When hatching plans to celebrate Under the Radar’s 20th anniversary I knew I wanted to go beyond just producing a special 20th anniversary issue. Despite two decades of writing about albums, one thing we’d never done is actually put one out ourselves. Thus I came upon the idea for Covers of Covers. The concept was so perfect and simple that I’m surprised we hadn’t thought of it before. We approached some of our favorite musicians and asked them to cover any song by any artist who had been on the front or back cover of our print issue over the years, including artists that had appeared in group cover shots. I sent each musician a list of the cover artists to choose from.
To pull all this off we have partnered with Joe Spadaro and his Connecticut-based record label American Laundromat. As well as releasing albums by Juliana Hatfield and Tanya Donelly, American Laundromat have a long history of producing amazing covers albums, including their tributes to Elliott Smith, The Cure, Neil Young, The Smiths, and the music of Wes Anderson films. They even put together a track-by-track tribute to the soundtrack to Alex Cox’s cult classic 1984 movie Repo Man. Without Joe’s help, Covers of Covers would still just be an idea in my head. He has the know-how to get an album mastered and manufactured, not to mention how to handle all the legal stuff. My Co-Publisher/wife Wendy Lynch Redfern then photographed and designed the album cover, which features a tower of all our print issues.
It was fascinating to see which musicians agreed to take part and which artists and songs they wanted to cover. Cassandra Jenkins was the first to say yes. We were also elated that Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle readily agreed to take part, considering Grandaddy were on the cover of our very first issue. We tried to have a wide variety of artists covered, but there was some doubling up, with two covers each of songs by HAIM and Metric. Each artist recorded the songs themselves and there was much excitement when each track was turned in.
We asked all the artists involved to provide a quote on why they took part in the project, why they picked each song, and how they approached their covers. Below are all the quotes in the order of the album’s tracklist.
will be available on CD and digitally, with cassette tape and vinyl releases in the works too. Visit for more details or to preorder. We are also), which “provides financial assistance to all types of career musicians and music industry workers who are struggling to make ends meet while facing illness, disability, or age-related problems.”
