Category: Glen Phillips


Glen Phillips Covers:
Huey Lewis, Van Morrison, The Beatles, Bjork, Gillian Welch + more
…plus new and old collaborative covers with Sean and Sara Watkins!

September 20th, 2009 — 05:41 pm





Glen Phillips made a name for himself as founding frontman for Toad The Wet Sprocket, a high school rock band made good; if you’re a child of the eighties like myself, or just a fan of retro alt-rock radio, you’ve heard his distinctive voice plenty of times, most notably on cultural staple Walk On The Ocean. Indeed, my own personal experience with the artist, now pushing forty, is restricted to a single lawn-seat glimpse at a mid-nineties H.O.R.D.E. festival, an event most memorable for being the first and last rock concert which I was able to convince the girl who would become my wife to attend.

But though Toad broke up before the turn of the century, this is no “where are they now” retrospective. For the past decade, the singer-songwriter with the distinctively strained voice and an ear for wry hook-laden songs has been busy pursuing his craft in other venues, drifting from label to label, releasing solo works and collaborations at a relatively frequent rate, and covering a broad set of tunes in concert and beyond. (For example, his Beatles cover, which you’ll find below along with several live covers, comes from an excellent all-Beatles-cover soundtrack to the truly awful 2009 Eddie Murphy vehicle Imagine That.) And although not all of Phillips’ output is legitimately folk, the vast bulk of it is singer-songwritery stuff, and it’s all good.

Glen Phillips’ three solo albums have veered from the full-blown singer-songwriter pop of his debut Abulum to the more Toad-like production of both faster and more atmospheric tracks on his incredible sophomore Lost Highway release Winter Pays for Summer, and back to both styles for his fluid, dynamic 2006 masterpiece Mr. Lemons — it says everything it needs to that I have favorites on all of them, and that each of those favorites fits a different mood. Though diverse, each album comes across as authentic, melodic, strong, and thoughtful: a rarity, in a world where most artists go through some sort of slump in their solo careers, and overall a powerful package indeed.


Phillips’ most notable collaboration, especially for folk fans, is an ongoing partnership with Sean and Sara Watkins, founding members of Nickel Creek and – like Phillips, Jon Brion, Aimee Mann, and a strong group of other musicians – regulars at L.A.’s Largo. In 2004, this partnership came to fruition with Mutual Admiration Society, a lighthearted, folkpop-meets-bluegrass album originally recorded in 2000 with all three members of Nickel Creek, and eventually released on the Sugar Hill label. I discovered the project last year in my local library, and, finding that it exists predominantly under the cultural radar, have worked tirelessly to spread the love to friends and neighbors ever since.

(Total aside: Bonus points to M.A.S. for featuring live Nickel Creek and Watkins-led covers of both the Jackson 5 hit I Want You Back and Britney Spears’ Toxic on their MySpace page; we’ve featured both Sara & Nickel Creek here previously, so I’ll let y’all head over there on your own to pick up these tracks.)

This week, the collaboration continues, and the task of promoting Glen Phillips, both solo and with the talented Watkins siblings, gets a heck of a lot easier with the release of a new project called Works Progress Administration — starring Glen, Sean, Sara, fiddler Luke Bulla, and members of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Elvis Costello and the Imposters, all from the Largo scene. Most of the tunes were penned by Phillips, and though Sean’s straining to hit the high notes in a few places, that songwriting, plus incredible musicianship and strong harmonies, has resulted in an absolutely stellar set of songs well worth the purchase price. Check out the Kinks cover from that album below, order the whole thing here, and then check out this full set of Glen Phillips coverfolk to whet your whistle while you wait for Phillips and friends to bring the WPA tour to your town.



What, you’re still here? Seriously, you people. Go buy WPA, and then, if you haven’t already, pick up the Glen Phillips back catalog. Or, if nothing else, head over to his webpage and click on the donate button.

After all, as I pointed out to some cheeseball who wanted to pay me to promote their artists just this afternoon, Cover Lay Down is proudly non-profit, avidly pro-artist, and fully supportive of the peer-to-peer recommendation and promotion model which characterizes music blogs at their best.

Which is to say: our love is not for sale. But Glen Phillips’ work is, and it’s well worth the price.

Previously on Cover Lay Down: Mutual Admiration Society cover Elliott Smith’s Between the Bars live in some parking lot after a show.

979 comments » | Glen Phillips, Nickel Creek

Covered in Folk: Harry Nilsson (Covers from Marc Cohn, Steve Forbert, Glen Phillips and more!)

October 15th, 2008 — 10:00 pm

My interest in Harry Nilsson came through coversong, most specifically 1995 covers album For The Love Of Harry: Everybody Sings Nilsson, which I picked up when it was new in order to gain access to otherwise-unavailable rarities from Marc Cohn, Aimee Mann, and a solid roster of other perfectly tuned oddities (like, say, Fred Schneider of the B-52s doing a pitch-perfect version of Coconut, or the infamous nasal harmonies of The Roches applied to a space-age Spaceman). Purchasing the album was a revelation: here was a set of tunes that were all strangely familiar, yet I had never realized that they were all from the same guy. For the rest of my life, a huge set of the songs in the very air of modern American culture would have new relevance to me — which is to say, Nilsson’s work remained ubiquitous as it had always been, but this time, when I heard his songs, I knew how to connect them.

Nilsson is best known in the world of cover collectors for his incredible cover of Beatles classic You Can’t Do That, which combines bits and pieces from 22 other songs from the Beatles catalog, and for his definitive version of Fred Neil’s Everybody’s Talkin’, which appeared in the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy, and would later be covered by dozens of others, far too often erroneously attributed to Nilsson himself. His voice is familiar to Western culture due to an almost unprecedented turn as a composer for and song contributor to over fifty film and television soundtracks, from the theme song to The Courtship of Eddie’s Father to the entirety of the songs written for the sorely disappointing Robin Williams/Shelley Long vehicle Popeye. You may have also seen his oddly endearing 1971 made-for-TV morality play and kidproject The Point in your own childhood, as I did; Nilsson claims he had the idea for the project while on acid, and it shows.

But Nilsson was more than just a soundtrack and novelty song guy. A highly prolific and versatile artist in the sixties and seventies, Nilsson released twenty albums between 1962 and 1980, when illness and exhaustion, coupled with the death of his friend John Lennon, drove him away from the studio. He was an incredible songsmith, as his high coverage speaks to; he had a way with a tune, and an ability to speak wistfully yet wryly about cultural alienation through finely honed lyrics floated upon a full wash of rich, orchestrated sound. Discovering his work has been a joy. Knowing that I have only hit the tip of the iceberg is even more wonderful.

Despite high pop culture credibility and two Grammy Awards, it is generally believed that Nilsson’s tendency towards constant reinvention and vast shifts in musical style throughout his career kept him from the recognition that he truly deserved. But over a decade after his death, a quick peruse of the blogosphere reveals that Nilsson continues to have a huge fan base among audiophiles, many of whom believe that his true genius was criminally underrated throughout a highly productive career pushing the envelope of sound and sarcasm, irreverence and grandiose instrumentation. Tellingly, Lennon, who shared Nilsson’s disdain for commercialism, was also a fan; in turn, I’ve heard bloggers I trust refer to Nilsson’s work as “Beatles-esque”, and though I’m not the hugest Beatles fan, I can see what they mean. And any musician who had his work included in High Fidelity — which is, after all, about music with a high credibility factor — automatically gets counted as one of the best of the underrated bunch.

I didn’t grow up with Nilsson in the house; as such, I owe a huge debt to the musicians I love and the blogosphere at large for my increasing fandom of Nilsson, who not only helped me put a name to this culturally ubiquitous voice, but taught me that there was more to this artist than soundtracks, misattribution, and “put the lime in the coconut”. As thanks and in tribute to the power of iconoclasts everywhere, here’s some of my favorite folk-tinged Harry Nilsson covers, from the great, lazy jazzgrass jams of Glen Phillips and Nickel Creek side project Mutual Admiration Society to Steve Forbert’s torn, wistful take on The Moonbeam Song.

Welsh popfolkie and early Apple recording artist Mary Hopkin takes an orchestrated turn on The Puppy Song, while a previously-posted Victoria Williams deconstructs the song into something playfully delicate and warbly; Marc Cohn croons Turn on Your Radio as a slow, inimitable blues with soulful vocals and a Nilsson-esque wash of sound. Canadian folkie Reid Jamieson‘s lovely, lighthearted solo acoustic take on Nilsson obscurity Nobody Cares About The Railroads Anymore alone is worth the price of admission. The Asylum Street Spankers are their ragged, irreverent selves, bringing an eerie saw and some doo-wop vocals to an acoustic Think About Your Troubles off their children’s album Mommy Says No. And who could resist the indie folkrock of The Format to top things off? Enjoy.

As always, our inclusion of links to the above artists’ stores and homepages should be taken as a tacit urge to support the continued creation of artistic genius in our culture by buying music, directly from the artist wherever possible. Which is to say: buying this stuff from the musicians justifies our existence, and theirs, so do it.

What, more? I was tempted to drop a long list of covers of Everybody’s Talkin’ here to serve as today’s bonus coversongs, but we’ll save that for a future Single Song Sunday. Instead, I’m going to suggest that, as with many prolific artists who treat musical output as an avenue for genre exploration, Harry Nilsson’s diverse output includes more than a few tracks which reflect the trope and stripped down sound of modern folk, even if they are ultimately best classified as classic radio poprock in context. Here’s a few covers from Nilsson’s lighter side.

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1,092 comments » | Asylum Street Spankers, Glen Phillips, Harry Nilsson, Marc Cohn, Mary Hopkin, Nickel Creek, Reid Jamieson, Steve Forbert, The Format, Victoria Williams

Covered In Folk: Gillian Welch (Glen Phillips, Ryan Adams, Alison Krauss, Crooked Still)

January 19th, 2008 — 06:45 pm

Hope no one minds an early “Sunday” post this week; my brother and his wife are on their way in from Brooklyn for the long weekend, and I don’t get to see them as often as I’d like. I’ll have a short post up for Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, if I can; in the meantime, enjoy today’s feature on “American Primitive” folkartist Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings, the tenth post in our popular Covered in Folk series, where we pay tribute to the songwriting talents of a single artist.


I saw Gillian Welch at the Green River Festival a while back, and it was a revelation. From ten rows back, her summer dress blowing in the hot breeze, her twanged voice, the doubled guitars, her narratives of Southern poverty and pain, all conspired to bring the hot scent of jasmine and Southern dust on the breeze even as we lounged on the New England grass. The crowd swelled. The rest of the afternoon passed in a haze.

Though it was her vocal talents in O Brother, Where Art Thou which put her on a mass-marketable par with Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris, it was clear to anyone watching that, as a musical phenomenon, Gillian Welch was a force to be reckoned with in the growing americana folk movement.

More often than not, Gillian Welch is the performing name for two musicians, Welch herself and her ubiquitous partner David Rawlings; when they work with others each gets billing, but in performance as a duo, the pronoun “she” is the standard convention. Welch appears as frontwoman, and can certainly stand her own as a powerful force in a particular subgenre of american folk music, but they share writing credit on many songs, and their harmonies — vocal and guitar — are notable and recognizable.

And what is the Gillian Welch sound? Welch’s voice is well-suited for the raw, backporch paces she puts it through; together, as songwriters and performers, these two musicians build on this vocal base to create an americana sound Welch calls “American Primitive”, something simultanously sparer and more richly nuanced than anything a solo artist could do with guitar or voice. Call it old-timey folk — unproduced and jangly, sparse and stripped down from the more traditional old-timey sound of groups like Old Crow Medicine Show, Welch and Rawlings’ musical compatriots and touring partners.

There are times when Gillian Welch sounds like an old Alan Lomax field recording, something timeless, raw and elegant in its simplicity and honest rough presentation. The lyrics, too, tend towards the trope and narrative themes — rural life, loss and hardship — of early American southern field folk. Given all that, it’s no wonder that over the last decade or so, since even before the release of debut album Revival in 1996, the folk end of the americana movement has begun to pick up her songs and give them the traditional treatment.

Today, some select covers from the increasingly vast spectrum of sound that pays tribute to this weathered, shy, still-young matriarch of the new americana folk set. Interesting, how many retain the original Welch/Rawlings close harmonies, as if the tenor echo were as much a part of the original text to be covered as the powerful words, melody, and chord. Perhaps it is.

Crooked Still hops with cello, banjo and bass; Emmylou Harris fills out the sound in her inimitable style; newcomers Dakota Blonde mourn a life alone with accordian and guitar and drumthunder. The infinite possibility of nuance and power keeps this oft-covered, well-worn tune fresh, despite its weary lyric.

Two electrified covers which take this heavy tune to its natural folk rock conclusion. Alt-country rocker Ryan Adams‘ shortened version, off the Destroyer Sessions, is full-on Neil Young, guitars and vocals tangled up in angst. Singer-songwriter and ex-Toad the Wet Sprocket frontman Glen Phillips‘ version is darker, more pensive, more beautiful.

At first listen, Peter Mulvey‘s classically-fingerpicked version teeters on the overly maudlin, and previously-posted girlgroup Red Molly‘s three-voiced approach seems to cost them emotive potential. But listen again — these grow on you.

Fellow Gillian Welch O Brother, Where Are Thou muse Alison Krauss and her star-studded band Union Station make a sweet live bluegrass ballad of an old-timey wallflower’s love song.

Kidfolk queen Elizabeth Mitchell brings us a light-hearted tale well-suited for the bedtime ears of the next generation of traditional folk fans.

This sultry gospel-jazz take from the Elan Mehler Quartet is sweet with breathy sax and slow-rolling piano. It isn’t folk, but it makes the perfect capstone to any set of Gillian Welch covers.

Don’t forget to click on artist names above to purchase the best of the modern folk world from bluegrass to bluesfolk direct from the source. And, if you don’t already have them, buy Gillian Welch’s four incredible albums direct from her website.

Today’s bonus coversongs hold back a bit, that we might eventually bring you a full post of Gillian Welch covering other artists. But here’s two collaborative efforts that give Rawlings and Welch their own billing, to tide you over until then:

863 comments » | Alison Krauss, Crooked Still, Dakota Blonde, David Rawlings, Elan Mehler Quartet, Elizabeth Mitchell, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Glen Phillips, Peter Mulvey, Red Molly, Ryan Adams