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Cover Me: Three Superb Cover Songs from 40 Years Ago
Rate-A-Record returns
A few days ago I wrote a story about songs turning 40 this year, and roughly thirty seconds after publishing it I realized I should have made it my first Rate-A-Record piece of the New Year. With that opportunity missed, I wracked my brain for one to kick off 2024 right, and ultimately found my inspiration exactly where you would all expect: Bruce Springsteen.
This isn’t a Springsteen Rate-A-Record, however. The inspiration came from the 11th-best song on the Born in the U.S.A. album (just behind “Darlington County” and light years ahead of “Glory Days”): “Cover Me.” I have written stories about cover songs on several occasions, but never one focusing on covers that all came out the same year. Fortunately, there are three great ones that were released in 1984, so I get to atone for my earlier oversight.
Of the three here, there is one you surely know, one you almost surely do not, and one you’ll probably be surprised by if you were listening to this band’s hits back in ’84.
For anyone unfamiliar with the Rate-A-Record format, it was started by the inimitable Terry Barr in the summer of 2022 as a riff on the old American Bandstand segment (he probably never dreamed it would catch on like it has) and is quite straightforward: rate each song in…
