Category: Sufjan Stevens


Tributes and Cover Compilations Week, Vol. 3:
The Watson Twins, Mundy, Sufjan’s Seven Swans, Madonna & more!

April 28th, 2011 — 08:30 pm

It’s shaping up to be a strong Spring in the world of tributes and cover albums, and good thing, too – though the single-shot covers continue to pour in daily, other than Reid Jamieson’s recent tribute to 1969, the Cowboy Junkies’ too-heavy-to-be-folk tribute to Vic Chesnutt, and a mid-February Sara Lov popfolk covers compilation, it’s been pretty dry at the album-length intersection of folk and coverage.

But apparently, in the world of cover albums, when it rains, it pours. Over the weekend, we featured Thea Gilmore’s stunning take on Dylan’s seminal 1967 album John Wesley Harding, and dropped two exclusive tracks from Paint It Black, the newest alt-country tribute to the Rolling Stones. Next weekend, we’ll be passing along bits and bytes from a trio of new tribute albums along the border of country, old-timey bluegrass, and folk music.

Today, we return to the shortform approach with a look at four more albums and EPs of folk, indiefolk, and folkpop coverage which have hit the ground running in the wake of a long, spare Winter.


Despite selling far fewer copies than the artist’s tributes to the states of Michigan and Illinois which came before and after it, Sufjan Stevens’ powerful, deeply Christian 2004 album Seven Swans served as such a powerful introduction to the one-time rising star for so many of his peers in the Indie world, it has taken only seven years for the album to be covered in full. But although it seems potentially risky to pay such thorough tribute to a single album so early in its history, there’s something quite deep about Seven Swans Reimagined, a focused indie tribute to the album which dropped at the end of March, the proceeds of which go to benefit for Komen for the Cure.

The roster features a veritable who’s who of the modern Indie movement, with many artists known for their appearance on other compilations, and though the album yaws through a fuller spectrum of the indie canon, with experimental arrangements which echo the originals, much of it is legitimately folk, thanks to generally acoustic, often hushed tones. In all cases, though, from the bouncy bells and flute of Half Handed Cloud’s gentle, pulsing neofolk to the frozen majesty of Unwed Sailor’s Sister to the plodding, echoey, psychedelic soundscape that transforms We Won’t Need Legs To Stand in the hands of Elin K. Smith, the songs maintain their humility and their spiritual edge effectively, even as their tones shift in new hands and mouths.

A few familiar faces, among them Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Joshua James, and Denison Witmer, will be a special delight those of an indiefolk bent; so will less well-known contributors, such as Shannon Stephens and Gregory Paul, whose harmonies make a gentle, almost Joni-esque acoustic slide ballad of Waste Of What Your Kids Won’t Have. And though it’s a bit more pop than folk, Wakey! Wakey! bring a delightfully rough, intimate edge to their majestic piano ballad take on A Size Too Small, taking what is perhaps my favorite song from the original album and turning it on its ear with aplomb. Stream, sample, and buy at Bandcamp – but first, here’s two streams to get you started.



  • Shannon Stephens and Gregory Paul: Waste Of What Your Kids Won’t Have (orig. Sufjan Stevens)

    (from Seven Swans Reimagined, 2011)



Blogwatchers already know about The Watson Twins‘ new Night Covers EP, which has been out since mid-April; cover fans may recognize their name from their take on Neil Young’s Powderfinger which appeared on Cinnamon Girl, the all-female, all-indie American Laundromat Records double album which we called “the tribute album Neil Young has deserved for most of his long and prolific career” when it emerged in February of 2008.

But though those who have followed the indie tastemakers in the past few years know the pair for their sweet sister harmonies, and for their collaboration with Jenny Lewis on the well-received Rabbit Fur Coat, which took the critical world by storm in 2005, should know by now: The Watson Twins are much more than a pair of backup singers made good. And, with one EP and two full-length albums already under their belts, identical twins Chandra and Leigh have produced a fine addition to our Spring roundup.

The Night Covers has but six tracks, most of which teeter on the alt-slash-popfolk line, as so much of their work has before; the disk is a bit pricey, but it seems worth the dough, if only because of how effectively the twins pay upbeat, driving tribute to a well-selected collection of pop and soul-turned-indiefolk songs from The Eurythmics to Bill Withers to Sade, with a rock turn by way of the Black Keys and PJ Harvey. Cover Me has a review of more substance, and an interview; their take on Turtles hit You Showed Me, the single, is typical of the album’s sound and sensibility.

Bonus tracks:



I wasn’t sure if I should include this next album on our list. After all, like the members of their indie roster, most of Toronto-based Paper Bag Records’ Madonna album tribute True Blue isn’t folk, ranging instead from the glitchy, fuzzed-out, almost Clash-esque rock Born Ruffians bring to Madonna b-side Jimmy Jimmy, to the wailing full-press post-punk of PS I Love You’s Where’s The Party, to the surprisingly well-translated throwback pop-tronica of Woodhands (Papa Don’t Preach), Winter Gloves (True Blue), and You Say Party (Love Makes The World Go Around) which anchor the album.

But the collection is free, making it an easy path to entry for the strong indie stable which Paper Bag Records represents. And two standout tracks are decidedly folk music: Laura Barrett’s gently disjointed La Isla Bonita, and The Rural Alberta Advantage’s “We’re Scared Version” of Live To Tell, which applies gentle guitar, synth, and tambourine to create a delicate, sunny, decidedly retrofolk version of Madonna’s sappy 80′s hit.



Finally, on the horizon: 2 U I Bestow brings us news of an impending covers album from cheerful Emerald Isle singer-songwriter Mundy, whose song of the same name not only serves as namesake for the Irish-only folkblog, it also brought the artist a bit of fame back in 1996, when it was included on the soundtrack to Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet. The aptly titled Shuffle drops May 13 in US and UK markets; thanks to Mundy’s reps, I’ve had a chance to hear the whole thing, and found it warm, familiar, and quite worth the time – recommended, especially, for those who prefer their folk without the indie edge.

The set, a tribute to the Mundy’s favorite American “folk” influences – a list which includes alt-country, country, rock, and folk singer-songwriters, from Bob Dylan, John Prine, Paul Simon, and Warren Zevon to Parsons/Hillman, Emmylou Harris, and both Lucinda and Hank Williams – doesn’t dig terribly deep into the catalogs of the artists it honors, and the tracks tend to hew relatively close to their original genre. But the performances here are sincere and solid, transformative and truly listenable, fully fleshed out with contemporary radio-ready folk-rock production values and instrumentation: an apt introduction to a strong, well-produced performer sadly underrepresented and underappreciated on this side of the pond. Here’s the pre-release single – in stream-only form, as requested – and two older covers for reference.

  • Mundy: It’s A Wonderful Lie (orig. Paul Westerberg)

    (from Shuffle, 2011)

Bonus tracks:



Stay tuned, loyal readers! Cover Lay Down brings Tributes and Cover Compilations Week to a triumphant close this weekend with new tributes of and from Tom T. Hall, Laura Cantrell, and Chris Thile and Michael Daves!

267 comments » | Compilations & Tribute Albums, Madonna, Mundy, Sufjan Stevens, The Watson Twins, Tribute Albums

Martha Scanlan: The West Was Burning (Covers of Bob Dylan and Tradfolk)

July 8th, 2008 — 11:01 pm

I was going to write about something else tonight. But sifting through some older downloads looking for inspiration, I got stuck in the rich, lush americana sound of singer-songwriter Martha Scanlan‘s 2007 debut The West Was Burning, and I just couldn’t move on. It’s been a while since we featured a single release here on Cover Lay Down, but it’s also been a while since music struck me as powerfully as this. And so a post is born.

A few years ago I managed to make it to the upper Hudson Valley for Clearwater, a folk and enviro-political action festival which leans towards the old-school stringfolk music of festival founder Pete Seeger and his modern inheritors. I saw plenty of great acts that year, from Natalie Merchant and Jeff Lang to Donna The Buffalo and Toshi Reagon, and loved them all. But my favorite act was a string band, a small group of very young old-timey performers I discovered quite by accident as I rounded a corner past the workshop stage. They were called the Reeltime Travelers, and they were new on the scene; their music was pretty traditional, but done so well and with such high energy, I walked away from the festival with their album.

Since I last saw her in the early days of the Reeltime Travelers, Martha Scanlan has undergone a transformation. Her work with the Travelers and as a songwriter on the Cold Mountain soundtrack was marvelous; subsequently, she won both first and second prizes in the bluegrass and country division of the Chris Austin Songwriting Competition at Merlefest in 2003 for two songs on the Reeltime Travelers’ second and final album Livin’ Reeltime. That success gave her the strength and credibility to leave Reeltime Travelers behind and make a solid name for herself as a solo artist. And though I’m a little late to the table in finding it, her debut release The West Was Burning, released last February on Sugar Hill, is absolutely stunning.

Scanlan’s sound is wonderful, delicate folk in the pure americana vein, a stripped-down version of Lucinda Williams or Kathleen Edwards, light where it should be but with great, lush production in turn, full of fiddles and mandolin and slow country bass. The old-timey sound is still there, but it’s been slowed down and fleshed out into something much richer, and eminently more powerful. Martha writes Montana so well, its as if someone came down out of the hills with a dozen newly-discovered, fully-fleshed traditional songs, pre-boiled down to their essential elements, with every lick and lyric perfect after years of evolution. Her voice is endearing, and suits the music well: delicate and pure, innocent and wise all at once. Add Levon Helm and his daughter Amy on drums, and the stellar production of americana master Dirk Powell, and you can’t help but have a success on your hands.

You’ll have to buy The West Is Burning for transformative originals like the delicate Seeds of the Pine, and the driving americana rock beat and full-band jangle and twang of Isabella – though you can hear a few more tracks, including a great live version of tradsong Old Rocking Chair, at Martha’s Myspace page, and if you’re in Manitoba this weekend, you can catch her at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. But don’t miss this sweet No Depression-flavored piano-tinged Dylan slowdance, and a perfect mountain ballad transformation of one of my favorite old hymns. I’ve even included a parallel set of covertunes from that self-titled Reeltime Travelers debut album, for comparison’s sake, so you can hear the evolution of Martha’s sound and sensibility.

Just for fun, today’s bonus coversongs provide an exercise in comparative listening:

688 comments » | Martha Scanlan, Reeltime Travelers, Sam Amidon, Sufjan Stevens, Wayfaring Strangers

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

Folkcovers For A Winter’s Night: Snowsongs, sleigh rides, and other nondenominational carols

December 5th, 2007 — 01:49 am

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

    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!

169 comments » | Elizabeth Mitchell, Erica Wheeler, Holiday Coverfolk, Jill Sobule, Nanci Griffith, Rani Arbo and Daisy Mayhem, Robert Earl Keen, Sufjan Stevens, The Roches

Thankful Folk: A Thanksgiving Holiday Special

November 23rd, 2007 — 10:32 am

The web is full of Thanksgiving originals this week: Alice’s Restaurant, Loudon Wainwright III’s Thanksgiving, songs about helping others, the odd song about pie or turkey. Here at the Boyhowdy House, we’re feeling grateful for a few choice folk-tinged coversongs of thanks and blessing-counting that stand out in a small pond of hymns and secular songs just right for the season. Without further ado, here’s some particularily Thankful Folk.

  • Chris Smither, Thanks To You (orig. Jesse Winchester)
    The opening cut from previously featured Chris Smither’s powerful, well-produced Small Revelations, this cover just plain rocks, from the first bass growl (I know I’m a sinner/I ain’t no beginner) to the last sustained blues lick.

  • Erin McKeown, Thanks For The Boogie Ride (orig. Buck/Mitchell)
    This short, crisp boogie-woogie tune from diminuative-yet-powerful folkartist Erin McKeown comes from Sing You Sinners, her full album of old Tin Pan Alley tunes. You can hear her infectious grin throughout.

  • Dave Van Ronk, God Bless The Child (orig. Billie Holiday)
  • Eva Cassidy, God Bless The Child (orig. Billie Holiday)
    Two blues versions of this Holiday tune from two very different folk artists stolen from this world far too soon. Dave Van Ronk‘s slow, bluesy solo acoustic fingerpick and Eva Cassidy‘s electrified loungeclub blues swoon make the perfect counterpart. Off Your Basic Dave Van Ronk and American Tune, respectively.

  • Rani Arbo & daisy mayhem, The Farmer Is The Man(orig. J. Carson)
    A mournful paean for the oft-invisibles who bring our table’s bounty and a gruff, loose-fiddled reminder to those who would forget. From Gambling Eden, which, like most of Arbo‘s work, is chock full of wonderful interpretations of old folk and gospel tunes. (Buy before 2008, get free shipping! And 10% of all profits go to Rock and Roll camp for girls!)

  • Sufjan Stevens, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing (trad.)
    My absolute favorite hymn, ever since I heard Sufjan’s five-EP set Songs For Christmas last year. Our hymnal lists this song as a hymn of Thanksgiving, so there’s no need to wait a month to hear the beautifully torn banjo-jangle plainsong approach Sufjan brings to it.

As always here on Cover Lay Down, wherever possible, all artist/album links above go to that artist’s preferred purchase source. Help make some artist thankful — buy their music today!

Psst! Looking ahead towards our next holiday? I usually try to hold off on celebrating too early, but yesterday, on our way home from an authentic 1830s Thanksgiving feast, we passed a family cutting down trees and putting up reindeer, and it reminded me of a song lyric. So stay tight until Sunday for our first post of the 2007 holiday season: a Single Song Sunday feature on Joni Mitchell’s River.

958 comments » | Chris Smither, Dave Van Ronk, Erin McKeown, Eva Cassidy, Holiday Coverfolk, Rani Arbo and Daisy Mayhem, Sufjan Stevens