Category: New Artists Old Songs


New Artists, Old Songs:
Matt Ryd, Piney Gir, Marco Mahler & Fort deClare
cover Beyonce, Billy Idol, Mark Knopfler, Wilco, Stevie Wonder & more!

July 13th, 2010 — 04:48 pm

We’re in indieland today, featuring a handful of new and new-to-me artists and labels who might generally be overlooked by the typical folkfan. Which is sort of the point, really: our ongoing New Artists, Old Songs series has always aimed to introduce you to under-the-radar artists, and since radar is subjective, the acoustic side of the hipster canon is certainly fair game. Especially when even in-genre, these folks are still struggling to make a name for themselves. Here’s hoping, as always, that you’ll help spread the word.



This cover comes with perfect timing, given the recent heat wave – though truly, Loudon Wainwright III’s well-covered summer gem is as much about sarcastic self-loathing as it is about the titular activity. Its source: A Very Magistery Summer, this June’s digital-only label compilation from Michigan indiehouse Le Grand Magistery, which isn’t totally folk, but has a nice light, organic feel to it, with sounds echoing everything from the Kinks to the soft sounds of the summer of love, making for a great, melodic set of throwback poolside pop songs lightly coated with the sparsest dusting of indie hipster fuzz and credibility.

Amazon’s mp3 store has the usual 30 second samples; check ‘em out to see why I recommend this one as a full-album download instead of the usual song-by-song pick-and-choose. Here’s Kansas-born, UK-based singer-songwriter Piney Gir, whose midcentury alt-countrified incarnation and recent folkpop release The Yearling have also ticked our fancy, with the aforementioned cover and a rocking Americana b-side used in a 2007 Peugeot ad to tempt you further.



Marco Mahler‘s newest release Laptop Campfire Speed is an aptly named showcase for his electro-popfolk; I usually find such things to be more electro than folk, but the light touch on production here results in a sound both decidedly post-millennial and oddly delicate, full of atmospheric soundscapes that would sound equally at home in a songcircle or a modern shaman’s slowcoustic DJ set.

His take on James Alley Blues – no. 61 in the Harry Smith Anthology, and first recorded by New Orleans folkblues singer Richard Brown on the cusp of the nation’s first great depression – is haunting and layered, a fundamentally acoustic track with bells and slow syrupy underpinnings, and though it’s a little less poppy than some of the other tracks on the CD, many of which echo the softer side of the Eels, it’s no anomaly: taking on such an ancient tune with such modernized aplomb only proves Mahler’s grounding in the folkways. Check out the full release on bandcamp, and then purchase it to take it with you.



Matt Ryd has a solid handle on pursuing fame in the age of the Internet – he sends email blasts with regularity, and posts songs via Youtube throughout the year, all part of a calculated attempt to develop a fan base through leveraged sharing. His choices for coverage, too, implicate the Chi-town singer-songwriter as both a popfan and a bit of an attention whore, with tracks clearly designed to attract maximum linkability – Beyonce, Katy Perry, Billie Jean, Paula Abdul’s Straight Up, an electric-uke Lady Gaga cover, and more populate the list. And as one of the songs on his debut EP made it to Scrubs, the preeminent venue for his particular style of indie folkpop, it’s safe to say the strategy is working.

But don’t sell Ryd short just because he’s appealing to the masses. His most recent fan blast included this poppy arrangement of an oft-covered tune by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits fame, and it’s a perfect case study in how simple, deliberate arrangement and sparse instrumentation can transform an original into something deliciously sweet and new. Stick around for the overdubbed popchart harmonies, check out his YouTube channel, and then sign up for the Matt Ryd mailing list to get exclusive subscriber-only access to an amazing entire digital album’s worth of radio canon coverage that makes me smile.



Finally, folky experimentalists Fort deClare – a band named after nothing, apparently, though it has a nice faux-historical, pseudo-military hipster ring to it, doesn’t it? – send along a couple of playful, sparse, lo-fi covers of similarly familiar origin, along with virtually none of the other information bloggers usually work with.

Seriously: no pic, no sense of where they’re from…nothing. Just the covers, and the phrase “You can give them to people for free, if you want to.”

Good thing I took the absence of info as a challenge, and listened to the tracks all the way through. The three-song set took a while to grow on me, but it’s hard not to smile when the whistle and kazoo kick in on their banjo-led take on perennial indie insider nod-and-wink song Such Great Heights. There’s no album to purchase here yet, but head over to their MySpace page for their lazy samba take on Feist’s Gatekeeper, a few other solid folk-ambient bedroomfolk covers, and some drearily delightful originals – Resentment, especially, has a mellow strum and an endearing, slightly off-kilter sound, a drowned heroin dream that rises into the sun.

[Update, Wed 7:50 pm: just got a note from Sam of Fort deClare, who says the band is mostly just him, with some cowriting and live performance support from fellow bandmate Reid. Sam's based down in Virginia, and he's just turned fifteen - not bad for a high school boy!]

1,981 comments » | New Artists Old Songs

New Artists, Old Songs: 80′s Edition
(Covers of Toto, U2, Chris Isaak, New Order, John Mellencamp & more!)

April 3rd, 2010 — 08:15 pm





It’s a conceit of modern music critics and bloggers to approach songs and albums as objects, and songwriters and performers as producers of those objects. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Nominally, at least, our purpose is to provoke fandom and sales; from a critical perspective, the act of listening is best done as a focused activity, the better to isolate and describe those elements which make a particular song, album, performer or performance worthy of our limited attention, and our purchasing power.

But the coverfolk approach goes deeper by its very nature. Recasting or replaying familiar and deeply resonant songs evokes time and space, reminding us that, more often than not, in our daily lives, music comes to us as an integral part of an inhabitable environment, rather than as something discrete and objectifiable. To consider songs as part and parcel of our selves – historical, social, psychological, and otherwise – is to pursue the folkways: to recognize the power and the reality of song as tied as much to who we are as it is tied to what the song is. And it is that ethnographic approach, which asks us to re-couple song with its community and its incidence, which we aspire to here at Cover Lay Down.

That means that who I am, in particular – not just as a listener and writer with a particular taste, but as a being-in-time-and-space: a parent, a teacher, a male-gendered 37 year old who lives rurally and as connected to the earth and community as possible – is as vital to what we do here as the situation and histories of the folk-minded musicians who we feature. And so, as a child of the eighties, it’s a special delight to find the mailbox so full of those tunes whose lyrics and melodies live deeply inside me, embedded in my formative memories.

Today, as a mechanism for getting back on track after a short series of topical posts driven by exhaustion and fullness outside of my life as a coverblogger, we turn to that mailbox, and to a series of recent arrivals from new and newly-transformed artists whose coverage of that decade has delighted our senses in the last month or two. Ladies and Gentlemen: new artists, covering the 80′s.



We start today by breaking the mold a bit: I’ve featured The Infamous Stringdusters several times since our inception in 2007, most thoroughly back in 2008 upon the release of their second full-length, an eponymous live album that only cemented their rightful place atop the pantheon of young bluegrass bands. But although the six-man collaborative – who won awards for IBMA Album, Song and Emerging Artist of the Year for their 2006 debut Fork In the Road – is no longer “new”, their new album Things That Fly, due April 20th, represents a full transformation of their sound: a movement from typically crisp bluegrass to something dripping with reverb and high-production dynamics that will surely help to broaden their already stellar reputation as highly energetic, highly skilled craftsmen.

Setting new cover In God’s Country up against 3×5 – a John Mayer cover from Fork in the Road – provides an easy roadmap for the band’s evolution: both are stellar and strong, but the newer work comes across as more lush, vivid, and holistically expansive without sacrificing a whit of the good stuff. The rest of Things That Fly is much of the same, and comes highly recommended; thanks, as always, to Sugar Hill Records for granting permission for us to be the very first to stream this exclusive track.

  • The Infamous Stringdusters: In God’s Country (orig. U2)

    (from Things That Fly, due April 20, 2010)



This is the first attempt at acoustic music from Ryan Avery, a classically trained violinist who more typically performs “breakbeat electronica” under the moniker Chance’s End. But don’t hold that against Avery and his current performing partner and cowriter Emily Zisman (guitar and vox): the experiment is a great success, producing a delicious cover of an 80′s one-hitters’ tune long buried in the psyche that transforms the urgency of the the synth-heavy original into something lighter, yet somehow wistful and pensive, the lyrical longing revealed through the sparse and fluid tones of a late-night recording session. Fiddle-driven and simply arranged, yet utterly gorgeous. Check out YouTube for a simple but effective simulcast that reveals the production process.



File it under new-to-me: though it’s from a 2007 covers album, this delicious cover of Chris Isaak’s breakthrough tune from California-based Celtic/soul duo Gypsy Soul comes courtesy of an unsolicited reader recommendation, and I’m thrilled to have been introduced to their genre-busting work. The track in question starts off acoustic and slow, the sultry, warm vibrato voice of lead singer Cilette Swann supported by producer/musician Roman Morykit’s orchestral strings. But give it a minute: elements of alt-country and Americana licks, and the contemporary pop harmonies, crescendoes and tones of Sara McLachlan emerge as the plot thickens and builds.

The end result is a truly enjoyable journey, more melancholy than the original but equally vivid, new eyes guiding us through familiar territory. The album it comes from runs deep and wide, from contemporary folk to Celtic-tinged pop to dusty, growling Americana, a perfect mix for the modern folkfan who thinks they’ve heard it all. I’m planning on ordering a few copies, myself.



Emerging Vermont singer-songwriter Jer Coons‘ slow, sensitive take on the Jackson 5 classic I Want You Back was released free to the airwaves back in December, a blog-borne teaser to keep the buzz going after the release of his lovely debut Speak; in recent weeks, as part of his ongoing Sunsets with Jer YouTube series, we’ve also been blessed with his cover of Love Vigilantes, a New Order tune I remember fondly, both in the original and and, more recently, as performed by both countryfolk champion Laura Cantrell and indiefolk blog favorite Iron & Wine.

The full-court cover-press seems to be working: Coons is selling out venues on tour up and down the East Coast, and though I’m disappointed to have missed the chance to see him as he passed through Northampton recently, surely my loss is others’ gain. Recent gigs opening for John Oates – yes, really – who has recently begun to leverage his own success in the eighties towards a career as a solo folk musician grounded in the sounds of the early folk revivalists, provide an additional connection to this week’s theme, and merit a bonus track from Oates himself off a recently-featured tribute to the Greenwich Village scene.

Bonus tracks:



I’m embarrassed to note that the original album from which this next song comes was one of my first pre-adolescent purchases. But Ana Silvera‘s cover of Toto’s Rosanna is perfectly gorgeous, etherial and wistful and heartbreaking and broken, and worth sharing on its own merits; I’m pleased as punch to be the first to bring it to the web.

And now’s the time to check her out, as her star begins to rise. British-born but now relocated to Brooklyn, Silvera – an operatically trained singer-songwriter and pianist with a penchant for lush arrangements, classical literary and historical textual allusions, and an utterly stunning “nouvelle chanteuse” voice – has already made major waves in both the NYC and London/Cambridge scenes despite a comprehensive lack of recordings, most recently for a 2007 collaboration with UK freak folk sensation Yo Zushi, and work with several members of Antony and the Johnsons.

Silvera’s first single Hometown, a first release from a pending debut album that promises more of the same, dropped March 11, and I absolutely love it. the YouTube video and the track itself reveal strong shades of Regina Spektor, with piano-led orchestration, fluid vocal dynamics, and blue-sky rise-and-fall tones; reportedly, Silvera also covers No Me Quitte Pas in concert, a favorite of Spektor’s. But there’s also something of Maura O’Connell’s vocal prowess in this cover, and that’s a potent combination, indeed. Purchase Hometown now to whet your whistle, check out Wears The Trousers for more about Silvera herself, and keep an eye on her webspaces for the full release.



Johnny Gruber, who records under the name Knock ‘Em Alive, describes his work as a mix of “electro, power pop, and indie bubblegum rock”, and aptly so. His cover of Paper In Fire is truly a radio rock song, which puts it pretty far to the boundaries here, so I’ll keep the writing short – but I just couldn’t resist this Mellencamp remake, Gruber’s first-ever attempt at recording a cover, and an exclusive here at Cover Lay Down.



We close our celebration of all things 80′s today with a bang, and a return to the broad mountain-music roots of bluegrass. The band: Kingsley Flood; the sound, my favorite kind of ragged, rootsy, post-Americana/indie group vibe. Led by perceptive lyricist Naseem Khuri, the new quintet out of Boston’s Berklee scene eschews comparisons to Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, preferring to tout equally valid and exciting connections to a wider base of influences, from Joe Strummer and The Replacements to Calexico, Guthrie, and The Band. Me, I hear ‘em all, and the combination of quintessential American characters and settings, cohesive sound, bluegrass-and-then-some instrumentation, and high-energy hybridfolk arrangements is keeping me up nights grinnin’.

This live cover of Tom Waits’ Way Down In The Hole is solid, bluesy and bar-ready, but the crowd recording doesn’t do the full studio potency of the band justice. So for more originals from debut CD Dust Windows, which dropped today, head over to Front Porch Musings, who posted not one but four stellar tracks. I’m especially enamored of Cathedral Walls, and the poppy trumpet-driven melodic rawness of A Little Too Old seems ready to take the indie blogs by storm, but it’s all very, very good.





Missed yesterday’s teaser post? Then don’t forget to head on back for a deliciously sparse take on a New Kids On The Block classic!

1,404 comments » | 80s, New Artists Old Songs

New Artists, Old Songs Week Vol. 4:
Covers from The American Popular Songbook And Other Standards

February 6th, 2010 — 04:04 pm



26 year old Frank Fairfield plays old mountain bluegrass and country blues standards solo on banjo, guitar and fiddle; he’s been compared to Mississippi John Hurt, and played sessions with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Robin Peckinold of the Fleet Foxes, who has hosted Frank as a sideman, calls him a man “born out of time,” and sure enough, his recent Daytrotter session, his late November KEXP performance of Cumberland Gap, and this lovely sepia-toned video of Nine Pound Hammer come across like timeless field recordings:





Mack the Knife isn’t an American song by origin, to be sure; instead, it’s from Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, which debuted in Berlin on the cusp of the last Great Depression. But its introduction to the American canon by both Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin in the mid-to-late fifties has made it a popular choice for coverage in a number of genres, enough to win a Grammy for Ella Fitzgerald, and to cause American Idol supervillain Simon Cowell to call it the best song ever written.

Here, on the B-side of his brand new 7″ Newspress Scare, young Vikesh Kapoor breathes new life into the tune, stripping it down to a backporch fingerpicking croon for a folk audience, with great results. And it’s a great introduction to Kapoor, an up-and-coming folk musician whose ear for traditional lyric structure and performance is so resonant with tradition, and whose day-laborer subjects seem so universal, that I spent almost an hour trying to find the “origin” of several of the original tunes on his MySpace page, most notably the delicious ballads Willy Robbins and Down By The River.

Kapoor has been compared to both Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and rightfully so, but he also reminds me of both Davey Graham and more contemporary folk artists Josh Ritter and Joshua James. Newspress Scare drops February ninth on Good People records, and will come with a Midwestern and East Coast tour; Bostonians in our reading audience should plan to catch Vikesh Kapoor at Democracy Center on the 11th for his hometown record release show.



If “non-repetitive pop” musician and trained ethnomusicologist Scott Alexander‘s newest set of songs sound unpolished, it’s because after a sophomore effort with full production, he decided to release his follow-up with a more authentic, cheaper sound. The resulting money-themed 8-song album Scott Alexander Makes 7 or 8 Dollars includes a touch of guitar jangle, slippery one-take production, an interestingly experimental use of banjitar and other instruments, sweet silly lyrics, and a shaky bellow not unlike that of Jonathan Richman, with a hint of Nick Cave’s low, ragged vocal style.

But the cacophony works well, especially on the barebones acoustic Cure-esque Let’s Go Shopping, the fragile female-sung popfolk Penny Gumball, and this strange and ultimately broken-beauty cover. Sounds like he’d be worth catching live, too, and not just because Alexander makes a habit of baking fresh cookies for his audiences, not to mention giving them out free on the streets of his native Brooklyn. And though his songs are arguably anti-folk popsongs through and through, frankly, I had nowhere else to put this Neil Diamond cover this week.



Finally, though we already wrote about local indie pubfolkers The Points North when their label Grinding Tapes released their excellent cover of Auld Lang Syne just in time for New Years, their newest free release – a great, fluid, and mystical lo-fi indiefolk breakdown of Dylan’s Girl from the North Country, which comes via popular blog Ryan’s Smashing Life – only reminds us that this is a band to watch closely. The tension is palpable, the arrangement exquisite, and the accordions, drums, guitar and voice combine to create a sense of distance and longing that utterly transforms the song. Nice work, guys; can’t wait for more.



Thanks for joining us here at Cover Lay Down for our New Artists, Old Songs Week, folks. We’ll return Wednesday with more featured artists, songs, and songbooks from the best of the folkworld.

In the meanwhile, as always, please remember that our goal here at CLD is not just to fill up your iPod, but to connect artists to fans, and vice versa, that music might continue to flow unabated and well-supported. If you like what you hear, please do the performers we feature the honor of following up on links and purchase opportunities.

982 comments » | New Artists Old Songs

New Artists, Old Songs Week Vol. 3: Indie Covers
of Neutral Milk Hotel, Bon Iver, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, She & Him and more!

February 5th, 2010 — 08:58 pm

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.

1,834 comments » | New Artists Old Songs

New Artists, Old Songs Week Vol. 2: Folkcovers
(Covers of Peter Paul & Mary, Leonard Cohen, Dylan, tradfolk & more!)

February 2nd, 2010 — 10:13 pm

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?


Cover Lay Down exists first and foremost to help connect artists to fans. If you like what you hear, please do your part by following the links above to pursue purchase and other venues for support. Thanks!

1,121 comments » | New Artists Old Songs

New Artists, Old Songs Week Vol. 1: Popcovers
The songs of Bob Marley, Aha, Beck, Neil Young, Survivor & more!

January 30th, 2010 — 09:53 pm





Here’s how it works: become a brand-name niche-blogger, and people send you stuff. Most of it is way off topic; some of it is decent, but not ready for prime time. A bunch more has saturated the blogmarket so much already, there’s little point in posting it again. And a few songs just don’t tickle the fancy – after all, if every song worked for every blogger, you’d never know who to trust.

But there’s wheat in the chaff, if you’re willing to listen. And in the interest of serving our stated mission – connecting artists with fans, through interpretation of familiar song – I listen to all of it, trying to find the best of an otherwise undiscovered country, always with an ear out for what our ever-growing readership clamors to hear.

This week, in a series of genre-focused features (Top 40 rock and popsong covers today; folk covers, indie covers, and a few random oddities to follow as the week progresses), we turn our ears and hearts to the best of those emerging artists whose new works have come our way in the past few weeks and months. Though they remain under the radar, may these songs help these musicians claim their rightful places in the pantheon of modern music.


I found out about Kelley Ryan through a short review in Straight No Chaser, who called the one-time astroPuppees frontwoman’s solo debut Twist “the best female folk record of this short year” and compared it to the Indigo Girls, Linda Draper, and Mindy Smith. Intrigued, I promptly wrote off for the full album, only to discover that, if anything, SNC may have undersold Ryan’s subtle-yet-potent way with song and performance, missing equally valid comparisons with Janis Ian, Sandy Denny, Lisa Loeb and Kate Wolf.

Ryan, who has also been paying the bills collaborating with and selling songs to the likes of Marshall Crenshaw, aimed to make this record a true feminine folkpop manifesto, eschewing the masculine sounds of the electric guitar for warm loops and acoustic strings; the result is a masterstroke of femmefolk prowess, strong, seductive, and eminently accessible. This Beck cover is a perfect example: where the original evokes slow lazy summer, low and buzzing, Kelley’s cover is frozen winter incarnate, her beautifully clear voice, coupled with a slow electropop production, catching the song in crystalline ice without losing a whit of the power and beauty of the song itself.

Twist drops Feb 16, but until then, it is being sold digitally through Kelley Ryan’s website for just a single buck – so preview below, and then head on over for a great deal!



I wish I could remember how I heard about Acoustic Americana fiddler and guitarist Sadie Compton, whose bright red dreadlocks and heavily tattooed punk-rocker’s skin seem completely counter to her Tennessean drawl and the timeless mountain sensibility of her performance. But a search of inbox and feedreader alike reveal nothing, and Sadie’s web presence is sadly out-of-date. I am forced to conclude that Sadie’s music dropped out of the sky, and be grateful for such gifts: clearly, the universe loves me.

Much of the music on Compton’s MySpace page is sparse and broken, a fine mix of fiddle-led cajun blues and old time Appalachian music reminiscent of an old Lomax field recording; listen with your eyes closed, and you can almost make out the ancient backporch countrywoman she channels through her music. But the lazy sixties folkpop sound of Compton’s Three Dog Night cover, complete with banjo and sweetly ragged harmonies, is an equally delightful antidote to the winter blues, while her Hank Williams cover just has to be heard to be believed. New album Black is the Color was supposed to be released last year, but I can find neither hide nor hair of evidence; if anyone out there can help me out here, I’d be eternally grateful.



Backwater-born Australian singer-songwriter Emily Barker has enjoyed a bit of press recently in the rest of the English-speaking word, thanks to the folks at the BBC, who selected a version of her song Nostalgia as the theme to the award-winning series Wallander. But Americans are notoriously slow to pick up on folk beyond our borders, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’ve just discovered this countryfolk chanteuse despite her long history in BBC-land, a record which includes several years touring and recording in the UK as part of folk group The Low Country, and her 2007 solo debut Photos.Fires.Fables., which provides a solid introduction to the able, twang-voiced songwriter, framing her performance as tender and wry, and reminiscent of fellow countrymen The Waifs.

Barker and her all-girl Aussie band The Red Clay Halo, who lend cello, fiddle, accordian, flute and four-part harmonies to Barker’s guitar-based singer-songwriter fare, originally recorded Nostalgia for their intimate 2008 group debut Despite The Snow, which led to opening slots for the likes of Jose Gonzalez, The Waifs, and Mary Gauthier. Since then, there’s not been much in the way of new recordings – the single for the new version of Nostalgia doesn’t come out until Feb. 8th – but their press kit included this gentle recent take on Neil Young’s Look Out For My Love, and it’s a wonderful showcase for Emily’s warbly alto and sensitive songwriting, and the band’s lush, modern take on the british tradfolk sound.



Ghana-born, Ontario-based “Urban Folk” artist Kae Sun pulls from a vast cultural stew – a childhood in the church choir, his father’s soul records, traditional folk chants, and the reggae and hip-hop so prevalent on Ghana radio – emerging with an evolving hybrid sound that teeters exquisitely on the line between fluid worldbeat and intimate songwriter fare. This soulful cover falls more solidly on the acoustic side than the vast majority of his recent album Lion on a Leash, but the combination of reggaepop origin and subtle folk performance are lovely, and given Sun’s preference for acoustic performance, provide an apt entry for any folklistener willing to follow the thread to African continent and beyond.


Nominally an indie-rock band, The Rural Alberta Advantage – yes, they’re from Canada, too – are nevertheless a folk-minded bunch on paper, mining the experience of their own rural small-town upbringing to craft driving, guitar-heavy songs which play just fine as folk once the reverb fades a bit. 2008 debut Hometowns, which contains some great hipster dancetracks, was all over the blogs; this tune, which layers earnest alt-whine vocals over a play-it-straight Jose Gonzalez guitar-trance approach to a classic tongue-in-cheek cover favorite, was released as a B-side mid-January; I picked it up via Captain Obvious, whose January Covers Mixtape also includes a few tracks from past and recent posts on Cover Lay Down.



Finally, eminently cute folk-uke-centered duo Shiny and the Spoon came together in 2008 after a chance meeting at a folk festival. Since then, the gleeful couple has gone on to record several YouTube videos, mostly covers, and most notably this playful cover of Aha classic Take on Me, which netted over 70,000 views in its first few months – and, like many surprise YouTube sensations, they’ve now moved on to record their first EP, hoping to cash in on the cute cachet. The EP will drop ASAP on CD Baby and iTunes; keep abreast of the news via their YouTube channel.



Want to hear more? As always, Cover Lay Down exists first and foremost to promote the spread and survival of folk music. If you like what you hear, follow links above to support the artists herein: buy the album, see the concert, and spread the word.

And don’t forget to return Tuesday night for the second installment in our New Artists, Old Songs Week extravaganza! Still to come: new takes on classic and revival-era folk songs, a whole slew of acoustic indiecovers, and a few surprises from the American Popular Songbook.

2,402 comments » | New Artists Old Songs

New Artists, Holiday Songs:
Seasonal favorites from the newly-discovered

December 15th, 2009 — 11:55 pm





I have mixed feelings about Christmas. Having grown up Jewish, I always felt a little besieged by what I long considered other peoples’ holiday. These days, as a professional culture vulture and cohost to a humanistic Jewnitarian household, the commercialism grates on me, though the threat of otherness has faded. I’ve even learned to live with the constant name-check of someone else’s savior which permeates even the most innocuous of shopping mall soundtracks.

But I have always loved the trappings of the holidays: the garish colorful world of lights and decorations everywhere, the smell of green pine that emanates from entryways, and most especially the universality of Christmas music, and the way it transforms the culture – the way songs of peace and joy are on the lips and ears of everyone around, as if the world were about to burst into song at any moment, and the crowd right along with it.

Of course, one of the great joys of Christmas is the way it brings out the coverfolk like nobody’s business. And along with new and familiar carols played out by the beloved artists we celebrate here with regularity, there’s something especially wonderous about the way new artists emerge from the woodwork and the mailbox, the blogs and the fanbase, carols in hand, to introduce themselves at holiday time.

Which is to say: I had quite literally heard of none of these artists just a month ago. And now, look – here they are, bearing gifts.


Merry Ellen Kirk plays earnest music, predominantly pianofolk, some of which sounds like Regina Spektor or Imogen Heap, and some which is a bit diva-poppish for my ears – check out her cover of O Holy Night featuring David Ask to see what I mean – but her acoustic-guitar driven version of Do You Hear What I Hear offers a clear, perfectly produced venue for her whispered vocal style, and her version of The Christmas Song brings a warm, quiet, delicate sound and sensibility to an old chestnut. You can get a full copy of Merry Ellen’s Christmas EP on a “tell five friends or pay what you want” basis at Noise Trade, and all of this and more can be heard on her website; sign up for her mailing list, and you’ll also get a beautiful, haunting a capella rendition of O Come O Come Emmanuel.



I picked up a Paste Digital VIP subscription a few months ago, mostly for the free monthly albums and samplers; at under three bucks a month, it’s a steal well worth sharing. This lovely atmospheric slowsong by indie up-and-comers The Rocketboys was a Paste freebie just this week, and I couldn’t resist: the combination of its full-fledged Sufjan-esque holiday production and the lead singer’s slightly nasal vocals really hits the spot.


Indie-folk band Desert Noises is known, if at all, for their gorgeous harmonies, which in my opinion gives them an edge on those Monsters of Folk guys any day; they also get serious cred for one of their members’ recent tour with Joshua James, but now that they’re back in the studio, they stand their own ground majestically, too. Proof of concept: the pace and build of this yuletide gospel hymn, which provides a stellar antidote to the perfect polish of the pop set this time of year. Thanks to 21st and Ivy, where there’s a new Yuletide Download to be had every day until Christmas, for passing this one along.


Like so many sensitive-yet-rocking singer-songwriters these days, NYC’s Neil Nathan is making waves via the small screen; when he sent along news of this Christmas cover and the accompanying “loony video”, he also noted that he’s had “a great year in folky covers”, citing the appearance of his cover of ELO The Move’s Do Ya on the Californication soundtrack and the release of his covers EP Songsmiths as evidence. And sure enough, like the rest of Nathan’s work, this one grows on you, if you let it. So let it.


I found Caravan of Thieves on one of those everpresent label samplers that clog the mailbox this time of year. But discovering hidden gems is why I listen to such things: the gypsy guitar and fiddle tones of this cover lend a playful swing and an edgy warmth to a song too often played as cloying and over-vamped. Please Please Me tourmate and solo singer-songwriter Jessie Torrisi‘s take on Alvin and the Chipmunk’s Christmas Don’t Be Late is a weird, warbly slice of Americana pie. And though – folkies beware – it’s got some sweet hard rock in it, the rest of this year’s XO For The Holidays sampler isn’t bad overall, either.


I’ve been looking for a chance to introduce y’all to British alternacoustic songstress Betty Steeles ever since she sent along a gorgeously hushed, magically layered rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye, a MySpace track which has fast become perhaps my favorite cover of the song ever, which is really saying something. But Betty’s a smart girl, and – noticing that I’m pretty much stuck in the Christmas groove right now – decided to jump the gun with this Cover Lay Down exclusive, a tinkly electrofolkpop “holiday take” on Louis Armstrong fave What a Wonderful World. And I’m in heaven.


Jim Hanft isn’t so new as all that here at Cover Lay Down; we first featured his cover of The Beach Boys’ Don’t Worry Baby in our New Artists series back in midsummer, making him an alumni of the feature. But I still love his particular brand of well-crafted “soundtrack-ready singer-songwriter bedroom folk”, so I’ve decided that the addition of Hanft’s “fulltime harmonist” Samantha Yonack to this classic duet allows it in on a “New Artists” technicality – which makes me happy, as theirs is a marvelous transformation of the tune into a playful-yet-soft acoustic coffeehouse number, complete with bells on.


LA “guitarist turned singer-songwriter” John Dissed, who offers a private collection of 25 coversongs free to anyone who joins his mailing list, has fast become a darling of the coverblogs, having in recent months appeared on both Cover Me’s Cover Commissions and Coverville’s gloriously vibrant and entirely free Spinal Tap Tribute Compilation [yes, I said Spinal Tap Tribute Compilation]. The former, a solid cover of T Rex’s Bang A Gong, is off topic, albeit worth the visit. The latter, however, is right on and relevant.



Remember, folks: Cover Lay Down exists to promote artists first and foremost. If you like what you hear, please follow purchase and website links above to learn more about the artists we promote, and consider purchasing CDs and downloadables for yourself and your friends and family. Thanks, and Happy Hanukkah!

1,276 comments » | Holiday Coverfolk, New Artists Old Songs

On The Commodification of Folk:
Billboard Adds Folk Charts; Public Radio Drops Folk Programming.

November 22nd, 2009 — 07:42 pm





Facts first: chartmaker Billboard announced last week that starting with their Dec 5th issue, they will be adding a Folk Albums chart to their sales-tracking activities. Snip:

…The Nielsen SoundScan-based survey will house new releases from traditional folk artists such Joan Baez, Ani DiFranco and Monsters of Folk, as well as appropriate titles by acoustic-based singer-songwriters such as Carly Simon, Rosanne Cash and Joshua Radin. The 15-position chart, to be managed by Gary Trust, will run periodically in print and appear weekly on billboard.biz and billboard.com.

“Billboard’s Folk Albums chart will reflect retail activity of a niche genre with a rich history. Folk artists are among the most insightful songwriters and intimate storytellers in music, and we’re proud to offer a chart highlighting their sales achievements,” says Trust…

Noble language, that. But even at first glance, Billboard’s inclusion criteria is oddly suspect. Though I happily welcome Radin, Cash, and DiFranco, all of whom we’ve included in our pages recently, I doubt most of us count Carly Simon as folk; similarly, referring to popular indie collaborative Monsters of Folk as “traditional folk artists” seems to indicate a comprehensive disconnect between the modern moniker “folk” and both its historical meaning and its modern sonic norms.

Still, the news here seems initially heartening, if a bit late in the game. Billboard deserves some credit for their recognition of the staying power and market measure of the modern folkscene; it may have taken over half a decade for Billboard to acknowledge the genre, but it’s hard to imagine that having these albums off the popcharts and on their own page will not have some positive effects. If nothing else, the change in chart recognition validates folk in ways which – for better or worse – will likely bring greater awareness of the term and those who follow it to a larger audience, and that’s not nothin’.


But the mainstreaming of folk comes with its darkside, for sure. Here in New England, even as communities devote themselves to celebration of folk’s past, and even as most folk clubs continue to survive in the midst of a drawn-out recession, local folk radio is slowly dying out.

Recent news of programming changes at once-seminal folk and roots vehicle WGBH has drawn severe and justified concern from local folkfans, artists, and promoters. And though we here at CLD think of folk as a much broader tent, WGBH’s recent insistence that “the Boston audience for folk and blues will continue to be served by other stations, particularly WUMB“, has offended folk purists who insist that the AAA format which WUMB adopted in 2007 leaves little room for either older folk artists such as Seeger and Guthrie, or the modern inheritors of such traditional forms.

In this light, we might also suggest that Billboard’s move carries a significant risk, in that it changes the tone and tenor of folk marketing to a more commercial-oriented one – or, more accurately, that it confirms already-ongoing changes to the perceived relationship between folk and mass culture, just as the mainstreaming of folk threatens to leave behind the vast majority of what folk is.

If so, then our lot must not be despair, but action.


Not all action is well-plied, however. In this case, some people have responded to the abovementioned c-change by pushing back against public radio, and while I admire the urge, I cannot condone the approach. For better or worse, the current financial model of public radio depends on a substantive listenership willing to donate; it is through those donations that public radio learns what its audience desires, and if those running the stations have learned from past fund drives that their listenership is no longer willing to support folk and blues programming, then it’s hard to justify arguing that they should run themselves into the ground to serve a minority.

Instead, I maintain that, as the modern fragmentation of microcultures and audiences owes much of its current existence to digital media, so must digital media take up the mantle of resolution. And though local media may not be able to sustain sufficient interest in folk programming to support themselves, if there is enough of a global audience present to support traditional folkforms – and I believe there is – then it is to that global audience that we must turn.

Specifically, I believe that blogs such as ours, and the ones we’ve mentioned recently in these pages, must work harder to carry the underground, artist-centric nature of folk forward, through writing, sharing, house concert hosting, and other activities – lest the “Billboardization” of folk transform the conceit of “folk” into a mere marketing designation in the popular mind, thus pushing back against the very power of the folkways, and of the diversity of those artists who quite legitimately claim not just its sales designation, but its history and sentiment.

For if the new mainstreaming of folk music which Billboard’s changes represents does not trickle down to all folk artists, regardless of sales power, in the form of renewed interest and attention – and I predict it will not – it becomes even more necessary for us to celebrate those who would target a more honest and human connection than chart sales and mass appeal.

Today, then, in honor and anticipation of these changes, and in recognition of the pitfalls and perils which they embody, we present yet another collection of new and recent work from a few less-than-mainstream artists just recently come to our attention.

These artists may not be on the top of the charts, and maybe they don’t belong there. But each, in their own way, deserves your attention, too. And in the end, I think you’ll find that their connection to the folk world is undeniable, though they come from all corners of the rich tapestry we call folk.



Left With Pictures performs heartwarming folk with a nod to several folkforms; this Richard Thompson cover, for example, combines singer-songwriter guitar, delicate nufolk vocal mannerisms, british folkrock instrumentation, and sea shanty harmonies to great effect. The band calls its work “chamber pop”, and it’s true that it has a touch of the indie sentiment which follows the designation, but I challenge you to call this anything but folk at heart.

If you like it, check out the video of them performing the song on the Black Cab Sessions, and then try on their brand new debut Beyond Our Means for more.



Queerfolk singer-songwriter Lucas Miré contacted me in response to our recent post on Kasey Chambers, offering to share a few more rarities he had gathered; I’m indebted to him for those novelties, which will surely show up in some future (Re)Covered feature, but equally grateful for his inclusion of several of his own covers in the mix, all of which turned out to be wonderful, delicate, richly layered, occasionally dischordant bedroom-folk takes on some surprisingly successful choices from the pop and folkworld.

Lucas has recently finished working on his second album, Never Regret The Night, and is offering free streams and full-album downloads for a name-your-price deal over at his bandcamp page; it comes highly recommended, especially for fans of Girlyman, We’re About Nine, and other alternately joyous and poignant folk festival fare.



I found the quirky anti-folk of NYC-based singer-songwriter and comic book artist Jeffrey Lewis through the recent recommendation of several readers, most notably for his 2007 tribute album to the punk band Crass, which sets the fast-paced songs against a tinkle of relatively gentle guitar, harmonica, harmonies and bells without losing a bit of their original energy. Lewis’ combination of croaky-voiced humor and finger-picking style is eminently charming, and after several weeks track-gathering I’ve amassed quite the collection of covers and originals. Here’s two favorites:



Rock Plaza Central made a splash in the blogworld a few years back with their cover of Justin Timberlake’s Sexyback, which brought bongos, subtle off-beat guitar chords, a flowing fiddle, and their lead singer’s uniquely broken emo whine to the table in style; since then, the Canadian indie band has become a darling of the Daytrotter and Pitchfork set, but despite a Myspace designation as a bluegrass and Americana band, most folkfans would be easily excused for assuming their coverage and delicacy were merely a one-shot reversal. Until now, that is: their recent release of an otherwise extracurricular cover of Dylan’s I Want You reveals a consistent sound with deeper folkroots than previously assumed, perfect for fans of The Decembrists, Clem Snide, or Gandalf Murphy and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams.



The sounds of vaudeville and the wry humor of filk music feature most prevalent in Altogether Now (Birds Bees Flowers Trees), the U.S. debut release from the UK’s Patrick & Eugene – along with banjos, ukuleles, whistles, and other instruments traditionally found in the world we watch on your behalf. Put it all together in this particular way and it’s barely folk, but the polka rhythms of this cover of Kylie Minogue hit Can’t Get You Out Of My Head speak to a grounding in a diverse set of cultural folkforms, and overwhelm any hint of morning commute marginalia which are so often the inevitable lot of such fun romps through the popworld.



I cannot for the life of me remember where I came across “rediscovery artist” David Potts-Dupre, who in his fifties has rejuvenated his career the hard way, coming up through the ranks of political gatherings and coffeehouse folk via Maryland-based musical collaborative TakomaZone. The countrygrass/ Americana Wilco cover which dropped as if from the sky comes from last year’s The Preacher and the Teacher, which represents the culmination of that journey. Like many of the originals and other covers on that substantive album, it reveals a troubadors sentiment and a tradfolker’s heart, and though a few of the tracks on the album are a bit earnest for my taste, despite both song and its performer’s advanced age, it deserves to be shared and celebrated.



Oh, and then there’s this current folkrock tour finale from Irish singer-songwriter and one-time Damien Rice back-up singer Lisa Hannigan, which speaks for itself:



We’re proud to do our part to keep the folkworld honest, broad, and rich by continuing to present and support a diverse set of artists, old and new, who claim the folk designation as their own. And we plan on doing so every Wednesday and Sunday for as long as we have strength to carry on.

But if you believe, as I do, that all branches of folk are worth preserving, then I call on you to do your part, too. DONATE to blogs which you feel serve the broader definition of folk, book tickets for summer festivals in advance, make it a point to support local folk venues, coffeehouses, and house concerts in your area – in Massachusetts, that would include such spaces as Passim and the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, the Iron Horse in Northampton, and the Notlob concert series in the Greater Boston area – and, most importantly, consider purchasing the works of those listed proudly in these pages and others.


For further reading, and to support the folk community writ large in all its incarnations, from roots and Americana to nufolk, we also recommend the following blogs:

Tell ‘em boyhowdy sent you.

1,682 comments » | New Artists Old Songs, Tradfolk

Old and in the Groove:
New coverfolk from late-blooming artists

September 27th, 2009 — 01:46 pm





The folkworld is rich with young artists these days, and with their heroes and forebears; head out to any major summer festival, and you’ll find the full mix, from long-established sixties folkies to mid-career singer-songwriters my own age, from second- and third-album folkies in their late twenties working hard to prove that they have the stamina and talent to sustain the buzz to emerging newbies who tend towards the young and the restless.

Less common, however, is the musician or band that breaks into the scene later in life. It’s an oft unspoken truism in music that starting out is for the young. But even as the mix of voices is new to us, artists who emerge in the prime of their lives also provide an audible comfort — with their natural abilities, with the music, and with the material — which can only come with maturity.

Today, we feature three relatively new bands comprised of older musicians who have only recently banded together. All sport a touch of grey, which can be a disadvantage in any market. All trend towards different ends of the folk spectrum, as befits our broad definition of the folkworld here on Cover Lay Down. But all share a rare combination of early career optimism and that confidence which results from years of self-reflection and self-awareness. The result is a diverse trio of new artists with nothing to prove, making a gentle sort of music that aims not for pop-production perfection, but something deeper and more authentic, and eminently folk.



The two married couples who comprise the aptly-named Return to the Dream came together after years in the business found them each losing sight of the dreams and inspiration that had first led them to music. The result of this reexamined life: a quartet that produces gentle, uncomplicated folk steeped in the earnest, spiritual optimism of the folk school of Peter Mayer or Kallet, Epstein and Cicone, with a light touch on the acoustic guitar-driven instrumentation, honest male voices alongside female lead and harmony vocals that recall the best vibrato-laden tunes from a mid-career Judy Collins or Maria Muldaur, and lyrics which primarily deal with quiet themes of deep understanding and deep connection to love, community, and the world at large.

Their choices of covers on the album fit neatly within this worldview, most especially their light-handed treatment of Blind Faith classic Can’t Find My Way Home, which finds new life here as an honest reflection on the journey that brought their well-penned inspirational originals and rediscovery of the core of folk music to life. Their self-titled and self-released debut Return to the Dream drops September 30th, and comes highly recommended.



Melbourne-based trio The Mercurials was formed when long-time blues and rock collaborators Mark Ferrie and Andrew Pendlebury, looking for a new sound, found Israeli cellist and vocalist Adi Sappir busking outside the subway in 2004. Since then, the band has released two albums, with a third still at the pressing plant, and the slow, bluesy acoustic folk rock which they have adopted shows both an unsurprising maturity and a genuine pleasure in making music which lets each note linger, a pulsing, fluid songcraft which washes over the listener like slow waves.

There’s shades of the languid, atmospheric best of the Cowboy Junkies in their covers of Nick Drake and Bob Marley, something of the ragged glory of an acoustic Lou Reed in the interplay of cello and ageless vocals on Dylan’s You Angel You (found on their out-of-print debut; available for free on their downloads page), and a mellow yet focused vibe throughout both covers and originals here. Redemption Song will appear on upcoming Mercurials album Silver and Gold, which drops via their website on Oct. 11, and seems well worth the wait; in the meantime, head over to pick up their all-originals 2008 album Tangents and a few choice downloadables.



The loose acoustic gypsy jazz swing of Gumbo, newly discovered by fledgling label Wild Rose Artists, includes clarinet and flute to compliment the guitar and bass, but their sound nonetheless sports shades of Hot Tuna or Garcia and Grisman in their best and most mellow later days, pushing ragged glory from a series of well-penned originals and classic pre-war tunes. Upbeat and joyous, more than anything else, this trio with over a century of experience under its collective belt sounds happy to be here, still making new records after years of work with other ensembles, still around to celebrate the world through fine “vintage Americana” music.

Gumbo’s debut album Never Tell Me To Quit, which can be sampled in its entirety over at internet radio-on-call delivery system Jango, is built around the original songwriting of guitarist and lead vocalist Sid Beam, who played in seminal folk group Magpie in the mid seventies, and the experienced support of wind instrumentalist and vocalist Joe Casprowiak and the jazz-trained bass-and-vocalist David Fournier. Like Sid’s originals, the album closer, a hugely fun cover of American blues and jazz standard Happy Feet, partners exceptional material with outstanding delivery; here, on this and two other songs at least a generation older than I am, the stew of experience and musicianship that is Gumbo shows its chops, proving that you’re never too old to come back to the fold, the fore, or the folk.



Cover Lay Down publishes new coverfolk sets and features Wednesdays, Sundays, and the occasional otherday. Coming soon: songs featuring the number nine.

1,699 comments » | New Artists Old Songs

Covered in Folk: Elvis, Part 1
(Recently discovered covers from highly recommended artists)

September 16th, 2009 — 10:30 pm





Typically, in our regularly recurring Covered in Folk feature, we enumerate the impact a particular artist has had on culture, and follow that with a carefully compiled list of folk covers from that artists’ songbook. Tonight, we break the mold, turning to the songs made famous by Elvis Presley in order to tout a few artists whose new and recent releases or rediscovered gems have been at the top of my playlist for the last few weeks for one reason or another.

One day, perhaps, we’ll feature a more traditional look at Elvis, with a broader look at some of the covers which have peppered the genre landscape since the man who brought black rhythm and the sparkly jumpsuit to white culture made his mark on modern music. Until then, I make no apologies for the ulterior motive. Ladies and Gentlemen: The King himself, covered in folk.


I received Waiting for the Dawn, the new album from Childsplay, in the mail mid-summer, promptly put it on rotation in the car, and loved it so much I never brought it inside to run it through the computer to share with you all. But this is music that deserves to be heard. Featuring a veritable who’s who of the Boston neofolk scene, many of whom we’ve featured here before — Sam Amidon, Lissa Schenckenburger, and Crooked Still lead singer Aoife O’Donovan among them — the fiddle-centered ensemble is built around a simple but honorable premise: all the players use instruments made by local craftsman Bob Childs. And, I should add, they all play exceedingly well, both together and as solo artists.

The newest album, which revolves around rich ensemble pieces that nonetheless manage to sound light-hearted, folky and smooth, includes several traditional reels and tradtunes, and a couple of covers; most balance Aoife’s sweet, breathy voice with a full string-led sound, and the result is nearly heavenly. Since the U2 cover made the rounds when the album was first released, here’s the lovely, delicate Elvis cover that closes the album, plus this totally non-Elvis bonus track: a gorgeous cover of Steve Earle’s Christmas in Washington from the same album. Buy Childsplay here, and fill your ears with joy.



My wee one is a girly girl by nature: pink is her preference, and princesses her thing. For this and other reasons, I tend to be in the other room during movie time, especially when the Disney-watching grows thick on the ground. But I couldn’t help but wander in the other day when I heard the unmistakable voice of Norah Jones at her mellow best emerging from the playroom.

I cannot recommend The Princess Diaries 2 to any but the most hardcore of Julie Andrews or Anne Hathaway fans, nor can I in good conscience promote any soundtrack album with both Lindsay Lohan and Kelly Clarkson on it to my regular readership. But this track is well worth passing along.


I’ve been meaning to fill our collective ears with Ingrid Michaelson‘s catalog for a while, ever since Girls and Boys got such high praise on the blog rounds upon its 2006 release. I finally got a taste of what I was missing when I was totally blown away by her new album Everybody, which I won in a contest hosted by fave blog Mainstream Isn’t So Bad just about the time the album hit number one on the iTunes charts.

The new album is cover-free, but I honestly haven’t stopped listening to it since the moment it arrived in the mail; its perfect indie folkpop is catchy as hell from beginning to end, and I’m exceedingly glad to have any opportunity to tout it. Here’s a live Elvis cover from her 2008 release Be OK to tempt you into buying the whole damn catalog, starting with Everybody.


Most folks don’t think of the public library as a source for music, which means most folks are missing out: though selection can vary widely from one to another, I’ve found that the average library includes at least a few hidden gems, quite probably ordered by some unknown benefactor librarian with a love for the acoustic stuff. Luckily, we’re connected to a pretty large system of library branches here in these rural, nearly radio-free environs, and I’ve learned to check the stacks when we drive through nearby towns.

Most recently, a trip to Northampton unearthed Irish singer-songwriter Luka Bloom‘s back catalog, which included this swirling, jangly, almost mystical long-forgotten turn on a well-covered Elvis tune. Acoustic Motorbike, the album from whence it comes, seems to be out of print, but if your local library doesn’t have it, you can and should pick up the bulk of his back catalog here.



We have shuffle to thank for this next track, which pairs Brazilian artist Seu Jorge‘s gentle acoustic guitarplay and that round, mesmerizing accent with a shuffling brushbeat and squeaky reed echo. I honestly can’t even remember how this perfect slowdance came to me originally; all I know is it’s there, in my head again, after floating from the speakers this past weekend in the midst of a lazy afternoon.


It’s a tough time of year for me to hit the local clubs and stages, what with the school year finally in full swing, the kids running us ragged with swimming lessons and other afterschool activities, and a pair of tiny kittens darting for freedom each time I open the door. Missing folk trio Red Molly last Friday in nearby East Hartford while we headed north instead to retrieve said kittens was just one of many lost opportunities in recent weeks. Though consoling myself with their recorded work isn’t the same, rediscovering this summery countryfolk take on their self-titled debut EP did put a smile on my face, and that’s not nothin’.



Keeping up with the blogs is always worth doing, and I’m not just tooting my own horn. For example: thanks to his quirky, well-honed tastebuds, host Jamie of Fong Songs has been good about keeping the tinkly tones of the PoZitive Orchestra on our radar, most recently checking in to let us know that although there’s nothing new in their catalog, the Russian band continues to hit the press. And for good reason, too. This cover of All Shook Up is a perfect example of their sparse, jazz- and sting-quartet influenced bossa-coustic sound.



Finally, I won an autographed copy of the first Stonehoney album when it first came out a year or two back, and liked their well-constructed countryrock songs well enough indeed. But it wasn’t until I heard their stripped-down performances on the workshop stage at this summer’s Falcon Ridge Folk festival that I truly considered them from a folk perspective, which makes for an ever better framework to crawl inside their slightly countrified americana sound.

Blue Christmas is generally considered a holiday track, but this lovely demo-style recording, originally released via their website, popped up on the shuffle last week and stuck like an earworm; I see no reason why good music can’t be featured year-round.



Cover Lay Down posts regular features and coverfolk twice weekly. This is one of them.

1,250 comments » | Covered in Folk, Elvis, New Artists Old Songs

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