Luke Combs’ “Fast Car” Cover Might As Well Be AI

Last summer, I dedicated this column to talking about how a now-historic TV-to-music sync -- Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" via Stranger Things season four -- vaulted the famously camera-shy singer back onto the Billboard charts. That column mainly focused on "bringback culture," or the instance of an older piece of music re-entering the zeitgeist through a successful screen sync, samples and interpolations, or being meme'd on TikTok. Today, I'm here to talk about a similar phenomenon with a parallel history to "bringback culture": the cover song, and where it's at today.