Geez,... so many great covers but I do agree with the original always being, well, the original! Chris Cornell doing Zep's "Thank You" is so good, I think Holly Cole does a great job with Elvis Costello's "Allison", there's also a great cover of Zepplin's "The Rover" by Blackberry Smoke, Aretha does a better job than Dionne Warwick with Bacharach' & Hal David's "Walk On By" could be a long list.... none necessarily better, just different and often equally satisfying.
what’s a song cover that you think is better than the original?
The first ones to come to mind are Whitney’s version of I Will Always Love You and Allen Stone’s Georgia On My Mind but I would love to hear other contributions as well! I feel like there are a lot of songs where a covered version gets more popular than the original and people end up not realizing that it is a cover (ex. i had a friend that genuinely believed the Jonas Brothers wrote Year 3000). so, what‘a a song that was written by one artist but (figuratively) owned by another?