Watch Members Of Mastodon, Cave In, & Baroness Play Metal Cover Of Fleetwood Mac’s “You Make Loving Fun”

The Two Minutes To Late Night video series has been one of the few reliable bright spots of a dark-ass year. Once a week, the comedian Jordan Olds gathers together a group of metal, punk, and hardcore luminaries, and they all remotely cover a classic song. In recent weeks, Two Minutes To Late Night has saluted Rage Against The Machine, Billy Idol, and Robyn. Today, the show has put together a truly impressive band to cover a Fleetwood Mac classic.

Fleetwood Mac’s “You Make Loving Fun” is not even remotely a metal song, though it might be one of the most cold-blooded works of popular music you will ever encounter. Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie, when she was still married to her bandmate John McVie, write the song about the affair she was having with the band’s lighting director. “You Make Loving Fun” became one of the singles from the band’s blockbuster 1977 album Rumours, and it was a top-10 hit for the band. It’s a cute, breezy jam until you know the backstory, at which point it becomes something else.

For the cover, the Two Minutes To Late Night crew have naturally transformed “You Make Loving Fun” into amped-up, riff-heavy, shred-happy hard rock. The lead vocalist on this one is Johanna Sadonis, singer for the Berlin-based heavy metal band Lucifer. She sings the song while lying down in a field, and she delivers all those lines to a skull, maybe making this into a love song to death. The two backup singers are the comedian Emily Panic, who happens to be married to friend-of-Stereogum El-P, and Two Minutes To Late Night regular Stephen Brodsky, who leads the bands Cave In and Mutoid Man.

The backing band here is plenty impressive: Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher, Baroness bassist Nick Jost, and Lucifer Nicke Anderson, who used to be in the Swedish bands Entombed and the Hellacopters. As always, Jordan Olds joins in, under his Gwarsenio Hall persona. Also, I might be burying the lede here when I say that there’s a special guest guitar shredder: Marty Friedman, who was in Megadeth for a decade, playing on Rust In Peace and Countdown To Extinction, and who then moved to Japan, where he regularly does guitar-hero stuff on TV and does soundtrack work for anime. Friedman heroically solos all through the cover, and he makes it look fun. Watch it and listen to the Fleetwood Mac original below.

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