Category: Iron and Wine


Iron & Wine covers:
Little Feat, The Four Tops, Nick Drake, New Order & more!

June 17th, 2012 — 07:20 pm





Iron & Wine – the nom de plume of American singer-songwriter Sam Beam, who took an MFA to a career in film studies before switching to the musical arts – was an early adopter in the heavily bearded and blog-driven indiefolk movement, smashing into the scene with debut The Creek Drank The Cradle, an understated home-recorded collection of originals released in 2002 on Sub Pop that made several major critics’ end-of-year lists. The use of his cover of Such Great Heights as a b-side to the Postal Service original in January of the following year helped spread his name and his sound to a wider audience even as it served as a harbinger of coverage to come.

These early works established Iron & Wine as a true force in the new folk world. Several albums and EPs in the next few years, including multiple live bootlegs and a highly desirable collaboration with fellow rising stars Calexico, led to a 2005 mainstage performance at Bonnaroo, and featured artists status on alternative and indie playlists worldwide. And the re-use of a number of his songs in major films and TV shows – from Garden State and Twilight to House, Grey’s Anatomy, and The O.C. – only cemented his reputation as a key player in the post-millennial transformation of both industry and genre.

Beam deserves his recognition. His originals are unparalleled; like many of my generation, I find true depth and potency in his early works, including both his early acoustic 4-track recordings and the rich, full band sounds of sophomore full-length Our Endless Numbered Days, and continue to keep his sensitive songbook close to my ears and heart even as it has expanded into a more electrified folk rock sound. But his intense layered whisper and a strong sense of nuance in both performance and arrangement also reveal poignancy in the songs of others on whose shoulders he stands. And his knack for resurrecting songs whose original production values obscure a surprising tenderness make him an easy favorite of the blogset, and an apt feature subject here.

There’s much to celebrate, too. In ten scant years of industry work, Beam has taken on a wide swath of the musical map in his inimitable way; we’ve shared several of these in other, older posts here on Cover Lay Down over the years, most recently in and among our beloved thematic sets. But what prompts today’s feature is Beam’s return to the fore of the indie coverage movement, thanks to a double-shot set newly released for Suicide Squeeze’s singles series: called Two Sides of George, the a-side features a George Michael tune originally recorded for the AV Club last summer, while the b-side takes on Lowell George composition Trouble. You’ll find both new songs streaming above our usual coverage history below; listen, and hear why Iron & Wine remains one of our favorite coverfolk standbys.

    Iron & Wine: One More Try (orig. George Michael)


    Iron & Wine: Trouble (orig. Little Feat)





[pick up the entire Iron & Wine coverage set as a zip file!]

4 comments » | Iron and Wine

Gender Gaps: Laura Cantrell covers New Order, Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello, John Prine et. al.

August 6th, 2008 — 12:33 pm

Photo by Ted Barron, stellar photographer and bloghost

Let Us Now Praise Famous Women, countryfolk artist and long-time WFMU radio host Laura Cantrell‘s guest post over at Boogie Woogie Flu decrying the dearth of female artists in the Country Music Hall of Fame, is a masterstroke on many levels: a good read, an earnest critique of gender bias in country world, and a great dissolution of the usual dichotomy between blogger and performer which can only lend further blogcred to the big and well-deserved buzz that Cantrell enjoyed for her most recent release, the digital-only covers EP Trains and Boats and Planes, a fine, well crafted country/folk/pop album with solid nods to a wide variety of songwriting greats, and undertones of Iris Dement, Lucinda Williams, and even a touch of Kathleen Edwards in performance.

In the folkworld, the issue of gender difference is actually much more subtle, and it drifts as generations go on. For example, musician and folk chronicler Scott Alarik, in his seminal exploration of the modern folkworld Deep Community, makes a good case for an anti-male bias in the crossover potential of that particular section of the singer-songwriter folkworld which has long been his focal point; as evidence, he notes how metorically the female Fast Folk artists of the eighties rose to pop prominence, while their male contemporaries, such as John Gorka, Bill Morrissey, Greg Brown, and Cliff Eberhardt, seem to have hit a wooden ceiling that keeps them on coffeehouse and festival stages at the peak of their career.

But it also true that, in order to rise to such prominence, artists from Shawn Colvin and Suzanne Vega to, more recently, pop-folker Kathleen Edwards and on-the-cusp country star Lori McKenna had to crank up the pop production value — a move that some have decried as leaving the folkworld behind for the trappings of top 40 radio. Alarik’s premise is muddied by the easy target: crossover appeal is no confirmation of core values within a genre.

And what Scott sees in his generation may not be true of all iterations of folk, either. If you ask the average passerby to name ten folk artists, they’ll tend to start with Dylan and Guthrie, but from there, the common fan’s history of sixties folk is full of names of both genders, from Judy Collins to Joni Mitchell. As I mentioned in the comments to Laura’s entry, the rich crop of name-brand women performing on the countryfolk line over the last few decades — Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams, even Allison Krauss — gives hope to a new generation even as it decries the easy, central categorization that best provides potential entry to a Hall of Fame. The newest folk movements seem heavy with female singer-songwriters, but it remains to be seen what fame and fortune will bring to their careers. And, of course, folk has no equivalent hall of fame — which means no gatekeepers, and thus a much less easily identifiable pattern of bias.

Laura’s insider report is highly credible as a condemnation of the Country world, though — and it is only lent credence by her early career as a guide to those same hallowed halls where the portraits of Country music’s Hall of Fame line the walls. But it also stands as a more general statement about bias in singer-songwriter forms, inviting us to look more deeply into our own responsibility, as fans and flamekeepers, for the way we frame the relationships between our musical icons, and ourselves. Laura deserves props for reminding us that, as long as the past continues to matter to how we define the present, which portraits hang in the halls of our memory palaces and institutions matters greatly. Here’s the songs of a few artists both living and long-gone which Laura herself has paid tribute to over a decent decade or more of increasingly confident, dynamic, and adept countryfolk.

Laura Cantrell’s new album Trains and Boats and Planes, which includes covers of artists from Burt Bacharach to John Hartford, is available at the usual digital download sources. Head to Laura’s homepage, for some sweet downloads; link from there to the EP, and Laura’s excellent past recordings as well.

You can hear Laura’s radio show The Radio Thrift Shop most Wednesday mornings live on NYC institution WFMU from 6-9; archived streams are available at the link above. And, if you’re in or around the Big Apple –a surprisingly significant hotbed for countryfolk these days — Laura will also be presenting a special “Let Us Now Praise Famous Women” revue at The Spiegeltent in NYC on Tuesday, August 19, featuring guest artists Jenny Scheinman, Megan Hickey (Last Town Chorus), Fiona McBain (Ollabelle), Theresa Andersson and a special performance by Rodney Crowell. Let me know, if you go.

Today’s bonus coversongs have major street cred:

  • Billy Bragg and Wilco arranged When The Roses Bloom Again for their first Mermaid Avenue album, thinking it was a Guthrie original

  • Iron and Wine’s treatment of New Order’s Love Vigilantes is thick and full of atmosphere, but we’d expect nothing less
  • (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding songwriter Nick Lowe covers Elvis Costello’s Indoor Fireworks

    Thanks to Boogie Woogie Flu for soliciting Laura’s thought-provoking piece, and Setting the Woods on Fire for calling it to my attention. Head on over to the former for choice cuts from some classic undersung female country artists, and the latter for a few great originals from Cantrell herself.

  • 752 comments » | Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, Iron and Wine, John Prine, Laura Cantrell, Lucinda Williams, Nick Lowe

    Subgenre Coverfolk: Freak Folk (Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Animal Collective, Vetiver)

    May 28th, 2008 — 08:20 am

    copyright lauren dukoff; borrowed from naturalismo.blogspot.com

    In a MySpace age of hypenated multiple genre designation, the term “folk” is increasingly used by artists and promoters as a call to a specific approach to musicmaking – usually characterized by acoustic instrumentation, and/or a sort of lo-fi confessional sensibility.

    If we were cynics, we might suspect that the term is used primarily not to signify genre identity at all, but instead to call to a kind of authenticity or legitimacy, as if being “folk” was a good, organic, indie thing to be. Certainly, the sounds produced by these slash-folk-slash-other bands do sometimes contain hints of tradition, and of intimacy, and of storytelling. And sometimes, they have acoustic guitars. But the hybrid forms which this phenomenon creates are too fragmented to be true subgenres. And for most folks, they’re not folk, either.

    That said, there is a high potential for subgenre to appear at the intersection of one musical form and another. Previously on Cover Lay Down, we’ve taken a look at some other subgenres from the fringes of folk, a diverse set spanning Celtic Punk, Bluegrass, and Zydeco. Today, we look at one of the boundaries where the folk world meets something else entirely. Its nominal figurehead and unspoken leader Devendra Banhart calls it Naturalismo. Most people call it Freak Folk. And let me warn you in advance, folks: it’s kind of weird.

    Joanna NewsomSee, it’s pretty much a given in folk music that the prevalence of singer-songwriter folk forms at the core of modern folk music traces its lineage to the folk revival of the sixties. Go to any folk festival; few are stretching the boundaries. Instead, there’s something definitively sixties-esque about the ways in which, like Bob Dylan and Joni Michell before them, new artists continue to connect with an entire generation, via the intimate nature of folk music, that they might question their values and structures through lyrics which applied the personal to the political.

    But though it is easy to misremember the connections between such ultimately mainstream artists and the hippie movements as if they were synonymous, it is also important to remember that the act of questioning power led the hippies to some very strange journeys and new values – which celebrated experimentation over structure, and a rejection of the trappings of coopted mainstream success which came so quickly for our beloved sixties icons.

    The hippie drug culture which grew up and dropped out to embrace such values also brought forth folk forms of its own which lived outside the mainstream folkways, strange in instrumentation and intonation. They called it Freak Folk — folk to freak out to, and folk for freaks — and its champions included Donovan, the Incredible String Band, and even early Jefferson Airplane.

    Animal CollectiveIf Josh Ritter and Ani DiFranco’s latest protege are the new mainstream folk, then despite a primary fan base in the indie community, Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Vetiver and Animal Collective have a legitimate claim to the Freak Folk throne. And, just as in the sixties, the mainstream camps of the folkworld haven’t really noticed. And maybe it’s all for the better. Call it what you will – freak folk, Nu-folk, or a particular brand of psych folk – the modern inheritors of the strange, delicate, visionary music of Donovan and Vashti Bunyan by way of Nick Drake produce a music heavy with experience and ecstasy which would, I fear, both bore and frustrate many stolid folk fans.

    It took me awhile, too. Certainly, I came to freak folk slowly. I never really got into the original freak folk movement. When Joanna Newsom was all over the blogs a year or two back, I eagerly sampled, but found her grasshopper-warble voice and classical discordant harp playing kind of alienating. Now that the dust has started to settle a bit on the newest wave of the freak folk movement, I find I like it.

    Even if I’m still not sure what to make of it.

    It’s surreal, and strange, and I guess that’s part of the point. Musically, freak folk and the related genre designations Psych folk and nu-folk fall well within the “folk idiom” as one astute wikipedian puts it. But unless he was a serious hippie, this is not your father’s folk record collection. Freak Folk leans heavily on the drone, combining it with an almost elizabethan sound and instrumentation, as if the players on stage in a production of As You Like It got heavy into the acid before the curtain went up on the second act.

    But there’s also something wonderfully delicate about the music that gets put into this category, especially in the vocalization. The voices are creaky and strange, focused on delivery more than beauty, and yet somehow, a strange and alien beauty can emerge nonetheless from the trancelike product.

    VetiverIs Freak Folk folk in more than just name? Yes, I think so. The tendency toward stripped-down, acoustic performance is there; more, the music may sound like an alien’s confession, but it is still confessional in its own way, strange metaphors and all.

    Yet as it was in its original incarnation, Freak Folk remains a challenge to the very mainstream listening habits of the coopted folkworld. In the end, I think, this is a form of folk which is notable for how introspective it is for the performer — and how isolated the performer is, in pose and persona and performance, from the audience itself. Where both the traditional folkforms which emerge from cultures and the confessional singer-songwriter forms which still typify the core group of performers at folk festivals work as folk because the lyrics and the simple structures of the music allow for an easy connection between listener and player, Freak Folk plays with a kind of alienating tension which reverses the traditional stance between music and masses.

    Sometimes it fails — I know plenty of folk fans who cannot listen comfortably to this music. And if this sort of folk succeeds at all for the audience, it is only by proxy, at least until we get fully drawn into the psychadelic tranceworld of the performer. But when it works, Freak Folk goes beyond connecting performers and audiences to engender shared ecstacies which can dissolve all boundaries between the music and the core emotional beings of both listener and performer. This is the psychadelic experience, after all.

    Today, some cover songs from the Freak Folk scene, plus a few especially comparable songs from artists whose names keep coming up in the research. The covers approach serves us especially well today, I think: this is a form of music which is difficult in some ways, so having an entry point in the commonality of familiar lyric and melody may be a necessary component to bring some of us in far enough to even attempt the ecstatic experience. But listen deeply. There is an immense, fragile beauty here that can make you shiver.

    Like most of the artists in today’s feature, we here at Cover Lay Down eschew corporate culture, but these folks gotta eat, and you gotta hear ‘em. Each of the artists herein produces albums; all are worth the investment, both emotionally speaking and as purchases. Click artist links above to buy work the organic, countercultural way: direct from the places where the artists best benefit.

    Today’s bonus coversong: though most of the Freak Folk movement is too new to have been covered, Joanna Newsom has charmed more than a few fans in the world of indie music. Here, two very different covers totally transform her original sound, while still retaining the marginal essence of freak and the delicate, deliberate approach of folk.

    702 comments » | Devendra Banhart, Final Fantasy, Iron and Wine, Joanna Newsome, Subgenre Coverfolk, Sufjan Stevens, The Decemberists, Twinsistermoon, Vetiver

    Covered In Folk: Lou Reed / The Velvet Underground (Of second generation anti-folk and modern indie kids)

    October 19th, 2007 — 10:57 am

    Alt-folk artist and producer Joe Henry and I are doing double duty today, folks: Henry’s amazing cover of Pale Blue Eyes appears below, but I’ve also guest-posted a write-up of his coverwork over at Disney cover blog Covering The Mouse for this month’s “When You Wish Upon A Star Week”. Thanks to CTM host Kurtis for inviting me over to play, and don’t forget to head on over for the bonus Joe Henry tuneage after you’re finished here!

    It’s hard to mistake Lou Reed for a folk artist. As primary songwriter for pre-grunge, early lo-fi champions Velvet Underground, Reed wrote for a sound wailing with feedback and screaming with the heady rush of an early rock and drug culture. And though the simpler streetmajesty of his early solo work, most notably 1972 single Take a Walk on the Wild Side, comes across as not so far off in both voice and production from contemporaries Leonard Cohen (a true folkie) or Springsteen (who has always teetered on the folk-rock edge), his work over the last few decades has tended more towards the odd, the electronic, and the experimental.

    But many of today’s singer-songwriters cut their teeth on their parent’s Velvet Underground records long before the colored girls sang “doot doo doot” on classic rock radio. And Reed’s songwriting, its vivid imagery grounded in the muted browns and grays of streetcorners and the seamy underbelly of urban life, still speaks to a generation growing up alienated from place, in part by the very medium that carries these words from me to you. Covers of Lou Reed’s work are everywhere, and more often than not, they sound like folk.

    Today in celebration of the singer-songwriter as folk artist, we present a quintet of Lou Reed covers by a set of musicians from the periphery of folk. The cuts below mostly feature young and blog-popular indie musicians, though I’m allowing father figure Joe Henry into the fold because of his work producing such neo-folk musicians as Teddy Thompson and ani difranco. Though few of these folks self-identify as folk artists, their primarily acoustic, rough-voiced, low-production styles ground them in the genre nonetheless, even as these same qualities call to the original tone and temper of Reed’s beautifully brokenvoiced anthems of broken boulevards and counterculture dreams.

    • Martha Berner, Sunday Morning (orig. Reed/Cale)
    • Clem Snide, I’ll Be Your Mirror
    • Cat Power, I Found a Reason
    • Iron and Wine w/ Calexico, All Tomorrow’s Parties
    • Joe Henry, Pale Blue Eyes

    If you’re old, like me, you’ve probably got your old Velvet Underground and Lou Reed albums packed away on their original vinyl format; you can upgrade for the digital age here, and get Lou Reed’s newer work via Hi Fidelity.

    All other artists listed today sell their disks directly through their web pages or labels; just click on their names to buy and browse: Martha Berner, Clem Snide, Cat Power, Iron and Wine w/ Calexico, Joe Henry.

    Today’s bonus coversongs:

    302 comments » | Calexico, Cat Power, Clem Snide, Covered in Folk, Dan Zanes, Iron and Wine, Joe Henry, John Cale, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Martha Berner, Velvet Underground