

Cover Me is now on Patreon! If you love cover songs, we hope you will consider supporting us there with a small monthly subscription. Long live the Kings on iTunes and Amazon. She capitulates, lets the music wash over her, rides the wave and means every note. Jansen doesn’t try to rework the song in the style of her preferred genre as Matisyahu and Trey Songz do in their covers. There’s a haunted loneliness and wide-eyed melancholy to Jansen’s cover, and when she sings about “someone like you and all you know and how you speak,” it’s almost as if she’s singing to an actual person, beseeching them to catch a mere glimpse of her. Followill might be vulnerable, but Jansen wears her heart on her sleeve, and oh, how it bleeds. And that’s what Dutch-American musician Lauren Jansen does.

All you can do is sit down at the keys and bleed. Strings are strong, but the lure of a stripped down piano ballad is stronger.

Picking a mere three out of a litany of contenders was a Sisyphean task, as every track I listened to had some tiny nuance that I loved, but here are the ones that stood out amidst all contenders, three Kings covers that follow yonder star with their own royal beauty bright.
#Kings of leon use somebody ep crack#
The track’s loud/soft dynamics coupled with Followill’s vulnerable lyrics about hoping to be noticed made it a popular cover choice, and everyone from Kelly Clarkson to Belgian women’s choir Scala and Kolacny took a crack at it. Followill brings it back to shore with the final lines – a repeated refrain echoing the first lines: “I’ve been roaming around always looking down at all I see.” He might have found a safe port and he’s ready, he’s ready, he’s ready… but he’s still searching. The maelstrom abates momentarily as Followill murmurs, “I’m ready… I’m ready…,” and then the eye of the storm passes and the music whips back as a fierce solo consumes the song. Lead singer Caleb Followill’s voice is the life preserver you desperately cling to, but the music sounds so good that if you were to be swallowed by the undertow, it might not be so bad. “Use Somebody” takes no prisoners and flings the listener into a tempest-tossed ocean of sound from the first note. The debut single “Sex on Fire” ignited the charts, and the album’s second single “Use Somebody” became an instant classic, going platinum and reaching number one on the Billboard Top 40 charts. In the decade since I discovered them, I’ve done some roaming around, but no one fills the places I can’t reach like Kings of Leon.īorn in the buckle of the Bible Belt in the same musically fertile land that gave the world Elvis Presley, these kings born of Leon (the band is named after Followills’ grandfather) are tangible and real and very much alive with warm flesh, thumping red blood and bone-shaking drumbeats twined around howling guitars and naked vocals.ĭespite being huge in Europe, Kings of Leon didn’t really make a splash in United States until the 2008 release of Only By The Night. Luckily for the rest of humanity, this was so much more than an artificial fever dream trapped in my pop-culture-addled mind. A quartet of charming Southern gentlemen playing the kind of bluesy rock that I really needed to help me get through the aha shake and heartbreak of my early twenties? It couldn’t possibly be real. The first time I heard Kings of Leon, I wondered if I hadn’t dreamed them into being. They are made by artificial hallucination.
