P.D. Magnus

A Philosophy of Cover Songs

My book A Philosophy of Cover Songs is published by Open Book Publishers. It is open access, so you can download a PDF or read it on-line for free. Printed versions are available at a reasonable price.

• The publisher's page about the book
• Read the free PDF
• Read the book as a webpage
• the PhilPapers page for the book
• a precis of the book
• A companion YouTube playlist of examples from the book

Reviews of the book:

• Brandon Polite at the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
• Andrew Davis at Popular Music

Here are some related posts and things.

• A Paean to the Much-maligned Cover Song, a post at the OBP blog (May 2022)
• Polite Conversations episode 28, where Brandon Polite and I talk about Taylor Swift remaking her early albums through the lens of cover songs (May 2022)
• Light Topics, Real Philosophy: Some Lessons from Writing about the Philosophy of Cover Songs, a post at Daily Nous (June 2022)
• Wherefore the Cover Song?, episode #129 of the Pretty Much Pop podcast (July 2022)
• When can a band cover their own song?, a post at Aesthetics for Birds (October 2022)
• They’re playing our song! The philosophical puzzle of cover songs, an article at Psyche (December 2022)

The book would have been impossible without earlier work I did with collaborators.

• Judging covers, with Cristyn Magnus and Christy Mag Uidhir (2013)
• Appreciating covers, with Cristyn Magnus, Christy Mag Uidhir, and Ron McClamrock (2022)

BibTeX

@BOOK{Magnus2022,
	AUTHOR = {P.D. Magnus},
	TITLE = {A Philosophy of Cover Songs},
	YEAR = {2022},
	PUBLISHER = {Open Book Publishers},
	ADDRESS = {Cambridge, UK}
}