You gotta hand it to Nashville's Nicole Atkins. The idea of a soft-focus, AM radio take of Guns N' Roses' "November Rain," replete with lap steel and acoustic guitar, sounds like a really long, really bad joke. And yet this cover, which was just uploaded to Soundcloud, is downright magical. Atkins pairs her honeyed vibrato with the signature low rumble of Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees), and each of them expertly avoid the hard-to-avoid artifice that comes when you're singing a late-period GN'R power ballad. Hell, the back-third, which is dominated by Slash's inflamed whine on the original recording, is tastefully replaced with a crunchy country-rock riff.
Atkins says that the idea for the cover arrived to her in a dream while she was staying at a homely Vermont inn, which we're sure is the exact same way Axl came up with "November Rain" in the first place. Take a listen above.
