Guest Post: Sandy of Slowcoustic
stops by with sweet covers of Lionel Richie and Damien Jurado
July 25th, 2010 — 10:30 am
As before, I’m still in the folkfield, due to return Monday. But we’re not the type that leave our readers bereft here at Cover Lay Down. Even when we’re hanging about stageside in a field somewhere, trying to get our favorite singer-songwriters to cover Freebird.
Instead, we asked Sandy, aka Smansmith, the ever-eloquent host of Slowcoustic – “a blog about the unhurried side of Americana/Alt-Country/Folk/Indie/Down-Tempo music” which has truly caused me to rethink the very nature of folk music over the last year or so – to stop in for a visit. And though he’s been hard at work on Folk Music For What Lies Ahead, a very promising compilation he’s been curating for Yer Bird Records which is due to drop this coming Tuesday, Sandy came through swimmingly, with a pensive piece on the nature of coverage, and its generative purpose from the artist’s perspective. Take it away, Sandy!
Hello everyone! Firstly, don’t get too excited, this is a guest post (or part post) from myself, better known as Sandy from Slowcoustic.com. Secondly, thank you to Boyhowdy for inviting me to bring my $0.02 on the pages of Cover Lay Down! Being a fan of this very site for a while now, I am taking part in filling the void left from your regular in-depth read to try provide a small morsel of food for though along with a couple of covers (!!) to take away. Remember, just a small morsel…
I didn’t really know where to start with this post, so I decided to find a couple of covers that I thought I would use. Sounds simple right? Well not as easy as you think when trying to come up with covers for a blog that covers covers better than myself (see what I did there?). So I did end up finding two covers and when listing them it hit me on what to post on…”why do artists perform covers in the first place?”.
We are going to discard the obvious reasons of not having enough of your own material to fill a show or album and go into whether it is for amusement or as an homage. Sure there may be more reasons, but in this instance I wanted to provide these two sides or examples of the cover track. You see where I am going with this now. If you are aware of my blog Slowcoustic, you are aware that I enjoy the hushed and slower side of things and folk ballads tend to hit home with me. So a great acoustic version of a Lionel Richie song is a fantastic place to start, isn’t it? Let’s listen to a cover that I think might have been done for “fun” or just because it seems absurd to have something like Lionel Ritchie covered by a deep south man-of-the-cloth type like Evan Birdsong of Blackbird Harmony.
- “Hello (Lionel Richie)” – Blackbird Harmony, taken from his Hardwood Exits Demos
Now, what about the cover song that isn’t done because it was a song that you wanted to change, but a song that you simply like and wanted to play it because you want to. It might not be specifically like you are performing a “cover song” so to speak, but simply playing the song originally performed by someone else. If you get what I am saying. I feel this next track is something like this as it isn’t wildly different than the original and is clearly not done tongue in cheek. The band is Theodore, but the track is actually a solo performance by the lead singer Justin Kinkel-Schuster who does a great performance of Damien Jurado’s “Fuel”.
There you have it. A cover that might have been in fun and one that was simply performed – in my opinion, both work better than most.
~Sandy
Cover Lay Down will return Wednesday with a fresh outlook on life. Thanks to Sandy and Chad for covering so well in my absence!