Shake It Out

Shake It Out: The Glee Cast's 2012 Cover and Its Billboard Journey

When Fox's Glee was at the height of its cultural influence in the early 2010s, the show's cast recordings occupied an unusual position in the music marketplace. They were simultaneously television tie-in products and legitimate chart competitors, capable of generating substantial sales and streaming numbers from a devoted fanbase that treated each episode's musical selections as both entertainment and personal soundtrack. The Glee Cast's 2012 recording of "Shake It Out," originally performed by Florence + the Machine, arrived at a moment when the show's musical ambitions were being tested against increasingly sophisticated source material.

Florence + the Machine released "Shake It Out" in October 2011 as the lead single from their second studio album Ceremonials. The original recording, produced by Paul Epworth, was a sweeping, orchestral piece that showcased Florence Welch's distinctive dramatic soprano and the band's ability to construct emotionally immense soundscapes. The song performed well on charts in the United Kingdom and received widespread critical praise, establishing it as one of the more ambitious singles released that year by any artist in the alternative or indie rock space.

The Glee Cast version was released in 2012 as part of the show's fourth season, during which the series was navigating significant cast transitions following the original characters' graduation from high school. The cover featured vocals from several cast members, consistent with the ensemble approach that had defined the show's approach to musical performance throughout its run. The Glee production team adapted the song's arrangement to fit the show's glossy, theatrical aesthetic while preserving the emotional architecture of the original.

The Glee Cast had established a remarkable chart precedent by that point in the show's history. The ensemble collectively holds one of the largest catalogs of charted singles on the Billboard Hot 100 of any recording act, a consequence of the show's weekly output of cover versions combined with a fanbase that purchased tracks in high volumes through digital platforms. This purchasing behavior, sometimes coordinated through fan communities, allowed Glee recordings to enter charts quickly and sometimes unexpectedly high relative to their cultural profile outside the show's viewership.

"Shake It Out" fit neatly into the categories of material that the Glee production team favored during this period: emotionally complex songs with strong vocal showcases, recognizable enough to carry weight with audiences who knew the original but malleable enough to be reshaped within the show's dramatic context. Florence Welch's original was about the desire to release burden and begin again, a theme with obvious dramatic utility in a show structured around teenage (and young adult) emotional crises.

The show's music supervisor and production team worked consistently with Columbia Records to release Glee versions of songs as standalone digital downloads timed to episode broadcasts. The strategy had generated more than 100 charted Hot 100 entries for the Glee Cast by the time the fourth season aired, making them one of the most prolific charting acts of the early streaming era by sheer volume of entries, even if few individual recordings reached the upper reaches of the chart. Florence + the Machine's "Shake It Out" was released in October 2011 and peaked at number four on the UK Singles Chart, giving the Glee cover a well-established source recording with substantial chart credibility of its own.

Critical reception to the Glee Cast's cover of "Shake It Out" was generally positive among viewers of the show, though music critics who assessed it against the Florence + the Machine original found, as was common with Glee covers of indie and alternative material, that the glossy production choices smoothed over some of the rawness that made the source recording compelling. This was a tension inherent to the Glee format: the show's aesthetic demanded polish at the expense of certain qualities that gave the originals their distinctiveness.

By 2012, the broader conversation around Glee's musical output had become more complicated. The show had begun its fourth season with considerable uncertainty about whether audiences would follow new characters with the same enthusiasm they had shown for the original cast. Music selections like "Shake It Out" were partly designed to signal that the show's ambitions had not diminished even as its personnel changed, reaching toward challenging material that would distinguish it from simpler teen musical fare.

The cover has persisted as an interesting document of how the Glee phenomenon processed contemporary alternative music through the filter of a mainstream television production, translating it for an audience that might not have encountered Florence + the Machine otherwise, while inevitably losing some of what made the original irreplaceable.