Christmas, (Re)Covered: Covers of and from Anais Mitchell
plus links to over 100 Holiday and Winter Coverfolk delights!
There’s something very folk about Christmas culture. Just one week into December, and the air is permeated with sounds of peace and love, comfort and joy that everybody knows, and can sing along to: on the radio; by the woodstove when the children are slowly preparing the living room for the tree; even at the mall, where no amount of commercialistic candor can muffle the startling thrill of a decent take on a piped in classic once again.
It’s gladdening to ring out old and new. And sure enough, plow through the archives, and you’ll find we’ve shared hundreds of Holiday coverfolk tracks and albums here at Cover Lay Down since our very first Christmas, ranging wide inside the festive folk tent, with sources from the secular to the scared, and the traditional to the modern. Today, we kick off the 2019 advent calendar with a long list of those previous features for your tree-side playlist pleasure…plus a pair of new Christmas covers of and from folkdarling Anais Mitchell to kick off the 2019 holiday season. Enjoy!
We featured the work of Vermont-bred, Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Anais Mitchell in 2017, on the cusp of acclaim and a Tony award for the Broadway folk opera bombshell Hadestown, and touched on the infrequent but always welcome works of Popcorn Behavior cofounder and Sam Amidon collaborator Thomas “Doveman” Bartlett much earlier, in our old blogspot home; here, in a track nominally released via an amazon.com exclusive years ago but not officially available outside of the commercial behemoth until this year, their collaboration soars, as two darlings of the post-traditional folk world take what well may be my favorite carol and drown it in the deep journey of sorrow and hope it deserves: joyful, joyful, with pulsing, ringing bells and a spectered wall of sound that rises and falls like the heartrushes of the season. It’s a tiny single gem: no small coda to Hadestown, or to Doveman’s 2008 tribute to the Footloose soundtrack, but a reminder that great artists make great art in doses small and grand alike, and celebrate it apace.
The oft-retro but always sweet harmonies of “Juno award winning pop-folk band” Good Lovelies remind my father of The Roches, especially in how they tend to pull in and out of their homophonic alignment; I find their voices more melodic, as my own tastes run, and might more readily compare them to the Haden Triplets or even The Staves. But although the album’s arrangements trend more towards the Andrews Sisters of old, Evergreen, the brand new miostly-covers Christmas collection from the trio – who we’ve also seen at the Holidays here before, thanks to a take on Gordon Lightfoot winter classic On A Winter’s Night which appeared on their 2015 holiday tour EP Winter’s Calling – runs a wide and delightful gamut, from a smooth, softly boogie-woogie Little Saint Nick to a truly swinging girl-group Jingle Bells straight out of a USO tour, alongside plenty of soft-to-upbeat drum-and-brass classics with jazz, rock, and country influence, and a quiet fireside version of several – including a song penned by Anais herself, originally released in 2007 on the very same album that presaged Hadestown with the track Hades and Persephone.
2017
2015
2013
2012
- Christmas Coverfolk, 2012: New Tracks from Old Friends
[individual tracks no longer available; download the mix here]
2011
2010
- I’ll Be Home For Christmas: Holiday Coverfolk 2010, Vol. 3 (Songs of holiday longing and loneliness)
2009
2008
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Category: Anais Mitchell, Holiday Coverfolk Comment »