Of course, while I was away, Jim Henley has to start a great blogthread about one of my favorite subjects, the "cover song." I've long been an aficionado of strange versions of songs, likely due to the fact that one of my earliest music purchases was unintentionally an album of the top hits of the day done by some no name band, so everytime I heard the original versions of those songs, I was going, "Now, that sounds better, but..."

Jim's original post on the subject was a response to bad cover versions. Now, it doesn't take much to make a cover bad, but there is a spectrum involved. The usual suspects that gets touted as the worst of the worst is "Mr. Tambourine Man" by William Shatner, but for the last year, I've reserved my vote for "Black Hole Sun" by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme (from the Lounge-A-Palooza album, which contains some other notable bad versions, but nothing to match Steve and Eydie). My mind's still not made up on Luther Wright and the Wrong's cover of all the songs from Pink Floyd's The Wall (entitled Rebuild the Wall), because while some songs are excruciating, some actually work reset with banjo and southern accents.

Some of the best cover versions come off of tribute albums, which saw their heydey a few years back, although we still get one or two a year now. If you like covers, the best tribute albums to my mind are:

• Deadicated, a tribute to the Grateful Dead with a great countrified version of "Truckin'" by Dwight Yoakam and "Estimated Prophet" redone by Burning Spear as a reggae manifesto.
• Kiss My Ass, a tribute to Kiss, with Garth Brooks (yes, the Garth) covering "Hard Luck Woman" and making it work better than the original, among some other inspired choices.
• A Testimonial Dinner, all covers of XTC, which you need for Sarah McLachlan's passionate version of "Dear God"
• Sharp Dressed Men, ZZ Top redone by country artists, including the indominatable Willie Nelson doing a swing version of "She Loves My Automobile"
• Badlands, where the artists not only cover Bruce Springstein, but limit themselves to just the songs from the Nebraska sessions. My favorite on this one is "Reason to Believe" by husband-and-wife team Aimee Mann and Michael Penn

The other interesting trend recently has been when an artist will do an entire album of cover songs. This includes:

• Dwight Yoakam's Under the Covers, which has my absolute favorite cover of all time, a bluegrass rendition of the Clash's hit, "Train in Vain."
• Shawn Colvin's Cover Girl, which has great covers of Talking Heads' "This is the Place (Naive Melody)" and the Police's "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic"
• Johnny Cash's Unchained, which actually has a few originals, but the standout has to be his version of Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage"
• Tori Amos' Strange Little Girls, which is not only covers, but all covers where Tori tries to reset a song that was originally from a male point-of-view to a female one simply through her rendition. Very uneven, but fascinating.

Of course, the one place that every fan of cover versions needs to know about is the wonderful The Covers Project, a Web site that tries to build a database of all the different covers of songs in order to build the longest "cover chain," but which can be used to highlight some artists that might be covering one of your favorites.