Rhino’s Got You Covered: Cliff Richard, White Lion, Ian McCulloch, and k.d. lang

It’s Wednesday, so it must be time to take another dip into the Rhino catalog and trot out a new quartet of cover songs that you may or may not have heard before. Let’s get started, shall we?

•    Cliff Richard, “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” (1968): It makes perfect sense that Cliff would cover a Neil Diamond song – they had a tendency to appeal to the same general demographic at that point in their respective careers – and he does a fine job of it here, instilling it with a nice touch of drama.

•    White Lion, “Radar Love” (1989): Unfairly maligned by many simply because lead singer Mike Tramp had a mane of hair that matched the band’s namesake, White Lion wrote some incredibly catchy songs and – as is the more valid point here – knew a song with a good hook when they heard it.

•    Ian McCulloch, “Lover, Lover, Lover” (1992): Although he’d already contributed a version of “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” to the Leonard Cohen tribute album I’M YOUR FAN the year before, McCulloch apparently felt that he had more tribute yet to pay to laughing Leonard, hence this track on his second solo album, MYSTERIO.

•    k.d. lang, “The Joker” (1997): Ms. lang’s quirky idea to do an album of covers that were all about smoking in some capacity or other (DRAG) worked remarkably well, but this Steve Miller song may have worked best of all.