Covers albums are an easy trap: pick the obvious hits, play it safe, call it a tribute. The Bad Beats took the harder road with Shiver & Shake: 14 Canadian Cold Cuts, digging past the greatest-hits playlist to find the deeper corners of Canadian music history worth reviving.
“We had to dig, because we didn’t just want to do the typical stuff,” is how the band’s approach to the project has been described — and that instinct is the whole difference between a covers record that feels like a victory lap and one that actually teaches listeners something.
Why Digging Deep Matters
Canadian music has no shortage of songs that never got their due outside a specific scene or era — tracks that mattered enormously to the people who heard them at the time but never made the leap into the national songbook the way the obvious classics did. A covers project built around finding those songs does real archival work, whether or not that’s the band’s explicit intention. It puts songs back in front of an audience that might never have encountered them otherwise.
It’s also just a better creative challenge. Reinterpreting a deep cut means there’s no “correct” version already burned into everyone’s memory to live up to or deviate from — more room to actually make the song their own.
Worth a Listen
If you think you know Canadian music’s back catalogue cold, a record built specifically to prove you wrong is worth your time. Fourteen tracks in, there’s a good chance at least a few will be genuinely new to you.
What’s the most underrated Canadian song you think more people should know? 👀
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