Homage or nostalgia?

The subject of this column is the new albums by Pete Yorn and Harry Dean Stanton with the Cheap Dates. But first, some context.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, every musician who has ever been referred to as a “rock star” will be dead, his music left to fend for itself amid the indifferent algorithms of the Cloud.

How much of it will survive, or what forms that survival will take, is anyone’s guess. But as the final generations raised on rock follow their musical heroes into the Great Beyond, a lot of that music will probably suffer neglect.

In the meantime, “cover” albums—long-players made up largely or entirely of beloved rock-star-era songs performed by musicians who found them inspirational—are becoming a thing.

They’ve been a thing before. In the 1950s and ’60s, performers regularly padded their albums with their own versions of other people’s hits. But today’s cover albums seem less about capturing a moment than about recalling one. Even at their most enjoyable, they end up feeling nostalgic.

Sometimes that feeling seems deliberate. On Pete Yorn Sings the Classics (Shelly), for instance, those classics emerge through a soft-focus lo-fi redolent of AM radio’s glory days, making the more contemporary material (the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man,” the Stone Roses’ “Ten Storey Love Song”) sound as wistful as the oldest (“Moon River,” “Surfer Girl,” “I Am a Rock”).

Yorn’s version of Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” feels fresher thanks to a sped-up tempo and the addition of mariachi horns. And no one who covers hits by Diana Ross (“Theme from Mahogany”) and Tracey Ullman (“They Don’t Know”) and misses by Roxy Music and the Velvet Underground (“New Age”) in one place can be said to lack a sense of adventure.

But at 46, Yorn is about two decades older than the original performers when they recorded the prototypes. And the temperamental distance between singer and song that inevitably ensues is somewhat distracting even when Yorn—as he often does—overcomes it.

There’s no such distance between Harry Dean Stanton and the Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Reed, William Bell, and Ben E. King covers that he sings on the half-studio, half-live October 1993 (Omnivore), which documents the late actor’s work during the ’90s with the Cheap Dates.

A veritable supergroup (the Iggy Pop and Tin Machine bassist Tony Sales, the Stray Cats drummer Slim Jim Phantom, the Kingbees guitarist Jamie James, the Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers guitarist “Skunk” Baxter on pedal steel), the Dates and Stanton made music that sounded a lot like the Flying Burrito Brothers’.

They had fun too. Whether cracking jokes between (or in) songs onstage or recording the loveliest version ever of the Cooder-Hiatt-Dickinson classic “Across the Borderline,” nostalgia was clearly the last thing on their minds.