Category: Covered in Folk


Covered in Folk: Tom Waits
(Dave Alvin, Kathryn Williams, Shawn Colvin, Sarah Jarosz, Redbird +more!)

December 26th, 2009 — 10:08 pm





I somehow managed to reach full-bore adulthood without hearing a lick of Tom Waits. Which is probably all for the better: as I’ve noted many times, my long-standing preference for melodic voices is only now giving way to a mature appreciation of the unique beauty that springs from powerful truths filtered through broken instruments.

And anyway, the Tom Waits songbook is eminently adult, both in the way it looks at the world through bleary, jaded, ancient eyes and the way it rattles about with themes of alcoholics, lonesome trainwatchers, tired prostitutes, and others past their prime, struggling to capture the last licks of a life that has almost finished passing them by. Indeed, the world that Waits inhabits often seems to burn with unfinished life-energy, the heat haze of a drunkard’s sweaty existence in every growl - sometimes festering, sometimes flickering, sometimes roaring out of control.

But there’s also something about a Tom Waits song that suits the stillness of winter. There’s ice in these bittersweet, boozy ballads: the chill of an outsider’s threadbare coat, the thin layer of frost that forms on a dying relationship, the icicle weight of the guillotine metaphor, an observer’s frozen distance from the ideal. In Waits’ capable hands, as in winter’s quietude, the world aches with wistfullness; time captured in crystal, the pessimistic inevitabilities of future and the hard roads of the past ever present in the hopeful moment.


Tom Waits is well-covered, and he should be. His melodies are simple, his imagery clear. The gaze of his narrators and the desires of his subjects resonate with us. The icewall that he places between the world as it is and the world longed for is a familiar one, for it represents our innermost fears and projections. And as long as they are treated tenderly, there are a multitude of ways to interpret these songs.

But where the songs of Bob Dylan and Richard Thompson are, by definition, folk songs, which lend themselves to a universal opportunity for coverage, Waits writes songs for his own distinctive voice. The coarse, gravelly vocals and slow piano-driven delivery that mark Waits’ beautifully broken performance wring every drop of poignancy from their underclass hearts and streets so exquisitely, it poses a particular challenge for would-be interpreters. And sure enough, as a bevy of mediocre, mixed-bag tribute albums proves, it’s surprisingly hard to cover a Tom Waits song with efficacy - to transform that rawness without shaming it with antiseptic beauty, or overwhelming it with rage and despair.

Too many miss the tenderness Waits feels for his subjects. Too many fall too quiet, focusing on melody to the detriment of the necessary nuance. Balance is key, here, lest the longing turn maudlin and cheap, or the chill turn to heat and anger.

Still, there are many ways to capture winter well. Ice can be fragile or fleeting, jagged or muddied, brittle or echoingly still; it can trap us, or shatter beneath us, or even sustain our careful footsteps across it, if we mind our surroundings. Here’s a few folksingers and singer-songwriters who manage to get it right.



Tom Waits coverfolk previously on Cover Lay Down:

17 comments » | Covered in Folk, Tom Waits

Covered in Folk: The Cure
(Grant Lee Phillips, Julie Peel, Luka Bloom, Death Cab, +10 more!)

November 25th, 2009 — 07:16 pm





I was never a real fan of goth-rock, though as I’ve written about before, pretty much anything that made the Top 40 in the 80s seems to linger in the minds and hearts of both my own generation and the artists it has since spawned. And The Cure was undeniably the most prevalent band of its type in mainstream mall culture when I was growing up: in my early adolescence, I dated several girls with somber black-and-white Robert Smith posters on their bedroom walls, and - looking back - can only suppose that the band’s hits and the commodified counterculture they represented resonated with a certain subset of suburban teenagers looking for a safe way to reject the Duran Duran mindset of their pre-teen years and simultaneously speak to the dark, moody feelings which lurked in their self-doubting hearts.

For whatever reason, the songs of The Cure were in the air during that formative time frame, both as radio- and bedroom-presence originals and, later, through the glorious grunge of Dinosaur Jr., whose fuzzed-out version of Just Like Heaven was a boot to the high-school head, one of my first introductions to the true joy of transformative coverage done well. As evidence, it is necessary only to note that The Cure has an especially high incidence of tribute albums and coverage in the modern era - a phenomenon due, we are sure, to their gradual shift from post-punk to suicidal goth rock to the more optimistic alternative pop of their later work, and the impact they had on all those forms, as much as it is their sheer chart popularity in the eighties, the heavy lyrical genius of Smith himself, or the existential gloom they brought to a generation yearning to reject so much, and finding only emptiness in its stead.

Today, we take a look at some of my favorite Cure covers from the last decade or so - mostly the best and most delicate of popular hits like Just Like Heaven, In Between Days, and Boys Don’t Cry, all of which which turn out to play out exceptionally well as slower popfolk ballads and dark, tinkly acoustic atmospheric pieces without all the synth and driving drums. From ragged and honest to celebratory and sharp, each speaks to a culture continuing to mine its past for sense and sensibility, the folkways incarnate, whatever the source.



  • Luka Bloom: In Between Days

    Irish singer-songwriter Luka Bloom’s all-covers album Keeper of the Flame features a holy host of great tunes like this one: melodic, sensitive, and surprisingly delicate, despite moving along at a decent clip. Bloom’s signature loose-strung, jangly guitarwork suits, and then some.


  • Angie Hart: Pictures of You

    Pop singer Angie Hart’s torch song take, originally recorded for a Traffic Accident Commission ad in her native Australia, evokes the sadness of the original lyric in majestic piano, orchestral strings, and a tender, girlish vocal dripping with just the right amount of sentiment and introspection.





As always, Cover Lay Down exists to support artists first and foremost; if you like what you hear, click on artist names to purchase records and pursue live concert experiences direct from the source.

4 comments » | Covered in Folk, The Cure

Covered in Folk: Townes Van Zandt
(Jeffrey Foucault, Guy Clark, Peter Mulvey, The Lemonheads + 7 more)

October 14th, 2009 — 10:17 pm





I don’t know as much about Townes Van Zandt as I’d like to. Despite the great similarities in sound and sensibility between his work and that of Guthrie, Dylan, and other core members of the folkworld, somehow he never cropped up in a childhood balanced between a mother’s love of the Seeger classics and a father’s fandom for the singer-songwriters of his own generation.

Of course, some of that is due to Van Zandt’s relative obscurity during the bulk of his life - as my father notes, until his resurgence in popularity at the turn of the century, it was almost impossible to find any of the artist’s studio recordings. But a commitment to coversong brings with it a lifetime of scouring liner notes and copyright notices. And the more I look, the more I find that so many of the great lonesome, mournful songs of distance and alienation recorded by the artists I love best in the last fifteen years have had their start in the hands and heart of Townes Van Zandt.

Too, in the same way that Big Star holds a special place in the hearts of a particular sort of blogger, there’s a high level of modern respect and celebration for the work of the soft-spoken Texas troubadour in the world of alt-country audiophiles. Pancho and Lefty, especially, seems to be well-covered and well-shared; over the years I’ve collected a full score of great covers of the song from websites hither and yon, so I’ll be going light on it today, in order not to preempt a someday Single Song Sunday feature on the song.

The combined commendations of the artists I love and the bloggers I respect came to a head back in the spring, when the buzz about Steve Earle’s tribute album was just starting to build. Suddenly, the blogosphere was full of Townes, both covers and originals. Most notable, at least for its combination of folk sources and coverage, was this fine post from astute countryfolk blog Beat Surrender, who offered an alternate version of Townes featuring a solid mixed bag of live and studio covers of the fifteen songs Earle chose to cover. The set comes highly recommended, and - as it’s still live - I’ll not repeat it here.

But there’s always more to be found. Here’s a short, mostly mellow set of my favorite covers of the Townes Van Zandt songbook, just a tip of a very large iceberg, scavenged and scoured with care - heavy on the singer-songwriter folk, and without our usual indie-to-alt diversity. Taken together, they make a great tribute to a great man and musician, lost to the lifestyle before so many of us would find him in the first place.



Townes may be long gone, a victim of the hard life which he celebrated so tenderly, but his legacy lives on in both the songs and the hard-working artists he inspired. As always, if you like what you hear, then pay your share to help the next generations survive on the road: follow the links above to pick up albums and tour dates, direct from the source wherever possible.


Cover Lay Down shares new and newfound coverfolk favorites every Wednesday, Sunday, and the occasional otherday.

11 comments » | Covered in Folk, Townes van Zandt

Covered in Folk: Elvis, Part 1
(Recently discovered covers from highly recommended artists)

September 16th, 2009 — 10:30 pm





Typically, in our regularly recurring Covered in Folk feature, we enumerate the impact a particular artist has had on culture, and follow that with a carefully compiled list of folk covers from that artists’ songbook. Tonight, we break the mold, turning to the songs made famous by Elvis Presley in order to tout a few artists whose new and recent releases or rediscovered gems have been at the top of my playlist for the last few weeks for one reason or another.

One day, perhaps, we’ll feature a more traditional look at Elvis, with a broader look at some of the covers which have peppered the genre landscape since the man who brought black rhythm and the sparkly jumpsuit to white culture made his mark on modern music. Until then, I make no apologies for the ulterior motive. Ladies and Gentlemen: The King himself, covered in folk.


I received Waiting for the Dawn, the new album from Childsplay, in the mail mid-summer, promptly put it on rotation in the car, and loved it so much I never brought it inside to run it through the computer to share with you all. But this is music that deserves to be heard. Featuring a veritable who’s who of the Boston neofolk scene, many of whom we’ve featured here before — Sam Amidon, Lissa Schenckenburger, and Crooked Still lead singer Aoife O’Donovan among them — the fiddle-centered ensemble is built around a simple but honorable premise: all the players use instruments made by local craftsman Bob Childs. And, I should add, they all play exceedingly well, both together and as solo artists.

The newest album, which revolves around rich ensemble pieces that nonetheless manage to sound light-hearted, folky and smooth, includes several traditional reels and tradtunes, and a couple of covers; most balance Aoife’s sweet, breathy voice with a full string-led sound, and the result is nearly heavenly. Since the U2 cover made the rounds when the album was first released, here’s the lovely, delicate Elvis cover that closes the album, plus this totally non-Elvis bonus track: a gorgeous cover of Steve Earle’s Christmas in Washington from the same album. Buy Childsplay here, and fill your ears with joy.



My wee one is a girly girl by nature: pink is her preference, and princesses her thing. For this and other reasons, I tend to be in the other room during movie time, especially when the Disney-watching grows thick on the ground. But I couldn’t help but wander in the other day when I heard the unmistakable voice of Norah Jones at her mellow best emerging from the playroom.

I cannot recommend The Princess Diaries 2 to any but the most hardcore of Julie Andrews or Anne Hathaway fans, nor can I in good conscience promote any soundtrack album with both Lindsay Lohan and Kelly Clarkson on it to my regular readership. But this track is well worth passing along.


I’ve been meaning to fill our collective ears with Ingrid Michaelson’s catalog for a while, ever since Girls and Boys got such high praise on the blog rounds upon its 2006 release. I finally got a taste of what I was missing when I was totally blown away by her new album Everybody, which I won in a contest hosted by fave blog Mainstream Isn’t So Bad just about the time the album hit number one on the iTunes charts.

The new album is cover-free, but I honestly haven’t stopped listening to it since the moment it arrived in the mail; its perfect indie folkpop is catchy as hell from beginning to end, and I’m exceedingly glad to have any opportunity to tout it. Here’s a live Elvis cover from her 2008 release Be OK to tempt you into buying the whole damn catalog, starting with Everybody.


Most folks don’t think of the public library as a source for music, which means most folks are missing out: though selection can vary widely from one to another, I’ve found that the average library includes at least a few hidden gems, quite probably ordered by some unknown benefactor librarian with a love for the acoustic stuff. Luckily, we’re connected to a pretty large system of library branches here in these rural, nearly radio-free environs, and I’ve learned to check the stacks when we drive through nearby towns.

Most recently, a trip to Northampton unearthed Irish singer-songwriter Luka Bloom’s back catalog, which included this swirling, jangly, almost mystical long-forgotten turn on a well-covered Elvis tune. Acoustic Motorbike, the album from whence it comes, seems to be out of print, but if your local library doesn’t have it, you can and should pick up the bulk of his back catalog here.



We have shuffle to thank for this next track, which pairs Brazilian artist Seu Jorge’s gentle acoustic guitarplay and that round, mesmerizing accent with a shuffling brushbeat and squeaky reed echo. I honestly can’t even remember how this perfect slowdance came to me originally; all I know is it’s there, in my head again, after floating from the speakers this past weekend in the midst of a lazy afternoon.


It’s a tough time of year for me to hit the local clubs and stages, what with the school year finally in full swing, the kids running us ragged with swimming lessons and other afterschool activities, and a pair of tiny kittens darting for freedom each time I open the door. Missing folk trio Red Molly last Friday in nearby East Hartford while we headed north instead to retrieve said kittens was just one of many lost opportunities in recent weeks. Though consoling myself with their recorded work isn’t the same, rediscovering this summery countryfolk take on their self-titled debut EP did put a smile on my face, and that’s not nothin’.



Keeping up with the blogs is always worth doing, and I’m not just tooting my own horn. For example: thanks to his quirky, well-honed tastebuds, host Jamie of Fong Songs has been good about keeping the tinkly tones of the PoZitive Orchestra on our radar, most recently checking in to let us know that although there’s nothing new in their catalog, the Russian band continues to hit the press. And for good reason, too. This cover of All Shook Up is a perfect example of their sparse, jazz- and sting-quartet influenced bossa-coustic sound.



Finally, I won an autographed copy of the first Stonehoney album when it first came out a year or two back, and liked their well-constructed countryrock songs well enough indeed. But it wasn’t until I heard their stripped-down performances on the workshop stage at this summer’s Falcon Ridge Folk festival that I truly considered them from a folk perspective, which makes for an ever better framework to crawl inside their slightly countrified americana sound.

Blue Christmas is generally considered a holiday track, but this lovely demo-style recording, originally released via their website, popped up on the shuffle last week and stuck like an earworm; I see no reason why good music can’t be featured year-round.



Cover Lay Down posts regular features and coverfolk twice weekly. This is one of them.

5 comments » | Covered in Folk, Elvis, New Artists Old Songs

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.

7 comments » | Big Star, Covered in Folk

Covered in Folk: Smokey Robinson
(covers from Billy Bragg, Patty Griffin, John Hiatt, Laura Nyro and more!)

August 2nd, 2009 — 12:58 pm





At 69, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and multiple Grammy winner Smokey Robinson is a cultural icon, with three songs on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, and a string of chart hits longer than Def Jam’s rap sheet. Though he is best known for his work with the Miracles in the sixties, and his subsequent solo career, his influence on modern music runs deeper still: his list of 4000 published songs includes writing or co-writing credit for My Guy, Don’t Mess With Bill, and Marvin Gaye’s first two million-sellers; he was the primary songwriter and producer for the Temptations from 1963 to 1966. Perhaps most significantly, it was his suggestion to songwriter and collaborator Berry Gordon that he start a label which led to the creation of Motown, and as a producer and VP for the label through much of its formative years, he provided guidance for a plethora of artists and styles who continue to frame much of the musical spectrum today.

Indeed, given the sheer number of songs “the poet laureate of love” has written and recorded in his 50 year career, and the heavy influence of the Motown sound on the generation of songwriters which followed, it would be odd if we couldn’t dig up at least a few covers from the folk and acoustic world.

But the sheer variety of coverage that such a search reveals is worthy of note. Perhaps because his songs address such universal emotion, and in such a direct, heartfelt manner, the simple, soulful ballads for which Robinson is best known seem to lend themselves well to individual transformation. From the many covers of You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me and The Tracks of My Tears which pepper the landscape — among them Billy Bragg and Greg Brown’s slow, broken-hearted solo acoustic covers, Laura Nyro’s gospel soul take with R&B trio Labelle, indiefolker Thao’s ragged retro styling, and subtle and soulful in-studio duets from Patty Griffin and She and Him — to obscurities such as Claudia Russell’s sultry, bluegrassy I Second That Emotion, Loudon Wainwright III and John Hiatt’s rare majestic paean to My Girl, a live English Beat-flavored cover of Tears of a Clown from swamp-roots rockers The Radiators, Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles‘ acoustic guitar-driven alt-rock americana Being With You and the Jerry Garcia Band’s early, jammy instrumental version of Temptations hit Since I Lost My Baby, the covers assembled speak louder than words, paying fitting tribute to a seminal soul and R&B songwriter.



Cover Lay Down publishes new coverfolk features every Sunday, Wednesday, and the occasional otherday, but we couldn’t do it without your continued support of the artists we feature; as always, if you like what you hear, please click on artist names above to purchase music direct from the source, and find out what artists are coming through your area on tour.

If you’re a Smokey fan, don’t forget to head over to his website to download his most recent single, a cover of Norah Jones’ Don’t Know Why. And whether you’re a folkfan or just in it for the covers, definitely come back later this week for a look at the continued influence of Berklee College on the Boston folk and bluegrass scenes.

Comment » | Covered in Folk, Smokey Robinson

Covered in Folk: Sting / The Police
(on covering the coverbloggers)

June 24th, 2009 — 11:05 pm





Though I consider myself a folk blogger first and foremost, as our masthead notes, coversong has its own appeal, both as kitsch and culture. And I make no apologies for the focus, nor do I regret the readership it brings. After all, even if just a few of you get hooked on a new song or artist each week, we all win in the process.

Of course, it’s worth noting that, as a coverblogger, I’m somewhat of an anomaly. The community of coverbloggers is a small one, and it tends to focus on interpretation and transformation; as far as I can tell, I’m the only one who sticks to a genre.

But it’s no secret that many of you come for the covers. Still, if you’re a regular reader of the coverblogs listed there on the sidebar, you might have noticed that, unlike those recycled-pop blogs working to bring you the next greatest thing — you know, the ones who all post the same label-sanctioned track the week the album hits the streets — mostly, there is honor among our small and hardy band. We who mine the past through those who would reinvent it respect each other’s primacy, and pride ourselves on providing something unique — an ironic turn indeed, for a group so interested in performances of familiar song.

Which is all to say: generally, when a coverblogger comes out with a solid bunch of covers of a single artist or theme which I, myself, have been collecting for, I celebrate it. Even when it means that a post subject I have been carefully preparing for must fall to the wayside, merely because some other coverblogger got to it first.


But in the case of Sting, I think I can make an exception to this unspoken community policy. Because, as I noted in the comments to Ray’s mid-May post over at Cover Me, a typically diverse compendium of covers of The Police, folk artists tend towards the obscure, and the solo, as much as they do his early work. And because Sting went solo more than half a career ago, that leaves plenty of potential for our very own exploration.

You don’t need me to tell you who Sting is. I will only note that, at least until he drifted into the pop vocals section of my local library, and decided to appeal primarily to middle-aged women, his evolution as an artist — first as a member of The Police, and then as a softer, more pensive solo artist circa …Nothing Like The Sun and Dream of the Blue Turtles — has perfectly paralleled my own evolution and interest as an audiophile, albeit just a few years out of sync.

So without apology, and with less explanation than usual, here’s a few of my favorite folky covers of the Sting songbook, written both before and after his break toward solo stardom. If you’re already a regular reader over at Cover Me, consider this a companion piece to last month’s post. If not, and you, too, are a Sting fan or cover fan, don’t forget to drop in on Ray for highly recommended covers by Alanis Morissette, Uncle Earl, David Lamotte and more.



No purchase links today, folks: most of these are reposts, and after all, the point of this entry is to tout my fellow coverbloggers. Special thanks to Coverville for making me feel at home by hosting a few of us way back in the day when I was first starting out, and a hearty (albeit premature) welcome back to Liza of Copy, Right? who has recently emerged after a long hiatus. For more coverblogs of exquisite taste, check out the sidebar to the right.

Cover Lay Down posts new coverfolk features every Wednesday and Sunday. Coming soon: more new and back-catalog folkcovers from the mailbag, and a very special look at one of the world’s late great troubadours of the road.

5 comments » | Covered in Folk, The Police

Covered in Folk: Joni Mitchell
(17 Singer-songwriter covers from countrygrass to indiefolk!)

June 13th, 2009 — 08:16 pm





Joni Mitchell’s early influence on her peers is part of the mythos of her era, and their support a major factor in her future success; it’s telling that David Crosby, Fairport Convention, Tom Rush, Judy Collins, Buffy St. Marie, and Judy Collins all thought enough of Joni’s songwriting to cover her work long before she won the Grammy for Best Folk Performance in 1970 — or indeed, in many cases, before she had a chance to record those songs herself.

But though Joni Mitchell’s emergence is often lumped in with the transformation of folk into a mass and popular musical form in the American seventies, her impact on what folk music would become is more than just that of the crowd. For while traditional folk songs generally tell third-persona narratives, and though earlier singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan or Sandy Denny often use the self as a narrator and observer of the universe, it is Joni who is generally thought of as introducing feelings themselves as the primary subject in song.

Whether or not she was truly the first to take this approach, Joni’s establishment of the confessional in folk music is unparalleled. Her explicit exploration of the inner emotional core — those conflicted, inward-looking lyrics, so powerful that they seem to be constantly on the verge of overwhelming the singer’s soft, soaring vocalization of them — did more to create the sense of modern folk music as intimately about the self, longing and faults and all. And the universalization of those emotions defined new ways in which folk music could connect artists and the cultures which they spoke to. Where previous folk music had evoked through narrative and metaphor, Joni’s music strung a direct line from emotional core to emotional core, from her lips to our hearts.


If Joni is over-covered — and certainly her songs are at least as familiar in the mouths and hands of other artists as any female singer-songwriter I can think of — it is because her deceptively plain lyrical poetry has resonated with subsequent generations of musicians struggling with their own voices and emotions, just as it has with her fans. And as singer-songwriter folk music has continued to trend towards the confessional and the local since Joni’s best-known albums have become such staples of the folk canon — the folk imagery and narrative of Clouds, the starkly personal inner darkness and jazztones of Blue, the almost cheerful pop voices of acceptance and celebration in Court and Spark — the covers just keep coming.

I’ve long been a fan of Joni’s — in fact, one of our very first Single Song Sundays here at Cover Lay Down featured an exploration of River, which has become a part of the melancholy side of the holiday canon. Today, we take a broader look at her influence, through some sweet, mostly lesser-known tributes to the seminal singer-songwriter who helped us see that folk doesn’t need to dance around the inner truth to reach every heart and soul.


As always, folks, Cover Lay Down exists to support artists, and the best way to do that is to buy direct from the artists themselves wherever possible. Joni’s work is available everywhere, and if you don’t have at least the aforementioned disks you really should, but all links above lead directly to label- and artist-sanctioned stores and purchase sources; follow ‘em to hear more of what you love. And don’t forget to pre-order Jay Brannan’s new CD to hear his incredible cover of All I Want.


Previously on Cover Lay Down:

Special thanks to fellow coverblogger quietcore of Blowin’ Your Cover, who first posted the Natalie Merchant and Cat Powers covers above way back in January of last year.

10 comments » | Covered in Folk, Joni Mitchell

Covered in Folk: Richard Thompson
(Kate Rusby, Buddy and Julie Miller, Bonnie “Prince” Billy and 9 more!)

May 12th, 2009 — 10:08 pm





I have a strong memory of being halfway up the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival Hill, the sun setting, the stage small in the distance, trying to figure out what people see in Richard Thompson. The man was clearly a legend, and a draw indeed; the hill was as full as I’ve seen it. But that voice, and the signature solo electric guitar, echoed off the hills like a sour note in my ears. I wandered off to put the kids in their bunks, and tucked Thompson away in my mind for another day.

We’ve hemmed and hawed around the subject for a while here at Cover lay Down, from our early feature on son Teddy Thompson to a half-pint feature on 1952 Vincent Black Lightning way back in August. In fact, on average, covers of Richard Thompson songs have cropped up at a rate of one per month — a high percentage indeed for a blog that only posts twice a week.

But regular readers may notice that though his songs are legion here, Richard Thompson’s own voice has only shown up a few meager times, for live covers of Britney Spears and Squeeze classic Tempted, and for his Donovan cover from the Crossing Jordan soundtrack. For a guy who has had such an impact on modern folk music on both sides of the pond — both for his work with the definitive sixties British folk rock group Fairport Convention and his subsequent career as a solo artist — and who has been so prolific in both stages of his work, it’s almost an embarrassment to have stayed at arm’s length for so long.


My bias against Dylan, Michael Stipe, and other practitioners of a particular type of nasal, pinched male folk voices is well-cited here at Cover lay Down; much of my long-standing resistance to Thompson’s music, surely, is due to the peculiar grating timbre of his voice. Too, his particular sound is so distinctive, it can easily be mistaken for sameness — that loose-tempoed strum, that too-often invariant volume, that strangled, raw-pitched yelp held loud and long.

But looking back, my bias for Thompson’s songbook is so obvious, and the field so rich, I’ve given myself a few days to try on the songs themselves, figuring that if they were truly that unlistenable, the man would never have become one of the most covered folksingers living today. And you know what? After steeping myself in his vast back catalog for just a few hours, I think I’m catching a glimmer of the power already — something about the tension between the little-boy longing in his heart, the beauty of the language he finds to express himself, and the authenticity it takes on when held in tension with the sound and fury of the performance.

I suspect I’ll always favor the covers, and not just because it’s my raison d’blog. Specifically, I find his language and melodies especially well-served by tender coverage, though like the originals, versions “out there” range from rockers to ballads. And since friend FiL sent along two generally solid tribute albums a while back — one a rocker, the other a delicate collection of freakfolk and neofolk — there’s plenty of fodder, both reposted and newly-found, to select from and share.

But like once-bitter coffee or a fine IPA, the man’s finally starting to grow on me. He may not turn out to be the musical love of my life, but I’m willing to find my peace with the guttural performance of this bittersweet poet of factory and field, apt chronicler of loves lost and discovered and lost again.

While I spend a few more hours with the originals, here’s just a small sampling of the Thompson-penned covers I’ve grown to love best in a lifetime of resistance.



As always, folks, Cover Lay Down exists to spread the word about artists, not just share the tunes and thoughts. If you enjoyed one or all of today’s sampler platter, follow album links to pick up your very own copies of tribute disks and more direct from artist websites and other local, anti-corporate sources.

And if you’re interested in joining me on my aural pilgrimage to learn more about the nigh-immortal Richard Thompson, head on over to BeesWeb, Thompson’s well-designed website, for purchase links, samples and more. The lyrics are sheer poetry, too, worth reading as verse on their own merits.


More recent Richard Thompson coverage on Cover Lay Down:

20 comments » | Covered in Folk, Richard Thompson

Covered in Folk: R.E.M.
(Redbird, Great Big Sea, Rosie Thomas, Grant Lee Phillips and more!)

April 4th, 2009 — 09:23 pm





I enjoy a good challenge. So when a recent and otherwise well-written treatise on the socio-economic function of cover songs past and present declared the R.E.M. catalog “too cryptic to survive being covered”, I set out to amass a collection of songs which would prove the author wrong.

My dubious pursuit was confounded a bit by a long-time personal apathy for R.E.M.’s particularly angsty, often melodramatic performance style, as filtered through frontman Michael Stipe’s voice and phrasing, which just aren’t to taste. Sure, there’s a few songs I wouldn’t change the station for — the driving guitar of Fall On Me, for example, or the deceptively cheerful pop surface of Man on the Moon. But these are predominantly band-driven songs, where so many others of the canon are singer showcases.

It’s a personal choice: I don’t like listening to Dylan either. But as with Dylan, and so many of the popular artists whose songbooks comprise our Covered in Folk features, there’s a recognizable genius under there, couched in a palatable form. It is no accident that R.E.M. is well established and well respected; love ‘em or hate ‘em, their influence, particularly in the emergence of college alternative radio, is legion and undeniable, and their reputation deserved.


The combination of cultural cache and strong songwriting has produced a world of broad and eminently listenable covers. It’s telling that when Stereogum decided to solicit current indie darlings for their second cover tribute, it was seminal R.E.M. album Automatic for the People which they ended up reconstructing track-for-track. And, as with so many previous features, that many of my favorite cover artists have taken on the R.E.M. songbook speaks volumes to its appeal and its potential among folk musicians and fans of a certain generational outlook.

My top ten list of covers consistently includes Grant-Lee Phillips‘ incredible version of So. Central Rain; I’ve posted it twice here before, and each time it has elicited comments from the readership. There’s more familiar covers here, too, from Rosie Thomas‘ lovely version of The One I Love, which pays tribute to Sufjan’s popular bootlegs of the same tune, to well-played cuts from folk supergroups Redbird and Cry Cry Cry.

Tori Amos and The Corrs come from that same AAA and college rock region of the genre map R.E.M. helped establish. Great Big Sea trend towards the sea chanty made modern, but most folkies will know the name. Stereogum’s coverage is predominantly indie rock, but the names are recognizable to those who come via the indiefolk music blogs. In the end, there’s nothing rare here, except perhaps the live cover of REM obscurity Hairshirt from Glen Hansard’s recent appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

But surely that familiarity proves the point. After all, if folk is in the ownership and the interpretation of song, then cryptic becomes a relative term, and coverage itself proves palatability. For in the end, is there greater foundation for love than the recognition of the soul, the spark of something sensible to the self, and the subsequent struggle to own it? And is it not this love, in the hands of the talented and thoughtful, which makes coverage great, and tributes worthy? Listen, and judge for yourself.



Today’s bonus coverfolk tracks give R.E.M. the chance to take on a few core folksingers, from Hall of Famer Leonard Cohen to the man whose original version of Gentle On My Mind won a Grammy for Best Folk Performance the same year Glen Campbell made it famous. After all, as the banner says, we do covers of folksong here, too:

7 comments » | Covered in Folk, R.E.M.

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