The Routledge Handbook to the Popular Music Cover Song: Vivid Versions and Musical Subjectivities examines histories, contexts, and critical perceptions of cover song practices that manifest in mimetic homages, nuanced reinterpretations, or radical transformations. Aimed at exploring genre variations, gendered and intersectional expressions, political implications, and international dimensions, the analyses collectively interrogate the implicit and explicit meanings of popular music covering and versioning, following a chronological pathway to illuminate evolutionary developments across phonographic history from the 1950s to the present. In 27 chapters, this handbook explores how covers create new ‘vivid’ versions that traverse social and musical boundaries and contexts.

By incorporating cross-cultural insights including postcolonial, indigenous, and sign language readings of recorded music texts, the authors foreground reinterpretive power as a vehicle for expanded awareness of under-examined cover contexts. Their goal is to invite reassessment of cover practices and their popular music presence, often by focusing on lesser known vivid versions and their commercial, technological, and compositional rearticulations. The Routledge Handbook to the Popular Music Cover Song: Vivid Versions and Musical Subjectivities is valuable for second through final year students on undergraduate courses devoted to popular music, composition, and production studies, and to postgraduate programs and researchers in a range of fields, including: popular music studies, musicology, creative music performance and composition, songwriting, and music production studies.