There she goes again.

6 March 2003—Bebop cats do it. Punk-rock brats do it. Even country singers in cowboy hats do it. “Let’s do it,” the members of Sixpence None the Richer said to each other, “let’s record a cover.”

So they did: they recorded their own version of “There She Goes,” originally by one-hit-wonder band The La’s. It was a competent, undistinctive remake of a song that had been originally released only eight years earlier. Sixpence’s version, featuring Leigh Nash’s treacly little-girl voice, became huge on the radio. The La’s subsequently became best known as the band that Sixpence covered.

Now, four years later, Sixpence has done the eminently thinkable in the risk-averse world of pop: they released another cover. This time, however, they went too far; or, rather, they didn’t go far enough. They turned in a performance of Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” that is so egregious that Nash & Co. should be prosecuted for burglary and attempted murder.

The Sixpence Incident made me consider the nature of covers. It began to strike me as odd that there are rarely — maybe never — covers of paintings.* (Sure, people have made plenty of parodies of famous works, but parodies don’t count. I can only say: poor Edward Hopper; poor American Gothic.)

And I can only think of four novels at the moment that directly call other novels and attempt to expand them: The Hours, which draws from Mrs. Dalloway; Wide Sargasso Sea, which imagines the inner life of a character in Jane Eyre; Lo’s Diary, which does the same for the title character in Lolita; and The Wind Done Gone, which retells Gone with the Wind. (However, the publisher of The Wind Done Gone, Houghton Mifflin, considers its offering a parody — probably for the sake that it makes a clearer legal argument in its battle against the Mitchell Estate to actually get the thing published — so maybe I should disqualify it.) There must be more than these few, but even so, nothing compares to the revivals in other art forms.

Strangely, photographs don’t get covered, but films do. OK, there’s no shortage of photographers who have shot the Yosemite Valley from the same spot Ansel Adams pioneered, but is that really a cover? Do you know any other famous photographers who are known for that shot? I sure don’t.

But films are redone all the time. The Front Page. The Philadelphia Story. Psycho. The recent release of The Four Feathers was the fourth version to hit the theaters.

Plays are revived more than films are, which makes sense to me: you can’t record a play like a film is recorded. Though a play is written down, it isn’t complete until it’s been performed, and it has to keep being performed so that new audiences can experience it; otherwise, it fades away. Even in productions that strive to hew to the playwright’s intentions (if such can be known) the collaboration of performers and script necessarily leads to an interpretation that almost always differs from troupe to troupe. That doesn’t even count the more frequent situation in which a theater company picks a play because it wants to update the play or reimagine it, setting it in a different time or milieu, or casting it in a way other than the playwright wrote it.

Even with the proliferation of Shakespeare festivals, I don’t think anything compares to the revivals in music. There are “standards” in both pop and jazz, classic songs that artists have redone and redone. We used to have two jazz radio stations here in the Bay Area. The commercial one, now defunct, used to play a different version of Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight” each night (guess what time?). With the public station, which survived, you can’t listen to it for an hour without hearing some variation on a song by Ellington, Coltrane, Brubeck, Miles, Monk, Bird, Diz, or a few other early masters.

It’s no different in pop music and rock & roll. Off the top of my head, I can name four great covers of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” all of them revelations in their own ways. Even Siouxsie & the Banshees, a post-punk band, recorded two Beatles’ covers, one of which, “Helter Skelter,” was later covered again by U2, a band which has seen several of its songs covered by other artists. (Funny story which may or may not be true: when the Pet Shop Boys wrote to U2 asking if PSB could do a version of “Where the Streets Have No Name,” U2 wrote back, “What have we, what have we, what have we done to deserve this?”)

There’s great potential for pleasure to be had with covers of standards. You have the comfort of the familiar mixed with the danger of the unfamiliar. Sometimes the meaning of the song changes as a result; sometimes only the tempo changes; sometimes lyrics are added to what was previously instrumental; sometimes it’s just fun to hear a classic done in another artist’s inimitable style. A few notable examples, some of which are better known than others:

Sid Vicious, “My Way.” The Sex Pistols bassist recorded this brutal version of the Sinatra classic approximately a year before he overdosed at the ripe old age of 21. He certainly did. They both did — wildly different ways, though.

Annie Lennox, “Train in Vain.” A little reverse action, as the former Eurythmic diva wraps a Clash tune in gospel robes. There’s a bit of transubstantiation for you.

Tom Jones, “Kiss.” Just goes to show how two Lotharios, Prince and Tom Jones, can go about their identical business in such different ways. Both successful beyond belief, mind you.

Bobby McFerrin, “’Round Midnight” and “Blackbird.” In the era before he was famous for the sapfest “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” Bobby McFerrin had a pretty good following that just ate up his particular gift for using his voice as pretty much any instrument he wanted. “Blackbird” is the greater of the two covers, since he literally becomes a one-man band just with his voice, but “’Round Midnight,” done for the soundtrack of the movie of the same name, is quite a sweet rendition of the classic.

Indigo Girls, “Romeo and Juliet.” Jeez, chart the journey: from Shakespeare play to movie musical (West Side Story) to Dire Straits song to this cover, which pays homage to all the previous references but adds something totally new: Amy Ray’s throatier wail, (I’m guessing) based on a failed lesbian relationship, recorded before the Girls were fully out. “It was just that the time was wrong” — a theme that has come up again in later songs.

Jason Falkner, “Both Sides Now.” Sure, it’s an indulgence on my part, but this is a brilliant cover, which does more than cover — it affirms the strength of the song. A Beatles song is generally a very well-crafted pop song, but a Joni Mitchell song is hard to see as anything but a Joni Mitchell song. It’s extremely difficult to separate her voice from her songs. To wit: Counting Crows’ recent cover of “Big Yellow Taxi” only reminds me of how perfect the original was; why bother covering it? But somehow, Jason Falkner turns her contemplative ballad into a rock song, and it’s just as strong in its own way. Maybe I might not love it quite as much if it weren’t a cover, but the fact that it is a cover, well, that just makes it sublime.

Sometimes artists cover themselves, and wonderfully so. Most times such reworked renditions show up in concert, but sometimes the artists just feel like recording different versions. Joe Jackson routinely performs vastly different versions of his songs, particularly in concert; I think there are something like five studio versions of “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” Sting did something particularly cheeky in raiding his own Police vaults for a song he put on his first solo album, “Shadows in the Rain,” but in doing so I’d say he vastly improved the song. Every time I saw Ani Difranco in concert, she did a different version of her own “Anticipate,” but the best self-cover I heard of hers was on her first live album, Living in Clip, in which she had taken a pretty good staple of hers, “Every State Line,” and turned it from a fairly standard folk anthem into a truly haunting experience of a woman traveling solo through menacing back roads one late night after another.

So it’s all the more galling when I hear not just a tepid cover but an outright gutting of a song make it into airplay on commercial radio. Sixpence’s version of “Don’t Dream It’s Over” actually chops out half the bridge, which ruins the rhythm for no apparent purpose than to make the length friendly for commercial radio, which is overrun with incessant advertising. There’s no other way to squeeze six or seven songs into an hour. At least one local radio DJ — who doesn’t control her own playlist, I’m sure — has the decency to mention each time that the song was originally Crowded House’s.

No such luck for another recent cover, “Landslide” — no one seems to notice that the Dixie Chicks rode the Fleetwood Mac classic to Grammy winnerdom. I’m not going to be a total grouch about it, though. The Chicks were famous before they came along and did this cover, and they do it a fair amount of justice, applying their prodigious harmonic talent to a beautiful song. Still, the harmony only reminds me that none of them has a distinctive voice like Stevie Nicks. For the Dixie Chicks, the harmony is the hook.

I’ll say one thing for their harmonies, though: they finally did a version of our national anthem that I actually enjoyed. Their rendition should be the gold standard: if a proposed singer can’t do better, stadium owners should just play the Chicks’ version at every American sporting event from now on.

I was thinking of including a hall of shame here, but it’s way too late.** Some people are inspired by crap, feeling that they can do better. I’d far rather be inspired by brilliance, which gives me something to aim for and, if possible, try to exceed. That, to me, is what performing covers is all about.