It’s time for another installment of Cover Me Round-Up: I’m on Fire—a song so nice, they covered it seventy bazillion times. At this rate, we’ll never catch up, so let’s jump right in.
First up is a familiar face. We met Carson McKee a couple of months ago when we listened to his lovely cover of “Nebraska” with his brother Skylar. Carson has another musical partner, though–he also performs with Joshua Lee Turner as indie folk duo The Other Favorites.
Carson and Josh have over 600,000 subscribers on YouTube and their videos have amassed more than 150 million views. Relatively speaking, their terrific video performance of “I’m on Fire” has gone under the radar at “only” 73,000 views. Not too shabby, guys.
Our next artist made quite the splash with his cover of “I’m on Fire” when he performed it as his live audition for the Australian television show The Voice in 2019. Conor Smith was only sixteen when he skated on stage and blew the judges away with his soulful cover of a song recorded twenty years before he was born.
Next is the most adventurous of today’s batch. Harry Manx’s music has a unique sound, a marriage of the blues with classic ragas. His cover of “I’m on Fire” is a perfect example, the lead track from his 2007 album with Kevin Breit, In Good We Trust. The Indian instrumentation shades Bruce’s song with tones both bright and brooding, resulting in one of the best covers of “I’m on Fire” and certainly one of the freshest.
Netherlands-based Nikki Henskens is our newest artist in today’s round-up. She just released Balcony Baby, her debut EP of original material, during the pandemic lockdown. You can check out her original music here, but she’s quite the cover artist as well. Her gorgeous vocals are front and center in this intimate solo performance of “I’m on Fire.”
We’ll wrap up today’s installment with a cover that not only takes musical liberties but lyrical ones, too. Cody Quintana and Seda are Maui-based musicians who perform together under the name Cuppa. Their interpretation of “I’m on Fire” is more smoke than flame, a world-weary duet between cautious lovers who we sense have been burned before. Seda adds a few verses of her own to flesh out her character, and the result is an instantly recognizable yet very different song.
That’s it for today’s installment of Cover Me Round-Up, but never fear: there will be more–particularly for “I’m on Fire,” a song that never ceases to inspire.
