Longtime Blues Traveler fans baffled by the band’s detour into faux ’70s prog rock on the Jay Bennett-produced Bastardos! (2005) should welcome their latest effort with open arms—and open ears. The set list reads like a greatest hits album, but Cover Yourself does exactly what the title implies: It makes the old faves fresh by reinventing them.

Ben Wilson’s chiming piano chords set the stage with “But Anyway.” The classic crowd pleaser off the band’s first album, which predates Wilson’s tenure by a decade, gets a reggae-style treatment with deep acoustic bass that works surprisingly well and is neatly capped by Chan Kinchla’s original acoustic guitar riff. G. Love drops by to trade raps and harmonica riffs with John Popper on “Just for Me” from Bridge, the band’s first album after the death of bassist Bobby Sheehan in New Orleans in 1999. Tad Kinchla’s big, fat bass notes call Sheehan down to stalk “Defense and Desire,” which turns BT’s sweaty New York bar band days into a rock opera, while “Mountains Win Again,” Sheehan’s signature song, becomes a wrenching blues lament.

As on any tribute album, not every cover works. The band’s biggest hit “Runaround,” off their platinum album four, is Cover Yourself’s biggest miss; horns and a reggae backbeat just dilute its quintessential bubblegum appeal. But the military cadence of Brendan Hill’s drums on “Hook” is a stroke of genius, tracking the inevitable march to the pop-song hook that “brings you home.” And the band scores a direct hit with a scorching “Carolina Blues” that heads deep into the Delta with guest guitarist Charlie Sexton’s snaky slide and earns John Popper serious props as a blues belter.