Good coverage: Sometimes cover songs are better than the original

I’m a sucker for badly sung covers of popular songs. I remember discovering Grum Lee’s now defunct website of purposefully bad acoustic covers sung with a French accent and thinking it was terrific. The site is dead – but Grum lives on, immortalised in YouTube…

Here he is singing a Dandy Warhols number.

The reason I post this is because I just watched this video Dave Miers posted today of a kid on a ukelele murdering the lyrics to that annoying Jason Mraz song.

Comments

Leah says:

Oh, that was on sunrise this morning. I stared at it for fifteen seconds, trying to figure out why on earth it was newsworthy. Then I realised the kid was playing the ukelele. I was too distracted by his no-better-than-any-other-three-year-old-and-possibly-worse singing talents. He should have just played for the video.

Andrew says:

That kid is totally awesome!! (and well good at the Uke). he certainly highlights how it's often impossible to understand the lyrics of pop/rock singers. I'm interested in the the development to singer/songwriter, where a songwriter may not have particularly good vocal skills is none-the-less obliged to sing it, and a 'cover' is kind of a dirty word. I 'cover' Mozart all the time. The singer-songwriter / covering idea seems to assume that there is one 'official' interpretation.