Cover Lay Down

I’m tired, I say. What should I write about tonight?

Flowers, she says. It’s almost spring. And she smiles at me, as if to say I love you.


Another Valentine’s Day come and gone, and now I’m running ragged against our usual Sunday deadline after a rare evening out without children, just my love and I amidst the white linen and wineglasses, a dozen other couples, and a small cadre of harried, presumably single servers.

It’s time well spent, though I regret any lost opportunity to read to my kids at bedtime. Recent studies have shown that time spent has more power on our sense of selves than money spent on things. Experiences last longer than the moments they take. And on Valentine’s Day, even with the wife and kids asleep upstairs, this means that love remains in the air, as it is wont to do.

This is not to sell gift-giving short, of course. Valentines given are experiences, too, our symbols by definition far more than the objects we use to represent our love. Which is to say: the dozen roses I sent my wife on Friday will live on our table for a week or more, bringing their scent and color to a world still cold and crisp with the last weeks of winter, but even beyond that, their meaning can transcend their brief cut life. The flowers may fade, just as someday soon tonight’s courses will fade and blur into memory. But like our experiences themselves, the flowers will move on to the compost heap, to become fodder for yet another crop of green and growing flowers in the fast-approaching Spring.

Here’s a dozen roses for your table this week. Experience them all, and choose wisely how you keep their meaning: each has the potential to last a lifetime, or an average of three minutes each, depending how you measure your time. And, as always, if you like what you hear, follow artist and album links below to independent and artist-preferred purchase sources, and buy a CD or two. Valentine’s Day may be over, but it’s never too late to show you care.

• Redbird: Love is a Rose (orig Neil Young)
  (outtake collected on the web; more Redbird here)
• Honeysuckle Rose (orig. Fats Waller)
  (from a 2006 Daytrotter Session; more Erin here)
• Clare Bowditch: Blood Red Rose (orig. Kev Carmody)
  (from Cannot Buy My Soul: the Songs of Kev Carmody; more Clare here)
• Trappers Cabin: Rose Parade (orig. Elliott Smith)
  (from the Trappers Cabin website)
• Pentangle: Sally Go Round the Roses (orig. The Jaynetts)
  (from Basket of Light)
• Laura Cantrell: When The Roses Bloom Again (orig. AP Carter)
  (from When The Roses Bloom Again)
• Mary Gauthier: For Rose (orig. Jonathan Pointer)
  (from Filth and Fire)
• Popcorn Behavior: The Briar and the Rose (orig. Tom Waits)
  (from Popcorn Behavior)
• Bruce Springsteen: Give My Love To Rose (orig. Johnny Cash)
  (live in 1999; more Bruce everywhere)
• Slaid Cleaves: White Rose (orig. Fred Eaglesmith)
  (from The Songs Of Fred Eaglesmith; more Slaid here)
• Salamander Crossing: Indigo Rose (orig. David Hamburger)
  (from Bottleneck Dreams)
• Madeleine Peyroux: La Vie En Rose (orig. Edith Piaf)
  (from Dreamland)

Cover Lay Down publishes new coverfolk features every Wednesday and Sunday, and the occasional holiday and otherday.

Part three in a series.

The heart has many hiding places, many meanings: hearts that break and mend, hearts that fail and falter, hearts that fly away after touching ours. This tiny lump of meat, its electric pulse no bigger than a battery, that flutters like a bird to tell us we are alive. And we who are human and claim to know our hearts, we forget that living hurts, and are surprised when it reminds us so often.

This afternoon my children pen store-bought valentines, march around the house demanding that I read the tiny messages on their candy hearts. While I try to explain the metaphoric meaning of every X and O to the wee one just beginning to recognize letters as sounds, not symbols, the older one sounds out the words, struggling to make sense of these little phrases we use to cue and coo, to bless and hurt and curse and caress each other.

One day, I think, they will understand everything. It breaks my heart, even now. And it lifts it, too, to know that they will know so much love, enough to feel its ever-impending loss. Love like a cinnamon heart — so bright and tempting, we forget how much it burns, even as it sweetens our tongues.

Some songs with nothing in common, then, save perhaps the most powerful metaphor we share with everything alive. Songs of the heart, written for lovers, wives, exes, children, selves. Something for everyone, no matter how scared or scarred, how heavy or light our own hearts might be.

For in the end, there is no joy without the context of sorrow, no loss without the awareness of what once was. Every heart is bittersweet, and every love song, too. And so we are never alone.

• Aoife O’Donovan: Hearts and Bones (orig. Paul Simon)
  (live recital, 2004; via Aoife’s MySpace)
• Kate Rusby: Radio Sweethearts (orig. J. Miller/J. McCusker)
  (from Hourglass, 1997)
• John Hartford: Little Piece of My Heart (pop. Janis Joplin)
  (from Gum Tree Canoe, 1987)
• Amilia K Spicer: Only Love Can Break Your Heart (orig. Neil Young)
  (from the Cinnamon Girl Neil Young tribute, 2008; more Amilia here)
• Jose Gonzalez: Hand on Your Heart (orig. Kylie Minogue)
  (from the Australian Tour EP, 2005)
• Serena Ryder: My Heart Cries for You (orig. Guy Mitchell/Mitch Miller)
  (from If Your Memory Serves You Well, 2006)
• Guy Davis: Sweetheart Like You (orig. Bob Dylan)
  (from the A Nod To Bob Dylan tribute, 2001; more Guy here)
• Rani Arbo & Daisy Mayhem: Heart with No Compassion (orig. L. Cohen)
  (from Big Old Life, 2008)
• Tracy Bonham: In My Heart (orig. Bill Withers)
  (from Before the Goldrush covers compilation, 2009; more Tracy here)
• Shawn Colvin & Loudon Wainwright III: A Heart Needs a Home (orig. Richard Thompson)
  (from Beat the Retreat: Songs by Richard Thompson, 1994; more Loudon here; more Shawn here)

As always here on Cover Lay Down, we encourage you to show your love by following the above links to label-sponsored and artist-preferred stores and sources. Because groove, as they say, is in the heart.


Previously on Valentine’s Day 2008, and now with all mp3s live for a limited time only:

• Love, Afraid: Coversongs to Prepare the Heart for Valentine’s Day
• The Opposite of Fear: Songs of Hope and Love for Valentines

I remember the night we drove everywhere just to find a place to commit ourselves to a future together. It was cold, like tonight is cold.

It wasn’t Valentine’s Day. But it was love.

Looking back, I can’t believe it took me so long to accept that the feelings I had for you were real, and worth risking everything. All that time I thought I was too broken, too battered. All that time, I thought a fool like me didn’t deserve a woman like you.

But you always believed. And every morning when I kiss you in your sleep before I leave, I thank you for that calm certainty. Without your willingness to wait forever, I might never have found the courage to jump into the abyss.

A companion post to Sunday’s songs of Love and Fear, then: a soundtrack for that long shared silence; a short sweet story of the miracle of us. If I could give you anything, it would be this feeling, always. No longer afraid, I fly with you.

I spent all morning trying to script a post about songs which struggle with the infinite and indescribably complex mysteries of love. The idea was to celebrate this complexity, and acknowledge as valid the stuff that often holds us back from putting a name to what we feel, lest we call it wrong and mess everything up.

But every time I try to put words to love, things fall apart. Love’s like that, I think. I guess that was the point, after all.

Instead, in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, here’s a mixed bag of folk-tinged coversongs that address the myriad and multiple fears we have about love: naming it, finding it, losing it, and losing ourselves to it.

May each of us, regardless of our romantic status, find something in the words of these poets and songwriters which speaks to our secret heart - the better to withstand the oversimplified, candy-red onslaught of emotion sure to come by Thursday.