And A Happy New Year (On The Turning of Time and Calendar Pages)

It's human nature to turn inward in times of timeturning. It's reassuring that we do; it bespeaks our still-close relationship with nature, and the planet. In a world long teetering on the verge of disaster, our innate need to constantly reground ourselves in history and ecology gives me more hope than anything at the future and continued existence of the human race. That it happens everywhere, regardless of country or creed, only reinforces my faith in all of us.

May your year turn joyfully. May you put to rest all the anxieties of a lifetime passed-so-far, and pass clean into the new possibility. May you live more and more in the connections between, and less and less in the margins. May you cover the world, and may the world cover you.

• Bruce Cockburn, Turn, Turn, Turn (orig. Pete Seeger)
  (from Where Have All The Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger)
  
  
• Ben Taylor Band, Time of the Season (orig. The Zombies)
  (from Famous Among the Barns)
  
  
• Mary Chapin Carpenter and Shawn Colvin, Four Seasons In One Day (orig. Crowded House)
  (live; more Crowded House covers here)
  
  
• Pablo, This Will Be Our Year (orig. The Zombies)
  (from Half The Time)
  
  
• Mindy Smith, What Are You Doing New Year's Eve (orig. Loesser)
  (from My Holiday)
  
  
• Rufus Wainwright, What Are You Doing New Year's Eve (orig. Loesser)
  (from The McGarrigle Christmas Hour)
  
  
• Tony Trischka, Auld Lang Syne
  (from Glory Shone Around: A Christmas Collection)

I resolve to continue to promote folk artists and their labels by linking to their preferred source for purchasing wherever possible, rather than supporting megastores and megalabels who really aren't interested in music, or in musicians or their audiences, except as a means to a dollar.

In addition, I resolve to continue to serve an astute listening public (that's you!) by continuing to bring you songs, singers, and songwriters in context as long as it is safe, legal, and fun for all of us...and by feeling grateful for every comment, email, and download. It's nice to feel appreciated, folks. Thanks for listening, and have a very, very happy new year.

Don't forget to come back Wednesday for another installment in our very popular Covered in Folk series. This week I'll be featuring folkcovers of Paul Simon tunes.

(Re)Covered: More of and from...Cat Stevens, Neil Finn, The Wainwright Family, and Bill Morrissey

I certainly wasn't planning to post four times this week. But I've unearthed some great-but-late cuts that just begged to be passed along. And this past holiday weekend left me feeling thankful for all those who write and say such nice things about Cover Lay Down. Guess the urge to keep giving was just too much to bear.

Today, the second installment in our (Re)Covered series, wherein we recover songs that dropped through the cracks too late to make it into the posts where they belonged. Enjoy!

I've had several requests for the popcovers I mentioned in last week's Cat Stevens post -- they're not folk, but Stevens is, and both Natalie Merchant and Sheryl Crow have folk cred (the former from her recent solo work, the latter from her early pre-stardom days). So here are Peace Train and The First Cut Is The Deepest. Along with a sweet, ragged, just-unearthed version of Wild World by antipopsters The Format. Plus Australian indiefolkers New Buffalo's slow, grungy acoustic take on that Nina Simone song that Yusuf covers, just for comparison's sake. Oh, and a wonderful, sparse, sleepytime Here Comes My Baby cover from previously featured kidfolk songstress Elizabeth Mitchell. Ask, and ye shall receive, and then some.

• 10,000 Maniacs, Peace Train
  
• Sheryl Crow, The First Cut Is The Deepest
  
• The Format, Wild World
  
• Elizabeth Mitchell, Here Comes My Baby
  
• New Buffalo, Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (orig. Nina Simone)

I also picked up a few wonderful solo acoustic covers from Neil Finn last week that I couldn't resist passing along; they would have been great bonus songs from our October feature on the songs of Neil and Tim Finn, if I'd had 'em, but that's what our (Re)Covered feature is for. He's not folk, and neither are the original artists of these two pop songs, but the brightly optimistic singer-songwriter treatment Finn gives these two pop songs would be perfectly appropriate on any folk festival stage in the country.

• Neil Finn, Billie Jean (orig. Michael Jackson)
  
• Neil Finn, Sexual Healing (orig. Marvin Gaye)

Lest we lose sight of our core mission, here's some folk covering folk: a wonderful Bill Morrissey and Greg Brown cover of Hang Me, Oh Hang Me I rediscovered just after posting Bill Morrissey's tribute to Mississippi John Hurt. It's a traditional folksong you might recognize as covered by the Grateful Dead under the alternate title Been All Around This World; I'm saving that for a long-overdue Garcia and Grisman feature, but in the meantime, here's another sweet version of the same song by new neotraditionalist Canadian alt-folkies The Deep Dark Woods.

• Bill Morrissey w/ Greg Brown, Hang Me, Oh Hang Me
  
• The Deep Dark Woods, Hang Me, Oh Hang Me

And finally, not one but two beautiful songs which really speak to the whole twisted family dynamic of the Wainwrights, who we featured in our first Folk Family Friday. First, in a burst of typical irony, Rufus and Martha cover father Loudon Wainwright III's One Man Guy, then -- just to show there's no hard feelings -- Kate and Anna McGarrigle once again bring together family friend Emmylou Harris and ex-spouse Loudon for a jangly take on the traditional Green, Green Rocky Road.

• Rufus Wainwright w/ Martha Wainwright, One Man Guy
  
• The McGarrigles, Green, Green Rocky Road

As always, all artist links here on Cover Lay Down go directly to the artists' preferred source for purchasing music. Please, folks: if you like what you hear, both here and out there in the wild world, buy the music, and support the continued production of incredible sound from those who eschew the easy top 40 route to fame and fortune.

Folk Family Friday: The Wainwrights cover Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Wainwright, et al.

Today, in our first of what promises to be a fine series of Folk Family Fridays, we bring you a family tree of Wainwrights: Loudon, Rufus, Martha, and Kate & Anna McGarrigle, proud and outstanding in their field. Keep an ear and eye open for upcoming posts on the Taylor/Simons, the Thompsons, three generations of Guthries, The Ungars, and anyone else we can connect by blood or marriage in less than six degrees.




Loudon Wainwright III met Kate McGarrigle in Greenwich Village in 1969; she and her sister were darlings of the Quebec folk scene; he was struggling to make a name for himself in the New York folk world. Their marriage didn't last long, but happily for the folk canon, it produced both enough acrimony to provide fodder for their own songwriting for years to come, and future folk-musicians Rufus and Martha, who each went on to make made a name and a niche for themself by continuing the family tradition of using their music to blast out at their family.

(Sidenote: Loudon went on to marry Suzzy Roche of the Roche Sisters; their daughter Lucy Wainwright Roche has performed with Rufus and Loudon, and released some great covers herself. And commenter woolmanite rightly notes that Loudon's sister Sloan is a folk-rocker, too. But we'd be here all night if I didn't stick to the once-nuclear Wainwright/McGarrigle branch of the family tree. Another time, another post...)

If even Vanity Fair has told their story, what else is there to say about the Wainwrights? For starters, consider the potential in tracing not just lyrical roots and commonality among folk families, but in listening to their works sequentially to compare the way nurture and stylistic choice and random genetic mixes produce in some folk families a sort of common voice, while in other families, subsequent generations end up at different poles of the folk spectrum, even while their voices echo their roots, their families, and their genre.

The Wainwrights are a poster family for the latter case; unlike many folk families (see, for example, Arlo and Woody Guthrie), each one of the Canadian-American Wainwrights has their own defined musical style. Yes, there's a faint hint of Kate and Anna's breathy melodies in Martha's airy intonation, Dad's swallowed vowels and a touch of Mama Kate's loose country melody in brother Rufus' torch song approach. The playfulness of lyric and performance, a dominant trait, shine through both sides. But the torch song stylings Rufus favors are all his own, and though she styles herself folkpop, Martha's a darling of the indie movement for a reason.

Of the four -- we'll count Kate and Anna as one -- Rufus is the one who has truly made a name for himself as a coverartist. I posted his co-cover of King of the Road when we covered his co-conspirator and constant companion Teddy Thompson earlier, and live bootlegs of everything from Careless Whisper to his Judy Garland covers bob up to the blogsurface constantly. You've heard his Hallelujah, and so I've posted a different Leonard Cohen cover here.

But as with all true folksingers, the recorded output of each of these prolific singer-songwriters includes enough covers to keep listeners smiling and this post on track. Today, some especially bright gems from the immense coveroutput of a collective century of musical genepool genius. I'm especially enamoured of Loudon's yelping bluegrass interpretation of the traditional Hand Me My Banjo Down. It puts Springsteen's version to shame.

• Loudon Wainwright III and Tony Trischka, Hand Me My Banjo Down (trad.)
  
  
• Kate & Anna McGarrigle feat. L. Wainwright, Schooldays (orig. L. Wainwright III)
  
  
• Martha Wainwright, Bye Bye Blackbird (orig. Gene Austin)
  
• Martha Wainwright, Tower of Song (orig. Leonard Cohen)
  
  
• Rufus Wainwright feat. Kate McGarrigle, Lowlands Away (trad.)
  
• Rufus Wainwright, Harvest Moon (orig. Neil Young)
  
• Rufus Wainwright, Chelsea Hotel No. 2 (orig. Leonard Cohen)

Expect a few more Wainwright family songs as we approach the holidays; 2005 release The McGarrigle Christmas Hour was one of the finest Christmas albums from the folk camp since the millenium turned over. Maybe I'll confront the Roche/Wainwright connection then -- the Roche Sisters' We Three Kings is a refreshing, crisp winterdisk, too.

In the meantime, instead of creating the world's largest buy-these-discs paragraph, here's a link to the webpages of each Wainwright/McGarrigle mentioned in today's post:

• Purchase Rufus Wainwright tuneage and play it often
  
• Pick up Martha Wainwright and you'll never put her down
  
• Louden up with 35 years of Loudon Wainwright III
  
• Revel in the sweet quirky harmonies (and bilingual website) of Kate & Anna McGarrigle

Today's bonus songs are few but precious:

• Emmylou Harris covers Kate McGarrigle's Going Back to Harlan
  
• Regina Spektor covers Chelsea Hotel No. 2

Stay tuned over the next few days for our first KidFolk coverpost (Garcia and Grisman! Alison Krauss! The Be Good Tanyas!) and yet another guest post over at Disney coverblog Covering The Mouse. Enjoy!

Teddy Thompson Covers: Leonard Cohen, The Everly Brothers, and King of the Road

British born and New York based alt-musician Teddy Thompson released Up Front and Down Low, an album of classic country covers, in July, and it says what it needs to about his underdog status that a) the disk has only been released in the US, and b) neither the blogosphere nor any other market seems to have noticed. Heck, I was startled to discover it myself as I researched today's entry, and I spent an entire summer listening to nothing else but Thompson's second album Separate Ways, a perfect, crackling masterpiece of self-pity topped off by a hidden Everly Brothers track.

One of several second-generation musicians emerging from under their parent's wing to startle a new generation, Teddy Thompson has not yet managed to ring the bell of fame that fellow secondgen artist and bad influence Rufus Wainwright has. Nor has he found his audience, yet -- being compared to Crowded House in one review and Jackson Browne and David Gray in another provides a pretty broad range. But if Thompson remains unknown, it's not for lack of musicianship (though in the case of his newest outing, it may be because the country market is not his niche).

Thompson's music is only folk in the broader sense, but his folk credentials are solid: son of old folkies Richard and Linda Thompson, born and raised in a Sufi commune, Thompson Jr. shares his mother's sweet, clear, etherial voice, and his father's penchant for bitter lyrics full of the seamy underside of fame and drug culture. The combination is powerful, and even if his guitar playing is still on the cusp of maturity, using his parents and peers in the studio has, so far, made up for that lack. I am confident that Thompson's music will eventually win the hearts and minds of a full generation once he returns to his original songwriting.

In the meantime, here's two songs Thompson covered for the 2006 Leonard Cohen tribute film I'm Your Man, where he stood out among some pretty heavy compatriots, including Wainwright himself. Tonight Will Be Fine comes especially recommended -- something about the bittersweet lyrics and the slow pace suits him, I think.

• Teddy Thompson, Tonight Will Be Fine (orig. Cohen)
  
• Teddy Thompson, The Future (orig. Cohen)

Still haven't heard Teddy's newest album, but I'd buy enough copies of Separate Ways for all of you if I had the cash. Since I don't, you should head over to his website and pick it up for yourselves -- and if you get the new one, too, let me know how it turned out, will you?


Today's bonus coversongs:

• Teddy Thompson and Rufus Wainwright cover King of the Road
  
• Teddy and Linda Thompson cover the Everly Brothers' Take A Message To Mary
  
• Richard Thompson covers Squeeze's Tempted (because I'm saving his Prince cover and his version of Oops! I Did It Again for another post)