My favorite covers are when an artist makes the song their own
What's the point of doing a song the exact same way?
Adding your own thing shines a light on you as a performer - and on the original artist as a songwriter
That's exactly with Colleen Green did with her "Dude Ranch" cover
From A.V. Club
Then came Colleen Green’s new album-length cover of Dude Ranch, which the acclaimed rocker—whose 2015 album,I Want To Grow Up,The A.V. Club named one of that year’s best LPs—calls her “favorite album of all time,” and I’m overanalyzing it all over again. Credit her fascinating approach, which reinterprets the album’s 15 songs using only her laconic vocals and a fuzzy bass guitar. The songs are slowed down to a sludgy crawl, but the original melodies remain intact, as do (most of) the lyrics. It’s a fiercely faithful adaptation in that sense: Green doesn’t change the gender pronouns, the numerous dick references, or even the album’s more unsavory lyrics, which drop words like “retarded” and recount the tale of a peeping Tom who’s “seen everything there is to be shown.”