Archive for September 2010


Townes, (Re)Covered: Riding The Range
(plus two new tracks from Isobel Campbell and friends!)

September 4th, 2010 — 11:45 am

It’s a (Re)Covered weekend, with Townes today, and more from the wide world of coverage to come tomorrow. Happy long weekend, and enjoy the tunes!





As noted in last week’s comments, we’re just days away from the official release date for Riding The Range: the Songs of Townes van Zandt, a 20-track benefit for the QE2 Activity Centre, which “specialises in providing day activities and activity holidays for people with disabilities”. If you’re a regular reader, you’ve heard of the 20-track compilation before – we’ve been watching it closely since last winter, when the project was still in its development phase – but I’d be remiss if I didn’t take one more opportunity to celebrate the impending release of a tribute album bound for glory and our year’s end top ten.

Riding The Range is the brainchild of two men: Phil Oates, the director of the QE2 Centre, and musician Michael Weston King, a masterful songwriter and performer in his own right whose song Riding The Range, as performed by Townes himself, gives title to the tribute. And both Oates and King deserve kudos, for their combined curatorial efforts have paid off in spades. Riding the Range contains a particularly strong mix of US and UK singer-songwriters and countryfolk troubadours, including new and newly-recast recordings from Cover Lay Down favorites Devon Sproule, Boo Hewerdine, Peter Case, Danny Schmidt, and Jeffrey Foucault. And though a number of the featured players were new to me, including Johnny Dowd, The Magic Numbers, and King himself, the resulting collection is consistently excellent, even breathtaking – no mean feat, considering the album’s length and diversity.

Previous nods to Riding The Range here at Cover Lay Down have included our recent Folk Couples feature, last month’s (Re)Covered, Vol. XVII, and last week’s topical post containing songs about shoes; each contains a track from the album, and you’re welcome to head back into the archives for a few bonus cuts. But pre-orders are finally open, so place your order today, and rest easy in the knowledge that by buying Riding The Range, you’re getting a great album, and helping a great cause to boot.



Seems the cowboy troubadour is due to haunt our (Re)Covered series ad infinitum; even without Riding on the Range on the cusp of greatness, we’ve already looked back twice upon our original Covered in Folk tribute to Townes Van Zandt. But this pair of Townes covers from Hawk, Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan‘s newest release, are just stunning. Snake Song is a dark alt-countryfolk masterpiece, but don’t miss Isobel’s duet with young second-generation singer-songwriter Willy Mason on No Place To Fall, a slow country waltz which plays masterfully off the tension between Isobel’s breathy soprano and Mason’s rich, echoey campfire baritone. The album is amazing, too.

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REPOST: Jeffrey Foucault Covers
Neil Young, Tom Petty, van Zandt, Chuck Berry, CCR, R.E.M. and more!

September 1st, 2010 — 10:03 pm

It’s a point of personal pride that in almost three years of existence, we’ve never missed a scheduled post here at Cover Lay Down. But tonight we’re as close as we’ve ever come, thanks to the sudden, time-consuming duality of both long days in the classroom and long nights at rehearsals for our local community theater production – and the heat wave we’re experiencing here in New England doesn’t help.

I had half a post written, but it looks like it’s not going to make it out of draft form ’til Sunday. Instead, here’s a revived feature from our first few months featuring one of my absolute folk artists, whose mellow, deeply moving catalog I’ve been listening to a bunch this week, just tryin’ to get myself get through the long days and shortened nights.


The best seat at the Green River Festival is in the shade along the ridge by the side stage, watching the motionless kiteflyers staring at the outfield sky. Because every year, there’s that one sidestage artist that comes out of nowhere, a voice and style fully formed, and — where did HE come from? — blows you away. You have no idea who you just missed at the main stage, and you don’t care.

Such was the year I discovered Jeffrey Foucault.

Foucault (pronounced foo-kalt) is a scruffy, shy, self-effacing country boy between songs. But once the guitar strum starts, in just a few notes he transforms into a bluesfolk singer songwriter with a mean slide hand and a voice like the weight of a thousand years. Seeing him live is like being present at a field recording. Even in electric form, as in his jangling juke joint blues cover of Chuck Berry classic Tulane, he has an authenticity that you just don’t hear more than a couple of times a generation.

As a musician, Foucault is also an intuitive partner. Foucault had come to the Green River Festival that summer as part of Redbird — a coverfolk trio, with previously-featured Peter Mulvey and coffeehouse folkstar (and eventual Foucault spouse) Kris Delmhorst. The way he used his scratchy Wisconsin blues voice to push and pull his partner’s voices like taffy, making something torn and beautiful, sweet and bitter both, out of the three artists’ disparate and distinctive styles, was truly extraordinary. Happily, this comes across in recording, too.

A sparse harmony-centered set, then, mostly B-sides and alternate takes, featuring Foucault solo, with Redbird, and with fellow alt-country folkster Mark Erelli: folks my age, all voices on the verge, part of a particular school of third wave coffeehouse folk that’s just now hitting their stride.





Pick up all of Jeffrey Foucault’s work since and including his stellar 2001 debut Miles From the Lightning. Redbird, too. And start booking those folk festivals now, folks: summer’s always just around the corner somewhere.


Today’s bonus coversongs:

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