Members of Rage Against the Machine, Foo Fighters Join Afghan Group to Cover Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams’

Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, Foo Fighters’ Rami Jaffee, the Go-Go’s Kathy Valentine, and more have helped out the Afghanistan outfit the Miraculous Love Kids/Girl With a Guitar on their new cover of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams.”

The cover finds the Miraculous Love Kids/Girl With a Guitar transforming the uncanny and thumping Eighties pop hit into a slow-burning power ballad that builds from eerie to epic. The clip arrives with a video that pairs the group’s performance with footage submitted by its array of guests: Along with the aforementioned musician, the song also features the Bangles’ Vicki Peterson, the Runaways’ Cherie Currie, MC5’s Wayne Kramer, Umphrey’s McGee’s Kris Myers, and the Bird and the Bee’s Inara George and Greg Kurstin.

The Miraculous Love Kids/Girl With a Guitar was founded by American musician Lanny Cordola, who helped put the group together in 2015 after meeting a young Afghan girl, Mursal, whose two sisters had been killed by a suicide bomber several years prior. The goal of the group was to provide a musical outlet for other girls and young women who’ve been affected by violence in the region, and in 2018 they released a cover of Brian Wilson’s “Love and Mercy” featuring Wilson himself.

In a statement, Cordola explained why the Miraculous Love Kids/Girl With a Guitar settled on “Sweet Dreams” for their second cover: “We wanted to do something moody — a kind of gothic hymn — and we gravitated toward the dark yet hopeful spirit of this song. The lines in the song — ‘Some of them want to use you, some of them want to get used by you, some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused’ — really resonate, reflecting these troubled times. But then a glimmer of optimism — ‘Hold your head up…keep your head up’ — gently flows through the voices of these girls who have experienced the worst that humanity has to offer.”