I recently had an email exchange with a future guest on my YouTube show who will be joining me to discuss Gnosticism. He asked for an example of a Bowie song that reflected Gnostic influences, and I offered “Blackstar.” After sending him an explanation, it occurred to me that this part of our exchange could be adapted into a blog…

This week’s cover is a version of Bowie’s “I’m Afraid of Americans” by Harmony Punks, a three-piece band from Tucson, Arizona, consisting of Jason Kelly on vocals and guitar, Marshall Prescott on vocals and bass, and Matt Wineinger on drums. The band describes the song as having become one of its favorites to perform and cites its lyrics about hedonism…

I encounter posts from Far Out Magazine during the process of compiling my weekly Bowie-related news summaries. The only problem is that Far Out seldom actually reports Bowie-related news. Instead, likely to generate results from searches, it churns out recycled stories based on usually widely known information or adaptations of others’ original stories. Far Out often recycles its own so-called…

Buffalo-born, Chicago-based vocalist Paul Marinaro performed at the 2026 Lewiston (NY) Jazz Festival last week with his Chicago quintet, featuring Tom Vaitsas on piano, Mike Allemana on guitar, John Tate on bass and Neil Hemphill on drums. Marinaro is an internationally acclaimed jazz vocalist who returned to Western New York, which is also where I’m from, for the festival. Presumably,…

”I Want Your Love” is the first previously unreleased Bowie song that will be part of the 1965 Shel Talmy Recordings, set to be released next month. Talmy was a producer who recently passed away, known more his work with the Who and the Kinks than Bowie. The Bowie recordings are from 1965, when Bowie was 18, well before Bowie…

AAP Illusions appears to be a creature of the 21st century. It’s a YouTube channel by, or mainly by Robert Dada. Its content appears to only exist on YouTube, and the channel has a large following. As far as I can tell, Dada does not appear live, post his music anywhere else, or even have contact information. I often like…

DoM’s mashups are usually pretty funny. They illustrate how two songs can be combined to create a new song that sounds like it should have always existed in the form he presents it. I often think these songs sound terrific, but there’s also something funny about them because I wouldn’t have guessed that the two songs could be combined in…

Bowie’s song predicting the end of the world, “Five Years” (1972) from Ziggy Stardust, unexpectedly made news when Meta, the company that makes Facebook, Instagram, eyeglasses connected to the internet and other insidious mechanisms that have helped degrade how human beings relate to one another, used the song in a bizarrely defensive Instagram ad about how artificial intelligence is going…

I recently came across an online article about the song “Everything Zen” by the 90s band, Bush (actually some form of the band exists today, so they aren’t just a 90s band). In any case, the article, which might fall into the “churnalism” category* that I usually despise, explains that Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale deliberately adapted two lyrics from Bowie’s…

This one has everything I’m looking for when I’m trying to select a cover of the week. Ayla Tesler-Mabé’s “Fame” is a real, professional-looking video. The song selection is uncommon, at least as a cover. The arrangement is familiar yet distinctive enough that I feel like I’m getting something that isn’t just good, but is also new. Best of all,…

There were several good Bowie covers to choose from this week, but I settled on this a cappella version of “Under Pressure” from an interesting ensemble from Portland, Oregon. Blueprint Ensemble Arts is a performing arts organization with more than 20 choral and instrumental ensembles, as well as musical theatre productions and educational programs. According to one of the members…

Since its release more than ten years ago, Blackstar has been embraced as one of Bowie’s best albums. Nonetheless, I rarely come across covers of songs from the album when I do my review for this weekly feature. This week, I found two that I liked. I’m selecting this cover of “Lazarus” over the cover of “I Can’t Give Everything…

Brixton Jones is the UK-based musical project of Greg Kaye, Andy Demetriou, and Joe Corbin who I discovered through one of their distinctive videos and have been following ever since. I had the band members on my show as a guest and am selecting their version of “Queen Bitch” as my cover of the week. Out of the gates I…

This cover of “I’m Afraid of Americans” brings together producer Liiiminal, vocalist Murfila, and guitarist Alex Guitar Dude for a modern industrial-rock interpretation of Bowie’s late-1990s warning about nationalism, manipulation and manufactured identity. According to the creators, the video is intended both as a tribute to Bowie and as a reminder to think critically in an age of AI, politics,…

I don't really have much information on Thibaut Gad, which appears to be a two-member band that records covers on its YouTube channel. There's not much more information than that there, and I can't find any external references. That said, they posted this well-made cover of "Space Oddity" this past week, which was the Bowie cover I liked most from…

Volador G is apparently an Argentinian band and they are apparently performing “Loving the Alien” here in Spanish. Though I took Spanish for many years, I so don’t recognize the language, I thought this was Italian. So, if that tells you anything, don’t ask me how well the band translated the song! Regardless, I think it sounds great. What’s so…

I didn’t like the options I had to choose from this week, so I thought I’d check one last time before I sat down to write, and I’m glad I did because I found this nifty cover of “Fascination,” originally from Young Americans. The artist here, 18-year-old Jasmine Phillips, characterized this as “completely re-recorded” by her and some of her…

I don’t know how much overlap there is between Bowie fans and fans of Weird Al Yankovic. However big or small that group is, I’m part of it. Weird Al has been making me laugh since the 1970s, and in all that time he never did a parody of a Bowie song. The nearest he got to poking fun of…

I have developed a slight prejudice against covers of “The Man Who Sold the World” in large part because it is one of the most frequent Bowie covers I come across during my process of evaluating covers of the week (also, in part because some identify it as a Nirvana cover). This is unfair to the song. I liked this…

Frequent visitors to this blog will be familiar with mashup artist DoM, who, among other things was my very first interview guest. I enjoy DoM’s mashups and frequently post those that include Bowie, like this one, combining “Rebel Rebel” with Tina Turner’s “Steamy Windows.” To my ears, the result sounds less like 1974 glam or 80s pop rock but rather…

Back in December, I interviewed Pittsburgh duo Canary — Josh M. Slifkin and Helena Nichols — about their creative partnership, their annual Bowie cover tradition, and the enduring influence Bowie has on their work. This past week, Canary posted a video of their cover of “Life on Mars?,” which is my featured cover this week. Their version of “Life on…

There seemed to be more Bowie covers posted over this past week than usual, many of which were quite good. I selected Nehemiah’s cover of “Ziggy Stardust” because it had the right balance of sound quality, something to look at, and, most of all, I really like this artist’s voice. Plus, “Ziggy” is neither “Heroes” nor “Space Oddity” (as usual,…