Cover Lay Down

Written last night in a rainstorm’s aftermath. Posted this morning in bright dappled sunlight.

They say April showers bring May flowers, but I’m not so sure. This evening’s thunderstorm was a big one, and in our end-of-the-wire rural existence, even when the power stays on, thunder knocks our ‘net connectivity for a loop. Meanwhile, now that the trees have finally filled in, our newly-terraformed backyard doesn’t seem to be getting more than a few hours of sun each day; as a consequence, we’re having trouble getting flowers to do much of anything back there.

I’ve got dozens of posts half-formed and half-written, in my mind and on the screen: new and beloved artists to feature, a long-overdue return to our Covered In Kidfolk series, a few great songwriters to rediscover through folk covers. But writing this with a waning battery and no ‘net access means being shut off from my usual research materials. And in the darkness, the sounds of rain pattering against the leaves, punctuated by the intermittent gutterball of thunder, are sweeter than any music I could play – so sweet, it’s hard to think about anything but the world outside.

Instead, I spent the last hour watching the flowerbeds all but wash away, and the muddy water wash the fill from between the flagstones. The rain against the windows turned the yard beyond into an everchanging pointilist dream. And I lost the thread of anything but the present.

Some rainstorms disrupt; some destroy; others help things grow. All involve chaos, in their own way; even if it is only because rain challenges our default image of the world outside as inherently sunny and easily navigable. Here’s a playlist compiled quickly, in the dark, and researched only afterwards: a set of coversong, from the usual wide variety of folk artists and singer-songwriters, that celebrates storms both real and metaphoric.

• Grant Lee Phillips, So. Central Rain
  (orig. R.E.M.)

  I’ve always liked this song –- the way the the storm gets entangled with the emotional distance in the lyric, the repeated cry of I’m sorry that serves as the chorus — but the original comes off like a maudlin torch song in my ears. On his 2006 cover album nineteeneighties Grant Lee Phillips plays the song out straight, holding his emotion in check, letting the way the words trail off reveal the true heart of the damaged, emotionally tongue-tied narrator. The song is transformed.

• Cassandra Wilson, I Can’t Stand The Rain
  (orig. Ann Peebles)

  Despite her powerful interpretive voice, Cassandra Wilson is usually billed as smooth late night Jazz. But this song is something sparse and jangled from the eye of a storm: tense, frenetic blues from a single slide guitar, a tapping foot like rain on the roof, Wilson’s alto floating above it all like a howl of wind. From the surprisingly good collection The Best Smooth Jazz…Ever.

• Neko Case, Buckets of Rain
• Jimmy LaFave, Buckets of Rain
• Beth Orton and M. Ward, Buckets of Rain
  (orig. Bob Dylan)

  I posted Redbird’s excellent version of this song at the bottom of a post on Grateful Dead rainsongs a while back. Of the three versions here, Jimmy LaFave’s is loose bar-room folkrock americana, with a bit of dustbowl mixed in; Orton and Ward are lo-fi and spare, like a living room cover; Neko Case is sweetest, and oh so perfectly countrified.

• Joan Baez, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
• Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
  (orig. Bob Dylan)

  More Dylan. A very young Joan Baez released this surprisingly tender version of his condemnation of society and its lack of commitment to social justice in 1965 on her Dylan tribute album Farewell, Angelina. Almost forty years later, Edie and the boys bang it out like a poprock anthem.

• Northern Lights w/ Vassar Clements, Rainmaker
  (trad.)

  Newgrass pioneers Northern Lights worked with master fiddler Vassar Clements on and off for over a decade; I especially like their 2000 live album Three August Nights. This high-energy live cut is a five minute bluegrass festival, the perfect jam for a sunny summer afternoon.

• Nanci Griffith, Coming Down in the Rain
  (orig. Buddy Mondlock)

  Mandolin and piano, robust harmonies in little-girl voices, and a story of love lost to the sky make this one of the strongest cuts on Nanci Griffith’s excellent cover album Other Voices, Other Rooms.

• Rani Arbo & Daisy Mayhem, I Get The Blues When It Rains
  (multiple artists)

  Previously featured artists Rani Arbo and Daisy Mayhem turn this over-covered 1929 country and blues chestnut into a cheerful stroll of a song, a tight gem of acoustic folk swing music with a little sultry swagger built right in. From Cocktail Swing, which is all like that.

• Juju Stulbach, Have You Ever Seen The Rain
  (orig. Creedence Clearwater Revival)

  Played as a tender, ragged waltz, a Creedence classic becomes pensive and atmospheric. This bright psychadelic indiefolk from newcomer Juju Stulbach, the Brazilian frontwoman of NYC band Mosquitos, keeps growing on me. Bonus points: it’s the soundtrack to this subject-appropriate commercial for GE.

• Petty Booka, Singin’ In The Rain
  (orig. Gene Kelly)

  This lighthearted romp with double-uke and doubled girlvoices from Japanese duo Petty Booka is bright like a rainbow at storm’s end. Because, in the end, what better way to meet chaos than to smile and dance within it?

Previously on Cover Lay Down:

Ever wonder what happens to the artists who win Best New Artist at SXSW? If they’re Caroline Herring, they release a strong second album and then disappear, putting their recording career on hold to focus on marriage and motherhood. Now, after a long hiatus, Herring returns to the forefront of the folkworld with Lantana, a stunning, intimate collection which I’ve already shortlisted as one of my top ten folk/roots/Americana albums of 2008.

Taking time off for family is an especially risky move in today’s music world, where momentum is king — bloggers, who constantly seek “the next big thing”, share no small responsibility for accelerating this process. But with true genius, Herring turns her time out of the limelight to her advantage, treating it as both subject and sustenance, crafting a strong, polished set of tunes which speak to the the complex balance between traditional family roles and career ambitions which women are asked to internalize in modern society.

The result is a revelation. Herring’s five years out of the studio only intensified what was already a stellar ability to create and deliver poignant, powerful songs about the world around her in a pure, rich southern-twanged voice reminiscent of some of the the best female folksingers of the past thirty years. The songs on Lantana are simultaneously authentic and new, applying traditional folk storytelling and verse structure to stories of women in today’s rural South who, like Herring herself, have struggled to find their place between the demands of the heart and post-feminist possibility.

At its best, this album is haunting and beautiful, combining strong songwriting with solid, effective production and stunning vocal delivery. Paper Gown, a murder ballad of the finest order which retells the chilling story of Susan Smith, is especially gorgeous example of Herring’s ability to create song of the first order: catchy, thoughtful, sympathetic, and deep, the song roots itself in your soul, lingering long after the music has faded from the ears. Even in her quieter, more peaceful numbers — including a deceptively simple cover of traditional lullaby All the Pretty Little Horses and a beautiful, wistful version of Kate Wolf’s Midnight on the Water, both of which we feature below — Herring brings a depth of emotion which few contemporaries can muster

Universally accessible yet rooted deeply in the sounds of Herring’s native south, Lantana is the best singer-songwriter CD I’ve heard in a very long time. Let’s hope it’s the first of many more to come from this up-and-second-coming talent.

• Caroline Herring, Midnight on the Water (orig. Kate Wolf)
• Caroline Herring, All The Pretty Little Horses (trad.)

Lantana doesn’t come out until March 4th, but you want more of Caroline Herring as soon as possible, so pre-order Lantana over at Signature Sounds today. Act now, and you can pick up this magnificent album for under ten dollars — a real steal in today’s market.

Still not convinced? Check out Paper Gown over at fellow folkblog Here Comes The Flood. Their description of Caroline Herring’s sound as “gothic country” is right on the money.

Today’s bonus coversongs include another take on Kate Wolf, and a set of songs which used to be my favorite versions of the slave lullaby All The Pretty Little Horses before Caroline Herring hit it on the nose:

• Nanci Griffith, Across The Great Divide (orig. Kate Wolf)

• Calexico, All The Pretty Horses (trad.)
• Shawn Colvin, All The Pretty Li’l Horses (trad.)
• The Chieftains w/ Patty Griffin, Whole Heap of Little Horses (trad.)

I spent all morning trying to script a post about songs which struggle with the infinite and indescribably complex mysteries of love. The idea was to celebrate this complexity, and acknowledge as valid the stuff that often holds us back from putting a name to what we feel, lest we call it wrong and mess everything up.

But every time I try to put words to love, things fall apart. Love’s like that, I think. I guess that was the point, after all.

Instead, in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, here’s a mixed bag of folk-tinged coversongs that address the myriad and multiple fears we have about love: naming it, finding it, losing it, and losing ourselves to it.

May each of us, regardless of our romantic status, find something in the words of these poets and songwriters which speaks to our secret heart - the better to withstand the oversimplified, candy-red onslaught of emotion sure to come by Thursday.

Thanks to email submissions, new releases and discoveries, and a newly-purchased CD repair kit, it’s time for yet another edition of (Re)Covered, a monthly feature here on Cover Lay Down in which we recover a few songs that dropped through the cracks just a little too late to make it into the posts where they belonged.

I saw Lucy Kaplansky last month at the UnCommon Coffeehouse with my father; as always, she turned in a wonderful, intimate set, including great covers of The Beatles’ Hey Jude, Robin Batteau’s Guinevere, Ron Sexsmith’s Speaking with the Angel, and my own request: Cowboy Singer, a Dave Carter tune which she seemed genuinely pleased to play. If you ever get a chance to see Lucy, drop everything and go.

We covered the works of Lucy Kaplansky in our first month here at Cover Lay Down, and posted Cowboy Singer last week in our feature on folk covers of cowboy songs. But I just can’t get enough of this sweet-voiced urbanite. So here’s Guinevere, which Lucy cites as her most requested song, plus a gorgeous Billy Joel lullaby from 2007 release Down at the Sea Hotel, a mostly-stellar album of dreamy kidsong covers from the Red House Records stable.

Raising Jewnitarian children means working hard to balance the outer culture’s overabundance of Christmas music with alternative seasonal sounds. This is sometimes harder than it sounds, especially when it comes to covers. Though there have been a few originals over the years that would fit the category, most notably a recent spate of Hannukah music from the fringes of the indierock world, it’s harder for these songs to enter the canon, driven as it is by the tick and tinsel of gift-giving and public holiday display in a predominantly Christian culture.

In some ways, it’s surprising, given the national push towards multiculturalism over the past decades, that there aren’t more songs of not-just-Christmas. There are plenty of modern, entirely secular songs about Christmastime, it’s true — common themes here might include “I miss you more this time of year”, “I want stuff”, and, more recently, “crass commercialism is getting kind of evil, isn’t it?” But ultimately, these songs are still about Christmas. After all, it’s not like I miss people more this time of year just because it’s cold.

Still, there’s a small, stellar selection of nonedenominational songs that have crept into the songbook over the years, many lying unnoticed among paeans to Christmas trees, Jesus, and holiday celebration. And a few great, well-covered songs out there which are appropriate for a snowy December day, even if they’d never make it on a holiday sampler.

Today, as an antidote to the already-overfamiliar Christmasmusic that fills ears and airwaves this time of year, a few select songs of solstice, snow, winter, and other alt-seasonal delights from the world of folk covermusic. Plus the usual bonus covers, just for kicks.

• Erica Wheeler, Song For A Winter’s Night (orig. Gordon Lightfoot)
• Quartette, Song For A Winter’s Night (ibid.)
  Gordon Lightfoot’s mellow Song For A Winter’s Night fits the folk mindset perfectly: the hearth, the snow, the story of us in a house. A spare cover from Erica Wheeler and the rich harmonies of Canadian folk supergroup Quartette do it justice, twice over.

• Robert Earl Keen, Snowin’ On Raton (orig. Townes Van Zandt)
• Rani Arbo & Daisy Mayhem, Snowbird (orig. Gene McLellan)
  The cover of snow becomes a metaphor of darkness and loss in Robert Earl Keen’s latenight honkytonk cover of Snowin’ on Raton, and a mantle in Rani Arbo and Daisy Mayhem’s light, swinging version of Elvis/Anne Murray classic Snowbird.

• Elizabeth Mitchell, Jingle Bells
• Sufjan Stevens, Jingle Bells
• The Roches, Jingle Bells
  Three vastly different versions of a jinglebell sleighride carol you forgot wasn’t about Christmas. Widely divergent possibilities of glee from the mistress of authentic kidfolk, the king of weird holiday indiefolk, and the unique harmonies of The Roches.

  As always, all artist links above go to artist/label storefronts — the best way to give artists the most bang for their buck. And remember, kids: music is a present that fits any occasion, any season, any connection between you and your family and friends, no matter what you celebrate.

  Today’s bonus coversongs:

• Jill Sobule, Merry Christmas From The Family (orig. Robert Earl Keen)
  Okay, so it’s not nondenominational. Folkpopstar (and Jew) Jill Sobule covers this drunken anti-spiritual paean to dysfunction with such aplomb, it transcends the holiday setting.

• Nanci Griffith, Ten Degrees and Getting Colder (orig. Gordon Lightfoot)
  This one’s not technically about winter, just cold. Lightfoot was Canadian. I guess it gets chilly up there. From coveralbum Other Voices, Other Rooms.

• The Roches, Winter Wonderland
• The Roches, Frosty The Snowman
  Two more familiar, playful, tongue-in-cheek “traditional” songs of snow from The Roches’ mostly-Christmas album We Three Kings.

  Haven’t had enough of Christmas coverfolk? Never fear! Stay tuned over the next few weeks for a plethora of acoustic holiday cheer still to come!