There’s just something fun about learning to play one of your favourite songs for yourself…you know, learning the lyrics, figuring out the chords and the rhythm and deconstructing all the constituent parts…

Then you get deeper…you begin to appreciate how everything fits together, the artistic decisions made by songwriter made, what kind of musical skill is required, the sort of production that was employed all that…and by the time you’ve learned the song, you’ve learned a whole lot of other things, too…and you’re probably a better musician as a result…this is why learning to play other people’s music is so important…

Now let’s look at it from the other side…if a song can be interpreted multiple times by many different people and it still sounds good, then that is a great song…

The best compositions not only sound great when played by a full band, but also sound great when performed by one person around a campfire…

And finally, there’s the fan aspect of all this…people love to hear songs done in different ways by different artists…sometimes the cover is even better than the original—or, at the very least, is revealed to be something more in the hands of someone else…

With all this in mind, I’ve assembled a list of cover songs…and we’re going to go through with them to determine what makes them (and the original) great…

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.