Fleetwood Mac’s “Storms” Covered by Best Coast

Best Coast by Larry Hirshowitz

Perennial California-philes Best Coast have a new album-ish EP out (which you can stream in it’s entirety until midnight–10/20/13) that sticks to the formula of garage-rock and girl pop with all the snappy and fun lyrics you can handle.

I mean, why would you do anything else(?) if you had such a fervent following just by sticking to the basics.

One group who did not stick to the basics however, was Fleetwood Mac.

On “Tusk“, their 12th studio album the band wandered into parts unknown, dropping those signature bass lines for more punk rock and new wave influences. In fact, the man behind that bass, John McVie, described that album as essentially three solo albums dropped into one. It probably cost as much as three albums to make.

So with those two opposing ideas of song craft, you have somewhere in the middle this Best Coast cover of “Storms” done on a recent trip to Morning Becomes Eclectic.

Lead singer Bethany Cosentino manages to find some new layers in her voice which keep her from sounding like Nicks-karaoke but also manages to sound different from herself. You can tell she probably sang this song alone, practicing guitar at a young age.

This stripped down version of a powerfully sad song gives the usually sunny Southern Californians a little cloud cover and that’s just fine by me.

I mean, you can’t appreciate blue skies without some “Storms” AMIRIGHT??!

Best Coast Live on KCRW