Cover Lay Down

Two Decembers ago, I posted a set of snow songs, accompanied by a short vignette of my children in the first snowfall of the season. Looking back through the archives, I see that darkness was falling by the time the snow was thick enough for much of anything, and the white stuff must have been heavier, too: my account features snowmen, snow angels, and snowball fights, and not much else.

Today, the girls are older, but the snow is higher: three feet and rising since midnight Tuesday, and still falling fast and thick enough to make us wonder if tomorrow, too, will be a day home from school. The patio table looks like a white-frosted birthday cake; the porch comes in level with the yard: it’s an entirely different world, a blizzard world, the kind kids get once in a childhood, if they’re lucky.

And so this time, instead of lingering on the porch, taking pictures and reveling in their play from afar, I chose to suit up and join them.


There’s plenty to do, out here in the whitewash, but we take it on gingerly, afraid at first to sully the majesty of nature unleashed. At first, we merely wade, buried up to my waist and the elderchild’s chest, carving a hedgemaze into the yard as we wander, wondering at a world obscured, watching the ebb and flow of frozen flakes by the billions as they shift the landscape. The pines and oaks which line our little homestead clearing blend into the landscape, their snowcovered branches rippling like waterfalls; every few minutes, the wind puffs the world into whiteout nothingness, shaking an avalanche down from the sky.

The world is too deep for snow angels: I throw the wee one into the air, and when she lands, she disappears, lying perfectly still “to pretend I’m invisible”. But snow invites play, and soon we cannot contain our energy. So we build a slide where the plow came through a foot ago, and then the girls take turns sitting astride my back while we skid down the half-mile driveway on our inner tube, bouncing and laughing as we creep ever-closer to the road. By the time we come in, our noses are frozen, our toes gone numb, but who cares: it’s the best damn day in the world, and I’m proud to have been a part of it.


I originally had something else planned for today’s entry. But as before, my heart is singing, loud and clear in the otherwise-quiet of a snow-hushed world. Here in the warm glow of the pellet stove, hot chocolate in my hands and children’s laughter in my ears, life is present and full of awe. It’s so good to be reminded that, even in a world of high-tech stormtracking and emergency preparedness plans, the universe still has a few surprises in store for us.

To shift the mood away from this peace would be spellbreaking of the worst kind. So here’s an updated list of snowsongs, to celebrate the deep, pure joy of winter.

• Rani Arbo & Daisy Mayhem: Snowbird (orig. Gene MacLellan/ pop. Anne Murray)
  (from Cocktail Swing, 2001)

• Lissa Schenckenburger: Like The Snow (orig. Kristen Andreassen)
  (from Different Game, 2001)

• Muleskinner: Footprints in the Snow (trad./ pop. Bill Monroe)
  (from A Potpourri Of Bluegrass Jam, 1974)

• Harry Nilsson: Snow (orig. Randy Newman)
  (from Nilsson Sings Newman, 1970)

• Thea Gilmore: Listen, The Snow Is Falling (orig. Yoko Ono)
  (from Strange Communion, 2009)

• John Gorka: Snow Don’t Fall (orig. Townes Van Zandt)
  (from Writing In The Margins, 2006)

• Robert Earl Keen: Snowin’ On Raton (orig. Townes Van Zandt)
  (from Gravitational Forces, 2003)
• Gillian Welch and David Rawlings: Snowin’ On Raton (ibid.)
  (from Live In Germany, 1999)
• Pat Green: Snowin’ On Raton (ibid.)
  (from George’s Bar, 2001)

• The Be Good Tanyas: Rain and Snow (trad.)
  (from Blue Horse, 2000)
• Peter Mulvey: Rain and Snow (trad.)
  (from Ten Thousand Mornings, 2002)
• Solas: Rain and Snow (trad.)
  (from Reunion: A Decade of Solas, 2006)
• Del McCoury Band: Rain and Snow (trad.)
  (from Live From Bonnaroo, 2002)

• Rosie Thomas: Winter Wonderland
  (from A Very Rosie Christmas, 2008)

Looking for more? Our pre-Christmas feature on Secular Seasonals & Nondenominational Carols includes several more snowsongs, including Sam Bush’s instrumentalgrass interpretation of Let It Snow, more solid folk versions of Winter Wonderland from A Weather, Joel Rakes, and Laura Cortese, and Fiona Apple’s warm, cheerful take on classic Frosty The Snowman.

We’re back on the bandwidth wagon after a full week of experimental streamposts, with thanks to all who have already donated to help us keep the music flowing, and a reminder that, until the end of January, 20% of all donations to Cover Lay Down will be paid forward to the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, the better to keep our local community fed and healthy. If you, too, enjoy what we do here, we hope you’ll consider helping out.

Now how about a look at some great acoustic and folk coverage from new and still-rising artists worth your time? Here’s some of my newest discoveries, with thanks as always to the musicians, readers, and labels who submit songs and samples for us to share.


First and foremost, though not so new as all that anymore: young Floridian folkband Jubal’s Kin sent me a link to download their self-titled debut back in November, and I’m afraid I got so swept up in the holiday spirit, I never made it to their work - which is a shame, since it’s truly something special, so I’m glad to finally have a chance to tout ‘em.

The nut: Jubal’s Kin is a sibling trio playing every-note-counts appalachian stringband balladry with slight undertones of both bluegrass and indiefolk, sweet harmonies and stellar musicianship, vibrant arrangements with well-placed high and low elements, and an entire album of mostly covers that tackles both tradfolk and the more modern stuff that sounds like it, from Patty Griffin to The Decemberists. The overall effect is highly listenable, full of grace and gravity, innocence and eternity all at once, a sound to steep in that rings the same bell as Sam Amidon, Nickel Creek, Sarah Jarosz, and Joy Kills Sorrow - high praise indeed, from this particular fan. Get it on Bandcamp, but check this out first.

• Jubal’s Kin: Everything Is Free (orig. Gillian Welch)

• Jubal’s Kin: No Depression (orig. A.P. Carter)
  (from Jubal’s Kin, 2010)

I found Kiersten Holine through a combination of serendipity, shrewd self-marketing, and code: because the text she wrote to accompany her video cover of These Days also recommends The Tallest Man On Earth’s take on the same song, her vid showed up atop the “suggested” sidebar alongside his live cover of Graceland, posted recently by Paste online.

I’m glad it did. Holine’s slightly raspy bedroom delivery and soft, tender guitarwork combine to create an environment that’s quite beautiful, revealing influences from modern acoustic sadcore and indiepop (Stars, Bon Iver) to old folkies (Dylan, especially). Turns out she’s made a few songs and videos with Jeff Pianki, who we’ve covered here before, too. And in addition to the vast set of coverage on her YouTube page, she’s got a ten-song set of downloadables at bandcamp: five free covers from the likes of Morning Benders, Stars, and Local Natives, and five solid originals in EP format well worth the $4.95. Here’s two, plus the aforementioned video, with hopes they’ll push you towards the next eight and more.

• Kiersten Holine: Heart of Chambers (orig. Beach House)

• Kiersten Holine: God Only Knows (orig. The Beach Boys)
  (from Bandcamp releases, 2010)

If How Dark It Is Before The Dawn, the newest album from Steve Stubblefield project Starlings, TN, represents a total reinvention of the songwriter and arranger’s core sound, it’s because Stubblefield himself has changed since his last album of original works in 2005: after losing his master tapes, several instruments, and much of his home in the wake of Katrina, the one-time southern bluesrock artist spent three years helping others recover from the storm, moving from Biloxi back to his hometown of Hattiesburg, MS in the process - where he turned back to his early love of gospel music, rediscovered the folk songs of Alan Lomax, and learned to play the appalachian dulcimer.

The newest crop of songs are more intimate as a result, and deliciously rich with the sounds of his native south, though looking back through his catalog, I find they still retain the highly produced Velvet-Underground-meets-the-delta feel which lent so many layers to his earlier albums. But it’s the combination of that same tendency towards fuzzed-out production with a wholly new tone - a slow, syrupy, majestic emocore-meets-americana sound, driven by the drone of the bowed dulcimer - which stands out most strongly as new, exciting, and eminently folk. Indeed, his new version of Reason To Believe sounds wonderful and full, like Springsteen filtered through a psychedelic Robitussin dream. And while they clearly represent an experiment with his new-found tonality, the tracks on last year’s all-covers album Under The Influence are well-chosen, and hold up exceptionally well under the treatment.

• Starlings, TN: Reason To Believe (orig. Bruce Springsteen)
  (from How Dark It Is Before The Dawn, 2010)

• Starlings, TN: Jesus’ Hands (orig. American Music Club)
  (from Under The Influence, 2009)

I first stumbled upon gifted feel-good singer-songwriter James O’Malley while searching for Christmas covers back in mid-December; if the name sounds familiar, it’s because his take on Darryl Purpose’s You Must Go Home For Christmas featured prominently in our Holiday Coverfolk feature set of holiday songs with a homecoming theme. Since then, he’s contacted us with two more covers, a hushed, almost mystical bluesfolk turn on a familiar Dylan tune, and a wonderfully weary take on Celluloid Heroes, recorded in 2009 for Ray Davies tribute Kinks UnKovered, which lends a pensive tone to The Kinks’ classic, and I’m very glad he’s decided to pursue our attention: the two cuts show a diversity of style and substance which remind us never to take those single-shot discoveries as the end of the road, lest we miss the good stuff.

• James O’Malley: Just Like A Woman (orig. Bob Dylan)
  (from Tales To Tell, 2009)

• James O’Malley: Celluloid Heroes (orig. The Kinks)
  (from Kinks UnKovered, 2009)

Hurrah for readers, who see what we’re doing here and help fill in the gaps. Like John, who sent along a video of Wisconsinite Hayward Williams, and his amazing rendition of Thunder Road. Williams looks fifteen and sounds timeless, like Marc Cohn with a guitar; turns out he’s popular with the Redbird crowd, making me wish I could catch him on the road with Jeffrey Foucault, who provides the quote on his homepage. And though he seems to be at his best live - which makes his newest release Cotton Bell a strong temptation, given that it is built around a set of live studio takes with talented peers - his studio work is dark and exquisitely produced, with crisp and muddy elements swirling around perfectly, so color me impressed, and wondering why the hell I missed him the first time around.

To be fair, the solo video rendition of this signature Springsteen song is even better in many ways - dustier, more raw, and more weary - and there’s a few other covers up from that same session, including a strong rendition of Tom Waits’ Long Way Home with Peter Mulvey and Brianna Lane on harmonies. But the album version is sparse and strong, too, with a broken rhythm and soulfulness that gains strength even as it loses its way in the song before dissolving into bells and mournful keys, making it more than solid enough to share and celebrate. And you get Mulvey on vocals, as a bonus. Here’s both, for comparison’s sake, along with a slow, raw solo take on Frank Sinatra signature tune One For My Baby (And One For The Road) from a gorgeous 2008 Basement Tapes session.

• Hayward Williams: Thunder Road (orig. Bruce Springsteen)
  (from Another Sailor’s Dream, 2007)

• Hayward Williams: One For My Baby (orig. Fred Astaire; pop. Sinatra)
  (from Basement Tapes session #10, 2007)

Finally, following the threads from Hayward’s store, I find Martha Berner’s cover of Sunday Morning, which offers a light, oddly upbeat poppy folkrock take on the old Velvet Underground with Nico standard that really brings new optimism to the song without overdoing it. Berner’s apparently much more well known - her MySpace page lists plays in the tens of thousands for most tracks - and the song dates back to long before the millennium, but presenting the two together offers a nice balance, here. We’ll call it a bonus track.

• Martha Berner: Sunday Morning (orig. Velvet Underground)
  (from The Ten Tiny Little Pieces EP, 2006)

Cover Lay Down: posting new coverfolk features and songsets twice a week without fail since 2007. Y’all come back now, y’hear?

Confession time, folks: though Sunday’s return to the world of video coverage made for a solid feature, I had an ulterior motive to eschew the usual mp3s. Yes, thanks to a curious combination of both ongoing bandwidth theft and the high demand for cover songs during the holiday season, I’ve been out of bandwidth since Thursday. And my clock doesn’t turn over until the 8th, which means right now, I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to serve the usual demand for coverfolk in ways which best support your needs as fans without costing me a bundle in overage fees.

And though it’s a subject I’ve avoided for a long time, I can’t help but think that maybe - as an experiment of sorts - the best way to balance the books this time around is to tackle the stream head on.

My preferred approach here on Cover Lay Down has always been to provide content in whatever format has the highest potential for you to truly fall in love with the music and artists we feature. And until recently, that has meant a reluctance to utilize streaming technologies, even as most other blogs have long since added those tiny triangular buttons that let you sample before you download. As our Play! page, where you can choose to download a browser-based tool that will let you play our tunes directly from this or any page, notes:

…this preference [for the download-only format] stems from my support for artists first and foremost; these artists work hard to craft songs as entire experiences, and skipping around does their art a grave disservice. As such, rather than encourage folks to make the call based on the first few seconds of a given track, I encourage you to download the music you find here on Cover Lay Down, and let it seep into your consciousness through your preferred listening method.

I recognize that this is an unusual stance. But I know more than most people what I’m talking about when I say that how we listen matters. In my day job, I’m a media and communications teacher, specializing in new literacies, and in the social and personal habits that surround the various modes of communication which different eras of technology have engendered.

My classes spend a full week each semester looking at the rise of the mp3 player and the remix culture, and exploring the broad changes which this has made to everything from how we create music to how we define ourselves through our listening habits. And invariably, year after year, we find that ownership is stronger when we have the most power over where, when, and how we listen.

As a professional, though I still believe that, residually speaking, we are still more likely to think of an mp3 as more “ours” than a mere Soundcloud stream or internet radio station, it’s undeniably true that the margin of experience between streaming and mp3 “ownership” grows smaller every year. Three years ago, when we started this blog, it took downloads to truly make music ours to play with at any moment, but today, streaming on the go is on the rise - and the growing incidence of web-enabled everything-boxes such as the iPhone mean that more and more, we can and do integrate streaming technologies into our daily walkabout experience.

Which is to say: just as the way we use video is changing the audiophilic spectrum, so is the increased ubiquity of the cloud, and our increased access to wireless technology in our hands and ears and pockets, making it possible for us to play music we do not fully own on demand, in the car and in the earbuds. And if we can do that, whether we own the bits and bytes that represent that music or not is increasingly moot when determining how it matters.


To be fair, not posting mp3s did mean a slight drop in readership over the past week - music blog aggregator Hype Machine, which brings us much of our drop-in traffic, doesn’t pick up songs in video format. And it is true that adding play functionality to the blog would raise the demand for bandwidth - studies show that people are much more likely to try everything if they can skim than if they have to download.

But the world of apps seems to be finally catching up with us here. Though I continue to be frustrated about my inability to access Hype Machine on my new iPad, as Duke over at The Late Greats noted earlier this week, the recent appearance of the iTunes app MusicMaven has made it possible for you to take the music posted by your favorite blogs on the go with your portable device - a far better option for those who prefer to surf on the go, too, than having to plan ahead by downloading songs before they leave the house. And MusicMaven lends some pretty nifty functionality to the process of blogsurfing, too: for example, it’s very cool to be able to make playlists directly from your favorite blogs, and play them as you use other apps, without having to use iTunes as a passthrough.

Cover Lay Down is honored to have made the select list which MusicMaven gathers in, though I think you’ll also like the overall set - these guys have great taste in blogs. And as a thank you for all of us, the folks behind the app have given me codes for up to five of you to download the app free of charge - so if you have an iPhone or iTouch, and you’d like to give it a shot, let me know, and I’ll give the first five responders a chance to test it out.

Of course, we’re still left with our little problem of bandwidth limitations - an issue which will only be exacerbated by serving the iPhone community. But I’ve always said that every problem is an opportunity, if approached properly. And today, the challenge provides us an opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade twice over.

First and foremost, the daily emails from our wonderful, solar-powered hosting company iMountain remind me that Cover Lay Down depends on the kindness of strangers to cover its costs. And although I dropped the ball a bit on our last pledge drive - yes, folks, I have your names on the right list, and will be sending out this year’s bootleg series as soon as I get the bandwidth back - we’re a bit overdue for our bi-annual reminder that it takes your donations to keep this place going.

So here’s the deal, folks: it’s winter, and there are plenty of families in my area and yours still struggling in the sluggish economy. So from now until the end of the month, I’m opening up the coffers to pay it forward: donate any amount to help keep our faucets running, and I’ll give 20% of all donations to the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, a stalwart group of local heroes who are just now watching the cupboards grow bare after the usual holiday rush.

As always, all donors to the cause will also receive a secret link to a homemade live bootleg mix of covers, with songs taken from this past year’s Grey Fox and Falcon Ridge Folk Festivals, and from the numerous house concerts which we have hosted here in rural America. All tracks on these bootlegs were recorded by yours truly, and are available nowhere else. Featured artists on the 2010 bootleg include Sarah Jarosz, Tim O’Brien, Tracy Grammer, Dala, Chuck E Costa, Eliza Gilkyson and Jimmy LaFave, Red Molly, We’re About Nine, and more.

But for whatever the reason - be it in support of the artists, the writing, the food bank - please, give if you can. And thanks in advance for your support, of us, and of the music.

Second, and back to where we started today, our little bandwidth outage has caused me to consider experimenting with other methods of service. There’s several, but my favorite so far is Soundcloud, which hosts music on its own servers; we’ve used it here and there a bit, and though it, too, comes off as a blank space on the ol’ iPad and on Google’s Feedreader, it does show on Hype Machine, and I’ve yet to hear any complaints.

Today, then, we present part two of our little experiment in delivery methods: a set of songs which have been sent to me via Soundcloud within the last few months, most of which, oddly and unintentionally, speak to the larger theme of need and change which runs like a wire through today’s feature. As part of our little test, since the ability to stream and listen “live” online makes it much easier to sample, I’ve decided to let the songs speak for themselves, rather than go on about them textually, though I hope you’ll remember that we only post that which we think you should pursue here on Cover Lay Down, and act accordingly.

Links below the tracks go to artist and label pages for purchase, as always, and we hope you’ll enjoy both the songs and the foray into new posting territory, as much as I have. And although Sunday will bring us back to the usual mp3-based setlist format, I hope you’ll also let me know in the comments how the switch from privately-hosted mp3s to streaming technologies over the last two features has served your listening needs.

Clare Maguire: Hope There’s Someone (orig. Antony & The Johnsons)


Benjamin Francis Leftwich: Rebellion (orig. Arcade Fire)


Clare Burson: We Used To Wait (orig. Arcade Fire)


Terry Edwards: Lulu’s Back in Town (orig. Thelonious Monk)


Nicole Atkins: Vitamin C (orig. Can)


The Good Natured: For The Widows in Paradise (orig. Sufjan Stevens)


That’s a Freight Train: I Can Change (orig. LCD Soundsystem)


Ruth Bewsey: Sal Paradise (orig. Futures)


Love Darling: Closer (orig. Kings of Leon)


Liam Bailey: I’d Rather Go Blind (orig. Etta James)
Liam Bailey: Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want (orig. The Smiths)


Pickingsplinters: Cocaine (trad.)


John Velghe: I Wanna Be Your Dog (orig. The Stooges)


Cover Lay Down posts new coverfolk features and song sets twice weekly in a neverending quest to connect artists and fans for the betterment of culture. Wanna help?

A few years back, I took a stand on YouTube-as-songsource, providing you, the reader, with a purely subjective, typically high-horse audiophile’s argument that music was meant to be heard, not seen:

Some of this is merely about visual distraction. I like concerts - being there is its own form of communion, and seeing an artist’s fingering and facial expression can lend a permanent layer of nuance to songs previously heard. But when unavoidable fascination with the technical nuances of sound production, and the way the light bounces off a varnished guitar to become a splotch of tabletop light, come into play, it takes up a part of me I was using to listen.

Mostly, though, the issue here is distance. Headphone sound is always enveloping; live music is, too, in its own way. But when it comes to screen-based sound, the tiny rectangle of light and motion reduces that all-encompassing feeling of communion to something tinny and contained. Scale and proximity matter: to squint at music is to be apart from it. It’s like smelling flowers while looking at them through the wrong end of the telescope.

Since then, of course, even as MTV has finished the long process of banishing video programming to the wee hours of the morning, a complex of change has shifted our experience with culture: bandwidth has caught up to us, webculture has gotten more visual, and artists continue to look to YouTube and other video companions as both an entryplace into the market and a vital component of word-spreading and fan-base building. As a consequence, YouTube has become more and more viable for me as a listener: not the most important place to find new recordings, by far, and still limited as a frame for experience, but still a valuable primary source for native content produced as audiovisual first and foremost.

And since I have only 17 subscribers to my YouTube channel, and since my hosting company is starting to send me notices about bandwidth overuse on a monthly basis, the time seems ripe for a return to our look at the role of videography in the spreading of the folkways.


As a subjective listener, I still prefer the headphone and darkness approach to music - the better to let the sound envelop me, in its purest form. And just as I eschew the audiobook as something along the spectrum towards the movie adaptation - which is to say, a medium whose tonal addenda makes it an unwelcome thief of at least some of the imaginative potency of the text - as an ideal, I still maintain that recorded music is meant for the ears first and foremost.

But my respect for artists leveraging new media, and my desire to respect their chosen vehicles for that leverage, continues to weigh heavily on my mind, even as I rip the occasional mp3 for us to share, flattening its intended effect in order to isolate the sound of music. And increasingly, I find that the artists I discover come from YouTube performance - via other blogs, artist homepages, emailed links, and those same vibrant video-centric sources which prompted our original look at the world of YouTube artistry and promotion.

We’ve featured many of these artists this past year, in fact. Tom Meny, Matt Ryd, HelenaMaria, Kina Grannis: each uses the videoweb as a primary space for first release, with site-based downloads most often taken directly from performances that came to us via video first. And the strategy works: Pomplamoose, who we’ve mentioned several times on these pages, even managed to leverage their fun cut-up approach to video performance into a series of car commercials over the holidays.

And the strategy is not limited to newcomers. Jill Andrews, pregnant and newly solo after the breakup of the everybodyfields, worked hard to sustain her fanbase via a monthly video series this year. Beck, too, has joined the fray in the last two years, gathering in cadres of friends and fellow performers for one-shot full-album coverage sessions called Record Club, with tasty and often oddly reconstructed takes on everyone from the Velvet Underground to Leonard Cohen to Yanni released song-by-song in full technicolor.

A number of newer sources and sponsors have produced or continue to produce video series worth mention, too. Cases in point include The Black Cab Sessions and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, both of which, in presenting artists in small spaces, prompted both acoustic and stripped-down electric performances whose intimacy translates fairly well to the small screen.

More relevant to our ongoing focus on coverage, The Voice Project, an ongoing series of chain-connected coverage videos which bring us slowly into artist homes and recording spaces in stark black and white, showcase the artist at play, paying tribute to his influences. Both the AV Club’s Undercover and Levi’s Pioneer Sessions presented video cover series this past year, producing several strong entries for our folk archive. Even ASCAP got into the act over the holidays, presenting a page of christmas card covers in tiny video boxes from a strong set of artists - including Dawn Landes, Robbie Fulks, Jill Sobule, and more - in intimate settings. And like the projects we mentioned in our first look at the world of music videos, all of the above are worth the visit, though each also yaws wide enough to caveat the emptor.

So here’s some folks using YouTube and Vimeo well: both as a medium for layered presentation of song as something sensually encompassing, and as a platform for performance, its recaptured relevance distinct from the studio recording I prefer to imagine in my minds eye.

Kina Grannis, who like many of today’s artists we first featured during New Artists, Old Songs Week way back in February, continues to treat YouTube as a primary medium, even after her first album Stairways emerged this year, charting Billboard sans label, sans management, and sans physical product. Here, she pairs with acoustic pop duo Boyce Avenue - equally adept YouTube natives, with some strong covers on their own YouTube page both solo and with fellow YouTuber Savannah Outen - for a gentle U2 cover and a delicious take on Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, released just yesterday.



Kina Grannis & Boyce Avenue: Fast Car (orig. Tracy Chapman)

Kina Grannis & Boyce Avenue: With Or Without You (orig. U2)

Where other coverage-oriented YouTube artists such as Matt Ryd, Danielle Ate The Sandwich, and Jay Brannan have managed to retain their authenticity throughout their online evolution, earning my immense respect and fandom, I have mixed feelings about the most recent work from Alex Cornell, who started covering songs in typical amateur style on YouTube several years ago, but has turned to a slightly overpolished production in his last few videos. Still, the man deserves due recognition for the evolution of style, in keeping with our focus on native YouTube professionalism today. Here’s two covers from Alex - an oldie and a more recent take, for comparison’s sake - plus relatively new coverage from Brannan, Danielle, and Ryd, for comparison’s sake.

Alex Cornell: I’m On Fire (orig. Bruce Springsteen)

Alex Cornell: No One (orig. Alicia Keys)



Danielle Ate The Sandwich: Bad Romance (orig. Lady Gaga)



Jay Brannan: The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia (orig. Vicki Lawrence)



Matt Ryd: California Gurls (orig. Katy Perry)

As mentioned above, The Voice Project has become one of my favorite places to linger, most especially for the way their home-and-studio-based visits come into the environment slowly, braiding arrival, small-talk, rehearsal, and contextual intro to the song as part and parcel of the whole experience. Here’s two surprises: Andrew Bird covering Cass McCombs on his porch with some help from a friend, and Jesca Hoop taking on Bon Iver in the alleyway behind her studio.

Andrew Bird » Cass McCombs from The Voice Project on Vimeo.

Jesca Hoop » Bon Iver from The Voice Project on Vimeo.

Did we cover the HearYa Live Sessions last time we did this sort of feature? Can’t remember, but their recent all-covers set with Americana faves The Deep Dark Woods, which hasn’t even been fully released yet, includes this solid cover of the tradfolk-via-The Grateful Dead tune Peggy-O, reminding me to remind you to return to both site and artists often.

The Deep Dark Woods: Peggy O - Live Session 9/21/10 from HearYa.com.

Looking for more video coverage? In addition the abovementioned sources and sites, it’s worth remembering that we took on many more video pieces this year than last, most especially as a way to showcase new artists who had little else to offer us by way of coverage. Here’s a few favorites that still linger from 2010: Dan Mills‘ delightful living room playlet, Frank Fairfield’s back porch banjo-fied countryfolk live on KEXP, and Chuck E Costa playing at our very own house concert series.



Dan Mills: You Can Call Me Al (orig. Paul Simon)

Frank Fairfield: Cumberland Gap (trad.)

Chuck E Costa: No Love Today (orig. Chris Smither)

Cover Lay Down posts new coverfolk features and songsets each Wednesday, Sunday, and the occasional otherday. Y’all come back now, y’hear?