Cover Lay Down

In order for me to cover a song, the melody must strike me as well thought out. I can’t just relate to the song personally, it must also involve the artist’s emotional detail. I tend to crave a genuine credibility from an artist’s voice and lyrics –- songs in which I believe every word. If I’m able to put myself in the situation of a song and play the part, then I know it’s for real and I want to share it with others.
– Angel Snow, singer-songwriter

Like many music bloggers, I have mixed feelings about becoming big enough to be noticed by the indie promoters. On the one hand, there’s a lot of great folk being produced out there, and I appreciate having it show up at my doorstep. On the other hand, there’s a lot of music out there, period. Some days it’s hard to find my doorstep.

Happily, in my case, the potential for being overwhelmed by new music is tempered by our focus on the intersection of two relatively small niches within the music world. Though we define “folk” broadly here, much of the music I recieve is easily rejected as either not folk, or all originals. Winnowing the pile down from there is time-consuming, but it’s worth it. For in and among the chaff that comes my way, a few artists have stood out as both worthy of repeated listening, and perfect for my readership.

This presents a challenge. Though many of our feature series here at Cover Lay Down focus on songs or genre, which provide plenty of opportunity for a single great track to find its way into the mix, until now, we’ve only done full features on artists who have enough cover songs under their proverbial belts to merit the full Cover Lay Down treatment. But some artists are so impressive right out of the gate, they merit notice even before their body of work has grown to that scale.

So today, we begin a new occasional series, in which I have the rare privilege of introducing some artists so far under the radar that most of them haven’t even hit the rest of the blogosphere, so new that they haven’t yet recorded more than a single cover or two, and so incredible I just couldn’t wait until their next album to write about them.

We call this new series New Artists, Old Songs, and though I expect most posts in this series to be short one-shot occasionals, this weekend we kick it off on a high note with three artists to keep your ears on: Americana singer-songwriter Angel Snow, urban alt-country artist Sam Jacobs, and bluesfolk pianist Jon Regen. Someday, when these folks are as famous as they truly deserve, you and I can take some pride in recognizing genius when we first heard it.

Nashville singer-songwriter Angel Snow has recorded exactly one album, with but a single cover, but I’ve never been so happy to have finally been discovered by the industry as I was when I stuck Fortune Tellers into my CD player. Angel’s promotional materials describe her sound as “classic Americana folk with a modern edge”, and that’s spot on, but it doesn’t begin to capture the incredible emotive power that Angel can wring from spare, ringing guitarwork and a plaintive country vocal style versatile enough to go from the the open tonality of Natalie Merchant to the weary yet hopeful backporch intimacy of Caroline Herring.

In short, Angel Snow’s music is wry and confessional, raw and open, and I’ve fallen in love with it. I was so eager to hear more that I asked her manager to pass along a few questions. Here’s Angel’s thoughts on Dylan:

Bob Dylan is a favorite of mine not only because his music continues to transcend time, but also because it was — and is still — so profound. His music left some flabbergasted (I love that word) and others outraged, and yet still he did what he felt he had to do. Maybe it was because he had to get his emotions out. Whatever his reasons for pushing that envelope, he still managed to keep his storytelling talent intact. Dylan’s train of thought -– now that’s something I’d like to dig into.

Compared to the rest of Fortune Tellers, Angel’s solo Dylan cover is sparse, but no less intimate. Add a bit more open-throated power, a light application of well-produced slow bass, kit drums, and gospel organ, and some vulnerable and introspective songwriting, and you’ve got a total package that’s already on my Best of 2008 list. Download the Dylan, check out a few more tracks at Angel Snow’s myspace page, and then pick up Fortune Tellers.

• Angel Snow, Meet Me in the Morning (orig. Dylan)

NYC singer-songwriter Sam Jacobs, who writes and performs under the name Lipstik, works in multiple genres — in addition to this raggedly stunning folk music, he’s also working on “some dance stuff and some noise rock things”. But his no-longer-forthcoming 4-song digital EP There Is Only One Thing, which features a cover of Tom Petty’s Yer So Bad, is a collection of “sad songs with piano and cello” on the verge of No Depression alt-country, with a sense of song structure and subject aptly described as Leonard Cohen-esque. Full-length work-to-be Pain is a Reliable Signal promises more in the same vein, if a bit more Van Morrison, and that’s not bad, either.

Today’s track is an apt example. The aforementioned Tom Petty cover starts ragged and raw, with brushes and guitar and a voice not unlike Petty’s, if a bit more melodic. The song transitions smoothly to a full-bore weary beauty once the cello comes bowing in, and the end result is pure alt-folk gold. Download below, and then Check Lipstik out here.

• Lipstik, Yer So Bad (orig. Tom Petty)

Pianist and singer-songwriter Jon Regen is already an old hand in the music industry; he accompanied and anchored tour bands for jazzmen Jimmy Scott and Kyle Eastwood for years, and cut two acclaimed albums of pianojazz in the early millenium. He’s recently started recording and performing his own work, and like fellow folkblogger and impeccable taste-master Muruch, who posted the title track off Regen’s promising new album Let It Go last week, I was struck by Regen’s “bluesy acoustic” authenticity from the first listen. Let It Go has high folkpop credibility, with production work from the same guys who work with Teddy Thompson and Ryan Adams, and support from Martha Wainwright on vocals and the distinctive guitarwork of Andy Summers of The Police, but Regen’s original songwriting and stellar performance are the real find here, and I’m glad he thought to seek us out.

Kudos to Regen for knowing his audience; Muruch may have the single, but I got a very nice personal note and an *unreleased* cover of Don’t Stop Believin’ which he recorded in 2005. It’s a great track, soulful and well-produced, reminiscent of the best work of Marc Cohn or Bruce Hornsby, and I’m honored to be the first to bring it to light. Listen, and then stream and buy Let It Go.

• Jon Regen, Don’t Stop Believin’ (orig. Journey)

Finally, today’s bonus coversong isn’t an old song, and it’s not new to the blogs, either. But young LA-based “acoustic soul” and jazz-folk crooner and songwriter John West is going places, too — somewhere just on the soul side of Shawn Mullins, I suspect, with more than a touch of Corinne Bailey Rae. This folky, gorgeously understated take on Rihanna’s Grammy-nominated and admittedly over-covered Umbrella is the only acoustic version of this song I’ve found which manages to retain the oozing sexiness of the original. And, dammit, it’s totally stuck in my head, so maybe posting it here will help.

• John West, Umbrella (orig. Rihanna)

We’ll be back Wednesday with a long-overdue return to our regular Covered in Folk feature, wherein we collect the very best folk covers of a single artist’s songs.

Interested in being considered for the Cover Lay Down treatment? Please gmail for details. All serious submissions taken seriously. Please note, however, that home recordings will only be accepted from Sam Beam.

There’s something of the sea in the songs of Cindy Kallet: something of the honesty and intimacy of water and stones and the wild shorebirds, something of the tight-knit communities and strong, silent families of the New England coast she loves so much. It’s there in her lyrics, which speak of the small moments of hope and love and laughter that make life rich and worth celebrating. It’s there in her craft, which combines simple, heartfelt, unadorned elements — a crisp, pure alto, an almost classical guitar sound, the rich harmonies of friends – in skillful, effective ways. And it’s there in her style, which echoes the older folkways of the sea shanty, the Celtic folk ballad, and post-Puritan shape note singing.

Cindy Kallet’s music is folk in a traditional sense, unpretentious, unproduced, grounded in place and nature and community, celebrating a simpler life. It is of a particularly New England coastal school of music, of a mind with the work of Gordon Bok and a few select others who spend as much time building boats and serving community as they do performing and crafting songs of simple praise. As a product of and for that place, it contains elements of traditional rural folk ballads and sea shanties, combining them with Appalachian instruments and the trope and formal phrasing of Quaker plainsong. And it sounds older than it is, as if it skipped over the major transformation that folks like Dylan, Guthrie and Seeger brought to the table of American “modern” folk, to pull instead from a strong and uninterrupted tradition of simple music “of the folk” played earnestly and without pretense.

In a world which considers such rough-edged confessional poets as Dylan and Guthrie the forefathers of modern American folk music, the “classical sensibility” and delicate phrasing Cindy Kallet brings to her craft can seems like an anomaly. But for all its grounding in the folk sounds, imagery, and culture of the northern American coast, there is also something both more intimately familiar and more elusively original about Cindy Kallet.

Kallet is a truly talented and innovative songwriter and performer, one who brings her own uniquely skilled touch to her craft. Her first album Working on Wings to Fly, released way back in 1981, was named one of the Top 100 Folk Albums of the Millenium by Boston folk radio station WUMB. She has earned high praise and admiration from many folk musicians more typically identified with the “mainstream” singer-songwriter folk movement, such as Christine Lavin, Dar Williams, and Patty Larkin, who cites Kallet’s Dreaming Down a Quiet Line as one of her favorite albums. In turn, Kallet cites James Taylor and Joni Mitchell among her influences, and indeed, there is something of James Taylor’s finger styling in her own, something of the phrasing of Joni’s sparser dulcimer tunes in the way Kallet pushes her pure legato voice soaring over her crisp stringwork. But the way she combines traditional and modern elements is truly her own. And the honest, intelligent eye she brings to bear on these elements is incomparable.

More than anything else, Cindy Kallet’s music is an overwhelmingly intimate and open experience. But though her music is extraordinarily unadorned, it is anything but simplistic. Kallet’s songs are simultaneously a celebration of the world, and a communion with it. Her way with language, and with emotional delivery, is deliberate and intelligent, carefully wrought to serve what comes across as an almost holy reverence for the small details that make life worth living well.

This is serious folk music, the core of the genre. It is simple, without being sparse. It is simultaneously delicate and complete. Every note counts, and seems carefully chosen. It feels like home, somewhere by the sea, on a warm Spring afternoon. I have never heard music that makes me want to listen so carefully.

Kallet’s skillful ability to bring together the elements of modern and traditional folk to revere and recreate a particular place and time is paralleled by an ability to bring together others, both as lyricists and as collaborators, to reach an equally powerful communion. As her own songwriting is celebratory, and rich in gentle purpose, the artists and songs she chooses to cover are equally authentic, in tune with the sea and the joy of life lived simply in every moment. This has often meant reaching towards traditional songs of the Irish and British Isles, as in her most recent album Cross the Water, a collection of originals and Irish reels produced with multi-instrumentalist Grey Larsen; it has also meant covering the work of other contemporary musicians, like Gordon Bok and Dougie MacLean, who share her sense of place. And her collaborative work with compatriots Michael Cicone and Ellen Epstein, which produced two incredible albums over a decade apart and will produce a third in May, ranges farther, finding that same sensibility in the working-class community portrait of Bruce Springsteen’s My Hometown, and a gorgeous three-part a capella delivery of Dylan’s When The Ship Comes In.

For all its evident craft, Cindy Kallet’s music comes across as egoless and effortless. Even as her songs celebrate the world she loves, she delivers them as if the point of performance were to invest every bit of her energy into helping each song become that which it is trying to be. This is far rarer than many of us would like to admit. Combine this with that sweet, rich alto, a powerful sense of phrasing in service to praise, and that skilled ability to use not only guitars, but the rarer instruments — dulcimer, harmonium — to support her sound, and the end result is an artist who is worthy of the highest praise and celebration.

So let us celebrate Cindy Kallet, as she helps us to celebrate the simple things. For all of us need more laughter and joy in honest work and play, more sea and spray in our lives. And this, more than anything, is the soundtrack to that life we dream of.

As a culture vulture, I have a particular fondness for the iconography of Hip Hop and Hardcore Rap; as a fan of trope and politic, I’ve always admired the complex rhyme and rhythm they bring to the table.

But I never really made a connection with hardcore rap as a cultural form. I’m an outsider on the streets; I can appreciate their gritty reality only as a sociologist can appreciate the poverty dynamic of his cityscape under the microscope. Though a six month stint in Boston’s inner city as a member of Americorps makes me somewhat more than an urban tourist, I make no claim that it gives me credibility to speak to the relative merits of, say, East Coast over West Coast style.

Even when I try to embrace the less hardcore side of the hip hop world, I know I’m just visiting. I’ve seen De La Soul and KRS-ONE in concert, but I felt awkward in the audience. I tried to write a rap lyric, but my friends were right to laugh at me. (Two words: iambic pentameter.)

But where the plastic lip-sync spectacle of Britney Spears (see All Folked Up, Vol. 1) is the polar opposite of folk, and where the lighter forms of Hip Hop are probably closer to R&B spoken-word poetry and Funk than anything else, I think Gangsta Rap can make a legitimate claim as street folk.

Sure, musically, anything built predominantly out of beatboxing, drum machines, and an atonal delivery is about as far from the singer-songwriter model as it gets; you’d be hard pressed to find a folk song with no melody to carry it. And the highly stylized, high-adrenalin street pose of the Gangsta lyric is hard to reconcile with the open-hearted communion that most associate with the folksinger in performance.

But the way that Gangsta Rap captures the authentic experience and emotion of an urban generation is most definitely “of the folk”. The collaborative process which typifies Rap and Hip-Hop performance – both onstage and with the audience – is very much in a vein with the traditional relationship between the folk performer and his audience. The use of sampled sound is a kind of cultural recycling which could arguably be compared to the tendency towards community ownership of traditional song in the folkworld. And if we make allowances for the differences in environment, both the storytelling and the narrative structure of hardcore rap forms turn out to be surprisingly consistent with the way folk has always used the natural world to speak for the inner life of the song’s subject.

To note that today’s songs are, one and all, truly beautiful in their own way is not to deny the beauty of the originals. The high tension between Nina Gordon‘s sweet voice and gentle acoustic guitar and the obscenity-laden lyric of NWA signature song Straight Out Of Compton merely reframes the deeply personal history and strong, complex emotion of the original, making it newly accessible. The etherial layers Ben Folds brings to Bitches Ain’t Shit only exposes the frustration family man Dr. Dre feels about the unavoidably mysogynistic pose of the streets to which he owes his life and livelihood.

Gin and Juice comes off wild and desperate in The Gourds’ juked up bluegrass, but wasn’t it always a song on the edge? Alt-punkers Dynamite Hack join in with a great, mellow acoustic take on NWA’s Boyz in the Hood (thanks to Adam, John, and Sledge for the recommendation). U Penn a capella group Off The Beat’s oft-mislabelled version of Gangsta’s Paradise is gorgeous and gospel, more tribute than interpretation.

Grandmaster Flash recorded The Message in 1982, long before urban blight turned to the gangsta life, but the weary note young alt-folkster Willy Mason brings to his recent rendition reminds us how prescient a warning the song really was. And the fact that the highest energies post-dorks Barenaked Ladies can bring to bear on Public Enemy’s political hip hop anthem Fight the Power fall far, far short of anything remotely resembling anger only reinforces just how far most of Canada really is from the streets of the hardcore world.

I seriously considered switching out today’s covers for the originals as an April Fools spoof. But the best hoaxes are subtle, almost beautiful in their believability. And each of these performances is something special, simultanously a hoax and a masterpiece, teetering on the edge of sincerity like a gangster caught between the rock of urban decay and the social pose that is, in the end, all that is left to matter. So mind the language, folks. And enjoy a short set of the folk of the street.

• Nina Gordon, Straight Out Of Compton (orig. NWA)
• Ben Folds, Bitches Ain’t Shit (orig. Dr. Dre)
• The Gourds, Gin ‘n Juice (orig. Snoop Dogg)
• Willy Mason, The Message (orig. Grandmaster Flash)
• Dynamite Hack, Boyz in the Hood (orig. NWA)
• Barenaked Ladies, Fight The Power (orig. Public Enemy)
• Rockapella Off The Beat, Gangsta’s Paradise (orig. Coolio)

Happy April Fools’ Day, everyone. We’ll be back late Wednesday, and again on Sunday, with a serious look at some real folk artists.