Jonathan’s post about the video, since comments there have tracked the video past at least one takedown notice.

A third and final must-vote is Porter Waggoner’s moving cover of Johnny Cash’s “Committed to Parkview.” The should-have-nominated track is the Beatnix’ Merseybeat take on “Stairway to Heaven,” captured here in glorious black and white video.

Now, I need to make sure I don’t miss the Countdown voting deadline (which I can’t seem to find now) like I missed the nomination deadline.