Attack!!

In Play This Book Loud: Noisy Essays, my new book out this May from University of Georgia Press, I write about cover songs:

A song is covered for any number of commercial, audience-pleasing, or personal-stake reasons. A singer might announce, onstage or in front of his bedroom mirror, “This song matters to me because. . .” Sometimes a musician covers a song to learn something technical inside of the playing, in the odd chord or tricky time changes. Sometimes a musician covers a song she’s loved s...