I’m a sucker for an unexpected cover song. That’s not always a popular perspective in music nerd circles, where cover songs are often thought of as the domain of scoundrels, posers, and novelty acts.

There is some merit to that position, I’ll admit. I assemble a new playlist for my trivia night every week (come on over to Burning Brothers Brewing some Saturday to get a taste!), and unexpected covers often figure heavily into the mix. I focus on jazz and funk instrumentals or foreign-language renditions of familiar songs. Putting those playlists together requires wading into a lot of unexplored and unadvisable corners of Spotify. There’s a bottomless well of fantastic cover material to be found there, but there is even more utter garbage.

For every transcendent organ jazz cover of Wham’s “Careless Whisper,” German pop take on The Hollies’ “Bus Stop,” brass band arrangement of Lorde’s “Royals,” or Liberace rendition of Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” there are a dozen limp covers by bands who are plainly just going through the motions. Even worse are smirky covers by bands who are just covering an unlikely song for the lulz. There are a whole lot of those out there, from folky covers of hip-hop songs to metal versions of Top 40 pop tunes. Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox has made a career out of ironic covers of popular favorites (no shade intended, they do as good a job of it as anyone out there).

I say all of this as a preamble to my conflicted feelings about today’s topic, the 2002 covers album “When Pigs Fly: Songs You Never Thought You’d Hear.” I only recently found out this album existed, even though it should have been right up my alley when it came out. It’s a project pulled together by New York filmmaker and musician Cevin Soling with the express purpose of matching familiar songs with artists who would never be expected to cover them.

The idea apparently came from a collaboration Soling’s band The Neanderthal Spongecake did, in which guest singer Kevin Dubrow of Quiet Riot performed a mellow acoustic version of “Metal Health.” After that cover got some traction on college radio stations, Soling became fascinated with the idea of unlikely cover songs. There was plenty of precedent for this in the ’90s and ’00s. Hit compilation albums like “If I Were a Carpenter,” “Saturday Morning’s Greatest Hits,” and “Schoolhouse Rock Rocks!” were all built on the concept of hip bands recontextualizing un-hip material, and acts from Alien Ant Farm to Korn had discovered the radio-friendly power of a semi-ironic cover song.

Still, the idea of a full “random covers for the sake of random covers” album was fairly novel. Through what must have been an impressive network of industry contacts, Soling was able to assemble a truly unpredictable roster of musical heavy-hitters for “When Pigs Fly.” The lineup for this thing is something else. Hawaiian music icon Don Ho covers Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey.” Country harmonizers The Oak Ridge Boys lay down a version of “Carry on Wayward Son” by Kansas. Squeaky-clean British invaders Herman’s Hermits get punk-ish on Billy Idol’s “White Wedding.” ’60s pop royalty Lesley Gore puts an amazing spin on AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.”

As offbeat as all of those cuts are, nothing is more out of left field than the album’s opener, a duet of Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” performed by ’90s folk-rock superstar Ani DiFranco and… Jackie Chan. I’m sorry, even though I’ve heard the song numerous times and know that I have my facts straight, it still feels wrong to type that out. Even knowing that the pairing was specifically formulated for maximum WTF-ness, even knowing that Jackie Chan is an accomplished singer with a number of albums to his credit, even knowing that the final product is pretty darn decent, it’s difficult for me to fathom that a Jackie Chan/Ani DiFranco interpretation of the great American songbook is a thing that exists. Which was Soling’s whole idea, so mission accomplished, I suppose.

From a historical perspective, there’s one more track on the “When Pigs Fly” roster that’s even more interesting. On the surface, having envelope-pushing new wave godfathers Devo cover Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “Ohio” actually seems like one of the less edgy entries on the album. Devo already had a long history of ironic weirdness, and their snide cover of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was such a signature of their early work that they played it on “Saturday Night Live” in 1978. (Hi there, young Fred Willard!)

What made this version of “Ohio” special was that Devo vocalist and bass player Gerald Casale was a native of Kent, Ohio, a former student at Kent State University, and a witness to the infamous National Guard shooting of four student protestors in 1970. Those killings were both the subject of Neil Young’s original rendition of “Ohio” and the impetus for Casale trading in his hippie roots for the sardonic philosophy of “de-evolution” that led him to co-found Devo. In that light, this recording stands as an impressive and even moving act of musical catharsis.

I’m still trying to figure out what I think about “When Pigs Fly” on the whole. On the one hand, you could take it as a cynical attempt at going viral by an artist who got a taste of ironic commercial success. On the other hand, you could take it as a good-natured experiment by a curator who just wanted to see if it could be done. However you choose to read it, it’s an undeniably odd time capsule that succeeded in its stated mission of capturing some musical mashups that would have otherwise never happened. It’s also the only place you’re ever going to find a duet between Jackie Chan and Ani DiFranco. In my book, that’s not nothing.