Good thread.
I get a kick out of listening to "tribute albums" as sometimes the covers are just amazingly bad, or the artist adds absolutely nothing to the original, covering it virtually note for note and even trying to do a (usually poor) impression of the voice. "The Art of McCartney" is a good example. Lots of straight covers that kinda suck (you'd think Alice Cooper doing "Eleanor Rigby" would be anything but a straight cover, right?), but then there are gems, like Dylan's I-don't-give-a-single-f cover of "
Things I Said Today" or even KISS showing off latent pop sensibilities in covering "
Venus and Mars", about which my wife said, "I didn't know those guys could actually sing and play music...".
I often find tribute albums at my library and will give them a listen even if I don't even enjoy the original songwriter/performer all that much. It's just interesting to see how others interpret the lyrics/music and if they can make it "their own".
Couple of covers I go back to often are the very obscure Norman Kapayos (a guy who routinely covers Hendrix/Prince) and band doing an acoustic version of Queen's "
Drowse" and Willie Nelson covering the big band classic "
Caldonia" with Wynton Marsalis.
But I think my all time favorite is one I've been listening to for 30-odd years. I love it for the sheer audacity of using Steve Wickham's violin in place of a legendary guitar solo, and for the balls of even thinking about doing it while the original was still fresh, not to mention as your show closing encore when you're headlining Glastonbury 1986: