Folk covers of familiar songs. Reimagined versions of folk songs.
Because in the folk tradition, music belongs to the community.
Folkfan since childhood, coverfan since my teens. In my other life, I teach. In summer, I staff folk festivals.
I also blog at Star Maker Machine.
All coverfolk provided solely for sampling purposes, for a short time, and in order to encourage people to buy music, directly from the artist wherever possible. Got questions? Contact me.
Just discovered here, and too awesome not to share immediately.
You can pick up acoustic blues-bop folk artist Dan Mills‘ catchy, refreshing new album Fiction in Photographs free if you’re willing to recommend it to a friend. Betcha will, too, after this.
We’ve wrangled a bit with the term “indie” here before, both in regards to its relationship with folk music, and as a source for coverage. Today, though, the term is merely a catch-all for coverage, loosely defined; after all, songsource being what it is, much modern music is neither folk nor fowl, neither pop nor pap, but that precious still-underground stuff which claims neither major label nor traditional affiliation.
We’ll have a tiny burst of American Popular Song come tomorrow, a fitting close to our thematic week. Let today be for those brave new and nu-acoustic souls covering the recent and the audiophilic, the rare and the undersung. Ladies and gentlemen: new artists, covering the indie world.
CLLCT is a growing online collective of musicians who give their music away – unlike, say, those small indie labels, which at least in theory have some profit margin in mind for all involved, or MySpace, which may be nominally a source for music, but feels less like a community every day. As you might expect, this means predominantly DIY music, from lo-fi bedroomy stuff to glitchy self-driven electronica, and a fair bit of collaboration from communally-minded musicians. A mixed bag, to say the least, but at least you know what you’re getting, and if you’ve got time to fritter – this IS the Internet, after all – it’s a fun, friendly place to pan for gold.
This recent Jonathan Richman tribute Baby, We Are Richman is a good example of what a collective like CLLCT can create: fluid in scope and contents, broad in tone and talent, it nonetheless brought me to the “cuddlecore ukulele folk pop” of Madeline Ava, whose lovely cover of I’m a Little Dinosaur went right to the top of my week’s playlist…immediately followed by her tender, hushed-yet-playful cover album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (except not really…), which is a full track-for-track solo uke-and-voice interpretation of exactly the Neutral Milk Hotel album you think it is. The title cut is clear and cute, and her Holland, 1945 makes for an especially sweet match ‘tween artist and song.
I rediscovered indie popsters Fanfarlo through inbox news of their upcoming iTunes Live Session EP; later, the cover I loved the most ended up on both new coverblog The Cover Lovers and, subsequently, the same Captain Obvious covers mixtape as the recently posted Rural Alberta Advantage cover of Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger. Which just goes to show you two things: like the other coverblogs in the sidebar to your right, both The Cover Lovers and Captain Obvious belong on your feedreader, and for all its evil unsharing DRM ways, sometimes, iTunes gets it right. Well, that, and “indie pop” at its acoustic best is another way of saying “sounds like folk to me”.
Blog darlings Fanfarlo provide a rich indiepop sound, with piano, fluid guitar, trumpet, pulsing strings, and harmonic goodness to spare; in production, they sound a bit like the more melodic, poppy side of Talking Heads or XTC, which is a fine thing indeed. But take away the studio, and they strip down beautifully. Their “live” cover of Tom Waits, which came out as part of their wonderfully-conceptualized advent calendar this past holiday season, provides a good sense of what that means without all the fanfare, plus a hint of Salvation Army band for good measure; other covers on the Fanfarlo video page, especially their recent “laptop sessions” take on Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, pull back even farther towards folk, to great and lasting effect. And their Bonnie “Prince” Billy cover is a hidden pseudo-americana-folk gem, Wilco-esque and majestic, crescendoing from sultry to triumphant and back in turns, coming through the wires ragged and gleeful, as befits lyric and sentiment.
Three video-ready artists close out our short set tonight.
Kina Grannis‘s version of Bon Iver’s Blood Bank doubles the falsetto-voiced tones of the original as a gorgeous harmonic choir over a forefront of strong singer-songwriter alto with more than a hint of Lori McKenna’s warm, welcoming tones. Her fireside Owl City cover is acoustic coffeehouse folkpop heaven; her most recent cover vid – a staircase-sung harmony trio take on a K’s Choice tune, sung with her sisters – is slow and rhythmic, a sleepsong of win.
Where did this girl come from? Oh, the usual: the LA-based YouTube megastar made a splash after winning a chance at network exposure during the Superbowl a few years back, and now rates hundreds of thousands of hits each time she posts a video. Grannis drops her debut, entitled Stairwells, on February 23; these – plus some lovely original self-released EPs, and a whole mess more delightful video coversongs from sources both classic and modern – certainly help fill the waiting void.
Indiepop artist Chantilly‘s debut disc Caught Light may be a bit uneven, but it has some great moments, especially on those tracks with keys and a solid beat, where the Brooklyn singer-songwriter comes across as full-bore chartpop with a dollop of soul, like a melodically-minded R&B star, albeit with a delicate sliding-tone vocal that softens the blow just enough for an old folkie.
Unfortunately for the string-minded, the guitar-driven songs on her debut disc are a bit too busy, and her voice a bit too buried under all that production. But Chantilly sent along a She and Him cover, and a nice take-down of Lady Gaga, at my request for coversongs, and both come off much, much stronger without the production, which speaks well of both Chantilly’s potential, and of her live shows to come as she begins to promote her debut.
I know the latter tune, like the K’s Choice cover above, truly belongs in our first round of this theme, but Chantilly’s a late addition to my roster, and like her guilty-pleasure popsongs, her solo couch videos are just oh so irresistible.
Finally, we have Baltimore artist Paul Masson, whose rough-hewn in-studio Animal Collective cover graced both inbox and the virtual pages of Slowcoustic in the past few months. I’ll admit, this cover took a few tries to grow on me – but it says something that I kept coming back, and the strained voice and earnestness of this cover really does serve the song exquisitely. Masson’s new self-titled EP has been compared to Neil Young and Hank Williams, Sr., and I can hear ‘em both – in the guitar, in the voice, in the tenderness, and in the sorrow. Try his new EP out at MySpace; I think you’ll hear it, too.
Welcome back to New Artists, Old Songs Week – a dedicated series of genre-related posts in which we turn our ears and hearts to those still-emerging artists whose coversongs have come our way in the past few weeks and months.
We kicked off our theme week Sunday with a host of new popcovers; today we keep the ball rolling with some of the best new covers of traditional and post-revival folk to come down the proverbial pike in a good long while. Enjoy…and don’t forget to come back at week’s end for a New Artists, Old Songs indie covers extravaganza!
Boing Boing favorite Sophie Madeleine is hardly underground, but then, I’m sure there’s plenty of folkwatchers whose online habits don’t dovetail with the aggregator crowd. And Madeleine’s worth sharing, with a crushably sweet, warm vibrato of a voice that just floats over those high uke strings.
This pair of coversongs below – one folkcover, and one bonus Irving Berlin classic I just couldn’t resist – comprise half of the free four-song covers EP The Sidetrack Sessions, recorded over the last year but not released in mp3 form until the last weeks of 2009; since then, her full-length Love. Life. Ukulele. has become available in a beautiful red-vinyl-and-download collector’s edition, or as a pay-what-you-want download only, and it’s a wonderful record as well. The full-length has found its way to Boing Boing, too, but other than a “new music crush” mention on a Slowcoustic end-of-year guest post, made nary a splash on the music blogs. I’m proud to be among the first to correct this oversight.
Like The Mercurials, who we featured several New Artists posts ago, Canadian folk/roots supergroup Bop Ensemble is a multi-generational trio, with two older established male artists taking on a younger female to fill out their sound, to great effect. In this case, Juno-winning folk legend Bill Bourne and Kerrville songwriting instructor Wyckham Porteous have joined forces with young female singer-bassist Jasmine Ohlhauser to create a full folk sound that rings with maturity, grit, and gentleness all at once, like a well- and warmly produced Tom Russell album, with shades of an acoustic Mark Knopfler session in the contrast between creaky voice and the lush sound of the guitars and bass.
Bop Ensemble’s debut Between Trains came out last summer, but it seems to have stayed underground until Keep The Coffee Coming found it just a week ago; thanks to Kat, I was in love by the end of the first verse of Buckets of Rain, and I think you’ll feel the same. Here’s the Dylan, and a fine take on a traditional spiritual for luck; head over to their MySpace page for a great low-slung Hot Tuna-esque cover of California Dreamin’, and some excellent originals to boot.
Berklee grad Laura Siersema comes from my neck of the woods, a fact we discovered by accident when engaging in the usual friendly artist-to-blogger exchange, but though hers is the kind of folk that I’ve often found a bit earnest, I’d still have shared this no matter where Laura lived. The slow, lush piano-driven popfolk production rings of mid-to-late Joni Mitchell or Rickie Lee Jones, while Siersema’s deliberately and formally phrased pop vocal style shows a fine performer in full control of a delicate instrument.
Something about this Peter Paul & Mary cover, especially, begs to be put on repeat. Pick up Talon of the Blackwater, and sample more at MySpace.
New Americana artists The Steel Wheels hail from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and you can hear it; their management sent word along via email just today, so I can’t claim to have heard the whole album, but they’ve shared stages with the right folks for their sound – Over The Rhine, Carrie Newcomer, and Adrienne Young and Little Sadie among them. And if lead songwriter Trent Wagler’s prayerful reworking of old traditional mountain fiddle tune Red Wing is any indication, The Steel Wheels are certainly going places, with apt comparison to Old Crow Medicine Show, Gillian Welch, and other new primitives on the line between old timey folk and something raw, new, and bluegrassy.
Try the tracks, pick up their brand spankin’ new disc Red Wing for a delicious cover of Working on a Building and some powerfully performed and well-written originals, and make sure to check their tour schedule so you can catch Trent and company on their way to fame and glory.
I’ve been sitting on this John D. Loudermilk cover, which came to fruition on the soundtrack to the 2009 film Beautiful Kate, since before Coverfreak posted it last September, and I wish I could remember where it came from. No matter: it came up on the shuffle last week, startling me once again with its rough, sad delicacy, and I was so songstruck, I figured it was better late than never.
The cover features Tex Perkins, who isn’t new at all, and Megan Washington, who is still in her mid-twenties; Tex is the award-winning Australian composer and songwriter who crafted the soundtrack, and young Megan’s a jazz-turned-alt-country countrywoman herself who seems to be going place fast, with an end-of-year win at the inaugural Vanda & Young Songwriting Competition in Australia, and a playful acoustic cover of Ross Wilson’s 1989 tune Bed of Nails being used as the theme for the brand new ABC show Bed of Roses.
Finally: I made a big deal of saying that Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah wasn’t really Leonard Cohen’s anymore, and implied that it was terribly, problematically overcovered, way back when the deep-voiced poet was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But that hasn’t stopped newcomers from continuing to try it on for size. In the last few weeks alone, I’ve received or uncovered no less than three folk takes on the song, each with its own charms, though none rivals the truly great and transformative covers of John Cale and Jeff Buckley.
Here’s the smorgasbord, with notes aforehand: that Detroit pop-rock singer-songwriter Steve Acho, who isn’t usually a folk musician at all, owes as much to Billy Joel as he does to John Cale here; that The Blue Eyed Shark drags the tune down into a maudlin emofolk which I like, but may jar the senses of older folkies; and that Adrian Heath, whose lo-fi kitchen-taped performance leads off our set, will donate $1 to the Red Cross Haiti relief effort for every FREE download of his newest album Want To Want To, which is a nice way to try out some tunes and support a good cause all at once.
…and just for fun, because I was blown away by Matt Morris‘ duet with Justin Timberlake on the recent Haiti Benefit, here’s their cover of the classic Cohen composition, too. Newcomer Morris seems pretty authentic for an ex-Mouseketeer; his YouTube version of The Beatles’ Help isn’t bad, either. My new guilty pleasure, perhaps.
Speaking of Haiti: it’s worth reminding you all that our Summer09 FolkFest Covers Bootleg giveaway, which offers a full set of 17 exclusive live coverfolk tracks to all who donate to Cover Lay Down before February 17th, is still on. 20% of each donation will go to support Doctors Without Borders, a group which is still struggling to help the sick, the injured, and the malnourished in Haiti; 20% more will go to our local foodbank, which is struggling in this economy.
We’ve raised over forty bucks for these worthy charity organizations so far; won’t you show a little love, and donate to the cause?
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