Single Song Sunday: Cat Stevens’ Trouble
(w/ Eef Barzelay, Marissa Nadler, Kristen Hersh & more!)
September 24th, 2011 — 10:15 pm
It’s been a tough few weeks, for body and spirit. Our inner city school is badly overstocked this year, with classes too full to manage, and hallways that ripple with energy we can barely control; the stress among the faculty is sky-high, and we’re hard pressed not to take it out on each other. Limping into such an environment every morning puts me at a severe disadvantage, but limp I must: I seem to have torn something in my knee, trying to compensate for a flared disk in my lower back, and have grow accustomed to a constant haze of low-grade pain.
If I was a more soulful man, I suppose, I’d be singing the blues. But I’m a folkfan, at heart; turning to the darker, sparser branches of the singer-songwriter movement soothes my breast better than anything else. I’ve been steeping in Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, and other thin outsider voices, trying to find the perfect representative to speak my pain into being, and calm it through the communion of folk.
And then the playlist skipped, and I remembered Cat Stevens.
We first covered the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens way back in 2007 here at Cover Lay Down, citing his uncanny ability to put words and melody to peace, love, and a connection to the earth as ample evidence for continued consideration of the soft-spoken singer-songwriter as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. But Stevens does loss and loneliness too, as evidenced by the bitterness of Wild World. And I will ever be floored by Trouble, this week’s Single Song Sunday subject: a majestic piece, elementally simple, surprisingly soaring, an apt and adept personification of the fickle fates that beset the universal everyman, written when the artist was 19, during a year of convalescence following a near-fatal bout of tuberculosis
The newest addition to this canon of coverage comes courtesy of Eef Barzelay (recently featured here), whose recent foray into Kickstarter promotion produced not only the intended EP of Journey covers, but a bonus disk of songs selected by generous patrons, who shelled out $150 for the right to select songs for Eef to take on. Barzelay’s torn, mournful take on Trouble is both a perfect sampler for that LP-length collection and a powerful reminder of the potency of the song itself.
Pair it with Lisa Haley’s Zydeco-Cajun country, the Holmes Brothers’ sweet blues harmonies, Bruce Robison’s sparse country ballad, a summery jam from Widespread Panic, crashing indie waves from Kristen Hersh, electric guitar folk from Eddie Vedder, a mellow, as-yet unattributed folkrock cover once thought to be by Oasis, and delicate takes from Marissa Nadler and Elliot Smith, and you’ve got a set that once again proves the flexibility of great songwriting.
- Eef Barzelay: Trouble
(from Fan Chosen Covers (Best Of), 2011)
- Elliott Smith: Trouble
(recorded 2003 for the Thumbsucker soundtrack)
- Kristen Hersh: Trouble
(from Sunny Border Blue, 2001)
- Eddie Vedder: Trouble
(live, circa 2007-2008)
- Bruce Robison: Trouble
(from Long Way Home From Anywhere, 1999)
- Lisa Haley: Trouble
(from Waiting For The Sky, 1997)
- Unknown band: Trouble
(from this YouTube video, among other sources)
- The Holmes Brothers: Trouble
(from the Crossing Jordan soundtrack, 2003)