Seven years after covering the 60s and four years after taking on the 70s, Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs are back redoing the music of the 80s with Under the Covers, Volume 3, out November 12 from Shout! Factory.
The previous two albums were filled with terrific, fun takes on numerous classics from each decade with Sweet and Hoff’s voices blending beautifully over faithful arrangements. Here, the duo take on music from the Go-Go’s (Our Lips Are Sealed, which can be previewed at Billboard), Dave Edmunds (Girls Talk), The Smiths (How Soon is Now), R.E.M. (Sitting Still) and The Pretenders (Kid).
Unlike the other two volumes, this one depends much less on mainstream tracks from the artists, focusing instead on a number of deep album songs. Sweet told Billboard that the two singers had different backgrounds from the decade. “It was a little different for both of us but there was a lot of important stuff going on. There was American stuff that was vibrant and new and about to move from college radio and create a whole new format called Alternative Rock. And there was an incredible continuing influence of just amazingly creative English groups coming in, like XTC and Echo & The Bunnymen. A lot of those groups actually started recording in the 70s and we thought about them for (‘Vol. 2’), but we couldn’t fit them on there.”
The iTunes version of the album will have three bonus tracks.
Track List:
- Sitting Still (R.E.M.)
- Girls Talk (Dave Edmunds)
- Big Brown Eyes (The dB’s)
- Kid (Pretenders)
- Free Fallin’ (Tom Petty)
- Save It For Later (The English Beat)
- They Don’t Know (Kirsty MacColl)
- The Bulrushes (The Bongos)
- Our Lips Are Sealed (The Go-Go’s)
- How Soon Is Now (The Smiths)
- More Than This (Roxy Music)
- Towers of London (XTC)
- Killing Moon (Echo and the Bunnymen)
- Trouble (Lindsey Buckingham)
Bonus Tracks
- Train in Vain (the Clash)
- You’re My Favorite Waste of Time (Marshall Crenshaw)
- I Would Die 4 U (Prince)
