During the late 2000s and early ‘10s, I had a band that crisscrossed the Midwest and East Coast, playing some amazing shows, some terrible ones and a whole lot more that fell forgettably on the spectrum in between.
Our sound was conversant in several fading indie-rock styles of the day, but nothing we ever did got a crowd more excited than our half-ironic cover of Rihanna’s “Stay,” which we only performed once, at a basement show in some fire hazard of a punk house.
Before that, I was in a pop-punk band that I remember fondly, but which probably sounded a lot more like Fall Out Boy than I would care to admit. Regardless, the best reaction we ever got, show after show, was our go-to version of “Love Story,” back when covering Taylor Swift actually felt like a mildly subversive gesture.
Eventually I began to wonder why it couldn’t be like that all the time. Well, it turns out it can. Just be in a cover band!
It’s great. The work is steadier. You don’t have to deal with the excruciating process of writing songs yourself. You’ll also experience the unfamiliar sensation of people being happy when you plug in and start a set. It’s all the great parts of playing music condensed into a single evening at Geezer’s Sports Bar (or wherever).
I need to tread lightly here. Among musicians, this is a topic of intense ideological disagreement. Online forum threads labeled “Covers versus originals” sprawl into existential “Yes, but …” arguments about the relationship between composition and presentation, between inspiration and craft, and it gets heated.
Yes, cover bands get paid better, but isn’t it more satisfying to perform music you’ve written? Yes, creation might be the higher form of artistry, but when a cover band is playing, the exchange of energy in the room — particularly when a tipsy crowd hears the intro to “Mr. Brightside” — is more immediate and powerful.
Yes, playing covers might be a sellout move, but it’s also a great way to improve as a musician. Yes, every song a cover band plays was written by somebody, but not every person can or should be a songwriter, and interpretation is still a worthwhile contribution to the world’s body of music. At least this is what I tell myself.
Spending most of my 20s and 30s playing in bands that were very serious about their material gave me a pretty clear sense of the marketplace’s appetite for the original work I was offering. And so in my 40s, I have aged — more happily than I would have imagined — from a precious artiste into a crowd-pleasing jukebox player.
For the past five years, I have been playing guitar in a Halloween-specific cover band. It began as a trio of friends jamming out some holiday classics — “Monster Mash,” “Ghostbusters,” “Werewolves of London,” “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” — at a low-key neighborhood block party.
They asked us back, and we started getting other booking requests. We added members, expanded the repertoire, did group costumes, played bigger and bigger shows, added non-Halloween gigs and as of this writing will have finished our busiest season yet.
The insular world of cover-band musicians is an interesting parallel universe to a conventional music scene. The rivalries are sillier, the average person is older and there is slightly more money circulating. There is perhaps a higher per-capita divorce rate within our ranks, but also, I would guess, more serenity about how it’s all turned out.
The price of admission into that realm is a form of soft, middle-aged acceptance that is both humbling and empowering, and which reinforces the idea that happiness comes from the management of expectations more so than specific achievements.
I didn’t find contentment in work until I stopped thinking a job needed to nourish my soul in addition to paying the bills. Likewise, I didn’t find happiness in music until I let go of the delusion that my own art was going to light the world on fire. There are worse consolation prizes than still getting to shred in exchange for drink tickets.