Category: Big Star


RIP: Alex Chilton, 1950 – 2010

March 17th, 2010 — 10:04 pm

The New York Times has confirmed that Alex Chilton, lead singer of Big Star and the Box Tops, passed on today of a suspected heart attack.

Chilton’s music was potent, and his influence immense; I still find new meaning in those simple lyrics, and nuance in those deceptively plain chords and melodies, each time I listen to them anew.

And tonight, I’m listening to them again, over and over.

In memory of the man who crafted some of the finest, most direct songs I know – the master of our adolescent hearts, still beating unbidden in our chests even as his own has stilled – today, we revisit one of my favorite features from last year.

Covered in Folk: Big Star
(Kathryn Williams, Son Volt, Evan Dando, Kelly Willis +10 more!)





Bloggers love Big Star. So much so, in fact, that mere mention of their names to a certain sort of audiophile is like a secret handshake, a wink and a nod that marks the listener as a well-informed, well-cultured aesthete of a particular underground substream which defined the modern musical map.

And deservedly so. Led by highly conflicted and conflicting personalities Alex Chilton & Chris Bell in the early seventies, the original incarnation of Big Star never had much mainstream success, perhaps because they were way ahead of their time, though label mismanagement and inter-band tensions certainly took their toll. Lineup changes had an effect, too: Bell left the band before Chilton and remaining band member Jody Stephens came back to record Third/Sister Lovers, a third and final masterpiece, and after that, the project pretty much petered out.

But thanks to mid-eighties back-catalog attention from both labels and the rising alt-rock movement, the post-British invasion proto alt-rock which Big Star produced during their short-lived first-wave career would go on to become a strong and heady influence for musicians and fans searching for a pound of powerpop truth in the lean rock decades which followed.


Singer-songwriters prone to pensive coverage love Big Star’s songbook, too. Short enough to fit in a thin box set, it is nonetheless chock full of easily learned, easily covered odes to timeless angst and adolescence, ranging from brooding acoustic ballads to powerful rockers.

The band’s underground cachet allows coverage to serve as a nod to smart listeners looking for an acknowledgement of the history of music which creates the time/space of performance and its corresponding experience. The songs themselves remain powerful enough to speak raw emotion in oft-hushed tones to anyone who might care to hear, regardless of familiarity with the original. It’s the ideal situation for covers, allowing the recreation of songs to serve as a community grounding for those that need it, while simultaneously providing a stage for just plumb good performance.

Which is not to say that it’s impossible to mess up a Big Star song. Only that there’s more than enough gems out there, and that we have the whole process — from the songwriters and original performances to the interconnected history which brings forth our experience of interpretation — to thank for it. We’ve posted a few of these before, and I’m certainly not the first to share most of ‘em, but for completeness’ sake, here’s the breathtaking best of a surprisingly large collection, from grungy electric folkrock to hard-edged alt-country to sparse and sultry singer-songwriter.

*You and Your Sister was a Chris Bell solo track, released as a b-side just a few months before Bell passed in a car crash at the age of 27 in December, 1978. It also featured Alex Chilton on backing vocals.


What with multiple Big Star reissues and compilations coming at us this year — most notably upcoming four-disk Rhino demos-and-all retrospective Keep The Eye On The Sky, which drops September 15 — I’m not the only one to pick up on the buzz. For more relatively recent blogger paeans, including links to a few more great Big Star covers, check out August tributes from Mainstream Isn’t So Bad and Aquarium Drunkard. And don’t forget to pick up 2006 tribute album Big Star, Small World if you’re up for some additional coverage of the late nineties post-grunge and Americana type.


Cover Lay Down posts new coverfolk features and sets Wednesdays, Sundays, and the very occasional otherday.

1,790 comments » | Big Star, RIP

Covered in Folk: Big Star
(Kathryn Williams, Son Volt, Evan Dando, Kelly Willis +10 more!)

September 1st, 2009 — 08:25 pm





Bloggers love Big Star. So much so, in fact, that mere mention of their names to a certain sort of audiophile is like a secret handshake, a wink and a nod that marks the listener as a well-informed, well-cultured aesthete of a particular underground substream which defined the modern musical map.

And deservedly so. Led by highly conflicted and conflicting personalities Alex Chilton & Chris Bell in the early seventies, the original incarnation of Big Star never had much mainstream success, perhaps because they were way ahead of their time, though label mismanagement and inter-band tensions certainly took their toll. Lineup changes had an effect, too: Bell left the band before Chilton and remaining band member Jody Stephens came back to record Third/Sister Lovers, a third and final masterpiece, and after that, the project pretty much petered out.

But thanks to mid-eighties back-catalog attention from both labels and the rising alt-rock movement, the post-British invasion proto alt-rock which Big Star produced during their short-lived first-wave career would go on to become a strong and heady influence for musicians and fans searching for a pound of powerpop truth in the lean rock decades which followed.


Singer-songwriters prone to pensive coverage love Big Star’s songbook, too. Short enough to fit in a thin box set, it is nonetheless chock full of easily learned, easily covered odes to timeless angst and adolescence, ranging from brooding acoustic ballads to powerful rockers.

The band’s underground cachet allows coverage to serve as a nod to smart listeners looking for an acknowledgement of the history of music which creates the time/space of performance and its corresponding experience. The songs themselves remain powerful enough to speak raw emotion in oft-hushed tones to anyone who might care to hear, regardless of familiarity with the original. It’s the ideal situation for covers, allowing the recreation of songs to serve as a community grounding for those that need it, while simultaneously providing a stage for just plumb good performance.

Which is not to say that it’s impossible to mess up a Big Star song. Only that there’s more than enough gems out there, and that we have the whole process — from the songwriters and original performances to the interconnected history which brings forth our experience of interpretation — to thank for it. We’ve posted a few of these before, and I’m certainly not the first to share most of ‘em, but for completeness’ sake, here’s the breathtaking best of a surprisingly large collection, from grungy electric folkrock to hard-edged alt-country to sparse and sultry singer-songwriter.

*You and Your Sister was a Chris Bell solo track, released as a b-side just a few months before Bell passed in a car crash at the age of 27 in December, 1978. It also featured Alex Chilton on backing vocals.


What with multiple Big Star reissues and compilations coming at us this year — most notably upcoming four-disk Rhino demos-and-all retrospective Keep The Eye On The Sky, which drops September 15 — I’m not the only one to pick up on the buzz. For more relatively recent blogger paeans, including links to a few more great Big Star covers, check out August tributes from Mainstream Isn’t So Bad and Aquarium Drunkard. And don’t forget to pick up 2006 tribute album Big Star, Small World if you’re up for some additional coverage of the late nineties post-grunge and Americana type.


Cover Lay Down posts new coverfolk features and sets Wednesdays, Sundays, and the very occasional otherday.

1,032 comments » | Big Star, Covered in Folk

Denison Witmer Covers: Oasis, Big Star, Nick Drake, The Band, Bonnie Raitt and more!

September 20th, 2008 — 05:34 pm

Over the past few weeks, Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter Denison Witmer has released several relatively spare covers to the internet as promotional teasers, part of a mechanism to build buzz in anticipation of Carry The Weight, an upcoming album of original songs. The approach is a familiar one, seen in an increasing number of singer-songwriters and bands teetering on the indie boundaries of folk music — see, for example, the lo-fi bedroom covers of the Morning Benders, or the recently-featured popfolk take on the Smashing Pumpkins from newcomer Amie Miriello.

Overall, the phenomenon is especially validating, to me, because the use of covers as a familiar entry point to discover new musicians is the primary raison d’etre here at Cover Lay Down; to see artists and labels doing the same is a confirmation that, at least from the artist’s and industry’s perspective, our work is not wasted. But in this case, I’m also excited because I’m still in the process of discovering Witmer. And the more I hear of his increasingly understated mix of seventies folk sensibility and modern indiefolk production, the more smitten I become.

Denison Witmer has been around for a while: he’s released a steady string of albums in a decade or more, and seems to have become a staple of the rich Philadelphia folk scene in that time. But though he’s not so far, geographically speaking, from my own rural Massachusetts setting, musically speaking, Dension’s more recent sound leans more towards the delicately organic indiefolk approach of Nick Drake, Elliott Smith or Mary Lou Lord, even as it comes across as smoother in performance than any of those musical peers and predecessors. And the Philly folk scene has long been separated from the Boston and New England folk scenes by the vast dividing line that is NYC; it is rare for artists to make it in both scenes without hitting a certain level of fame, if not notoriety, on a national level.

As such, my experience with Denison comes from the very expansion of my own taste and experience in both the folkworld and the covers world which are part and parcel of my commitment to blogging over the last eleven months. On the folkfront, Denison’s name came up in my exploration of the work of Rosie Thomas, especially following the release of her blog-favorite album These Friends of Mine, which was heavily influenced by Thomas friends, co-producers and session musicians Sufjan Stevens and Denison Witmer. And, in the covers realm, I’ve recently discovered, and come to appreciate, Denison’s delicate, reverent takes on a well-selected subcatalog of other people’s songs.

As with his previous covers album, 2003 release Recovered, these newest covers are nothing especially transformative, but that’s not the point. As we heard in our previous Single Song Sunday feature on Jackson Browne/Nico song These Days, which included Dension’s version of the song amidst a huge pile of other covers, Denison’s approach to coversong strips songs down to their sonic core, not so much reinterpreting as owning and refocusing the songs in toto — from arrangement to lyrical structure — in the particular context of Denison’s languid voice, rich string style, and preferences for a slow, songwritery, richly atmospheric, and slightly folkpop production.

In the past, the result turned songs by The Band into highly recognizable versions of songs by The Band done with reverence, one voice, and just a slightly more focused production, songs by Big Star into folkrock songs with Big Star’s particular riff style and grunge approach. Here, it means quiet, stunning, reverent-yet-raw bedroom cover versions of Bonnie Raitt’s signature tune I Can’t Make You Love Me and The Red House Painters’ beautiful Have You Forgotten, and — released just today — a pensive campfire cover of Oasis hit Champagne Supernova, all of which both reflect and totally re-center familiar songs, allowing them to retain the tone of the original, while creating a pleasant new entry into each through consistently warm, slightly raspy tones. You get the best of both worlds, in other words: covers which show Denison’s commitment to songcraft and musicianship; songs which speak clearly as songs, recalled and refreshed with respect.

Thanks to My Old Kentucky Blog for raising the flag on these newest covers; keep an eye on Denison’s MySpace over the next few weeks as he releases other well-chosen obscurities and familiarities yet to be named. In the meanwhile, while we wait for the November arrival of what may well be the long-overdue breakthrough release from this underrated thirtysomething composer, session man, and solo artist, here’s those abovementioned covers, along with another great cover from Denison’s back catalog which honors his debt to protoypical indiefolk icon Nice Drake. As always, stick around afterwards for a few bonus tracks…

Remember, folks: we’re here, in part, because the folkprocess survives in the way artists and song each winnow towards and away from each other, giving us entry into the best of what is new and current through the old and familiar. But though Denison released a vast swath of his catalog free for eternal download a few years ago in honor of his thirtieth birthday, you can’t eat free. If these covers take you to listen to and subsequently buy the original works of Denison Witmer, and remind you to order Carry The Weight when it comes out in November, then the model works for all of us — the artists, the labels, the bloggers, the fans. And then, everybody wins.

A few more, perhaps, before you go? Though Denison’s influence, voice, and signature sound, like Sufjan’s, is all over Rosie Thomas’ These Friends, not many people realize that one of the best songs on that album is actually a cover of one of Denison’s earlier songs. Here’s that cover, plus the incredible original, since it seems to have gone relatively unheard in last year’s Rosie Thomas lovefest…plus another paired set from Denison and Thomas, pulled early from an upcoming feature on the songs of Fleetwood Mac.

Cover Lay Down publishes new covercontent Sundays, Wednesdays, and the occasional Friday or Holiday. Coming soon: new old timey musicians take on timeless songs, sweet songs of apples and honey to celebrate the Jewish New Year, and yet another installment in our popular Covered in Kidfolk series for cool moms and dads.

254 comments » | Big Star, Bonnie Raitt, Denison Witmer, Fleetwood Mac, Nice Drake, Oasis, Red House Painters, Rosie Thomas, The Band

Kathryn Williams Covers: Tom Waits, Big Star, Velvet Underground

May 18th, 2008 — 04:26 pm

I first heard UK-based singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams a few years ago, when tracks from her 2004 major-label all-covers release Relations began to show up on the cover blogs. Since you, too, are a reader of music and cover blogs, you’ve surely heard her gorgeous, tense version of Nirvana’s All Apologies from that album. And you may remember her dreamy and delicate cover of Spit on a Stranger I posted, alongside the Nickel Creek cover of the same tune a few months back, when we did a feature on Pavement; looking back, it still feels like Williams’ track was the strongest of the entry.

But while cover songs provide a comfortable entry point for us to discover new artists or revisit older ones, in the best possible world, when considering the work of a performer or songwriter, a cover song is only a doorway to discovery, and not the full house. Like cover songs it contains, Relations provides both an excellent introduction to the work of an incredible artist, and to her sound, but it would be a mistake to let a few tracks from Relations remain the endpoint of an experience with Kathryn Williams.

For one thing, Relations remains one of only two major-label releases in what is otherwise a catalog of solid singer-songwriter albums produced on Caw Records, Kathryn Williams’ own label. Though the differences of label-vs.-indie influence can be slight in actual performance, in this case, given the less-than-mainstream extremes we hear spilling into the margins of Williams’ penultimate release Leave to Remain — which Kathryn herself describes as “the one where, if it wasn’t my voice, I could probably listen to it’” — it seems safe to assume that Kathryn might consider her indie releases to be more authentic representations of her sound as she herself imagines it.

And, for another, though her body of work falls squarely within the definition of folk music, within that broad definition Kathryn Williams defies easy categorization. Her tendency towards confessional songwriting, in the style of Dylan or Joni Mitchell, is evident to all; her guitarwork is consistent with that approach, if more delicate. But hiding behind her deceptively unassuming lyrical performance and acoustic guitar style is more than a tinge of grungefolk, like predecessors Mary Lou Lord and Juliana Hatfield. And a preference for unusual instrumentation – strings, woodwinds, drumbeats among them — and a tendency towards the use of these instruments to produce dissonance and drone effects in production, has led to legitimate comparisons with the new freak and psych folk camps.

Williams’ increasing facility in exploring the potential of such disparate elements comes to a head with Two, her new album with fellow singer-songwriter Neill MacColl. Two is presented as a duo album, but it fits squarely into the Kathryn Williams canon; on the majority of the album, Williams voice is solo, and we hear a more mature, confident expression of what has come before – sweet on the surface, with an undertone of experience (see, for example, the much more radio-friendly yet equally gorgeous sound of Come With Me.)

And though the songs are predominantly co-written, the primary voice here, too, is still hers: with the exception of a single duet on the album’s sole cover, MacColl seems to be primarily contributing harmony vocals and additional stringwork, while Kathryn’s “barely there” vocals and overall sound are more prominent. Further, although in parts the album comes across as experimental, its sound is still very clearly a continuation of the musical directions in which Kathryn Williams has been moving for much of her career.

Ironically, nowhere is Kathryn’s dominant hand more evident than in the only true duet on the album, a cover of Tom Waits classic Innocent When You Dream. At first listen, the song sounds weird and unfinished: instead of harmonizing, the two voices pull at each other, fighting for the listener’s attention. But by bringing forward the fragile freak-folk sound through vocal dissonance, instead of hiding it in the undertone or drone or production, the true nature of Kath’s complicated vision is finally realized.

What finally becomes clear when pursuing the deeper success of Kathryn Williams work is that where most folk invites the listener, this a folk that coaxes and teases, lulling us in with a sense of familiarity, only to challenge us with tension and undertones not usually heard in singer-songwriter folk. If it took a collaboration with Neill MacColl to bring this out, so much the better, and kudos to both. But regardless of whether you think of this newer work as a solo record or a true collaboration, though it may take several listens to fully appreciate it, Two is a tour de force, one which re-establishes Kathryn Williams as a folk artist to keep watching as she continues to mature and explore.

Here’s a few great but often underplayed covers from Relations to set the stage, followed by that cover of Innocent When You Dream, so you can hear for yourself how one leads to the other. In neither case, though, do one or two songs represent the beauty or breadth of the full albums; I highly recommend seeking out both Relations and Two in their entirety.

  • Kathryn Williams, Thirteen (orig. Big Star)
  • Kathryn Williams, Candy Says (orig. Velvet Underground)

    (from Relations, 2004)

  • Kathryn Williams and Neill MacColl, Innocent When You Dream (orig. Tom Waits)

    (from Two, 2008)

No bonus tracks today, sadly; all but a small handful of my music remain unaccessible due to previously-mentioned technical difficulties. I’m hoping to have some resolution on the computer front in the next week or so; in the meanwhile, here’s some highly relevant and still-snaggable tracks previously posted on Cover Lay Down:

277 comments » | Big Star, Kathryn Williams, Neill MacColl, Tom Waits