Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn cover Europe’s “The Final Countdown”

Covers. Musicians and music fans have a love/hate relationship with them. Often, an artist will put their fingerprints all over an existing song, one can’t even imagine that there was an earlier version. Other times, it is four minutes of performance dread while the band plays something accessible to the audience.

For the past five years, The A.V. Club composes a list of fifteen songs called Undercover and then invites in musical artists to record their covers of these well-known ditties. We have chosen to showcase Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn covering Europe’s “The Final Countdown” – https://youtu.be/S5AsyuNia5Y

Other Undercover 2015 offerings include: Trampled By Turtles covers Yes: “Owner Of A Lonely Heart”, Punch Brothers cover The Cars, Reggie Watts covers Van Halen, They Might Be Giants covers Chumbawamba (another favorite cover) and Strand Of Oaks covers Asia: “Heat Of The Moment.”

For those of you not familiar with The A.V. Club, it is an entertainment website featuring reviews of films, music, television, books, games and DVDs, as well as interviews and other regular offerings examining both new and classic media and other elements of pop culture. While the site is a subsidiary of The Onion, The A.V. Club is not satirical, unlike its parent publication. It does have a leading edge quality, unlike the mainstream pop sites like People and E!.