Category: Theme Posts


Mother’s Day Coverfolk
(On learning to love the self in the other)

May 13th, 2012 — 07:54 pm





I’ve written about my father several times here on Cover Lay Down, citing him as a friend and fellow folkfan whose companionship I cherish, especially now that I have children of my own. I’ve written about my wife, too, and my children, when the occasion warranted it. But other than a 2008 feature on Mothers of the Folkworld, we’ve skipped over Mother’s Day for four years running – leaving my own mother conspicuously absent from these virtual pages.

If I’ve avoided taking the time to parse the particulars of our often volatile relationship until now, it is because for most of my adult and adolescent life, I did not understand it. But though I cannot and should not claim to know anyone as well or better than I know myself, after years of therapy and soul-searching, I think I have come far enough to take an awkward step towards explicating my avoidance of the topic until now.

The things I have inherited from my mother run deeper and more complex. From her come ADHD tendencies and a high propensity for disorganization, a deep need for social and interpersonal connection, a teary sensitivity to the world. Though it is these same raw and specific qualities, I think, which allow me to experience such deep and profound joy and solace in the universe, the exposure to the emotive elements which results also leaves me in a particularly poor place to negotiate truces when I must.

Instead, these innate characteristics, and the confusion that they often cause within me, leave me wandering the earth with an innate feeling of fragility. And the knowledge that I contain such multitudes can lead to poor choices: a carelessness with words and action that often worsens when I let my guard down around those who I know too well; a snowblindness to other opinions that comes across as disrespect; a propensity to overreact to small things, and thus magnify my distress.

And if I have learned anything in my almost forty years, it is that where one person in such a situation can mitigate and manage the delicate self through care and community and introspection, people of this particular type are ill-equipped to support each other, or indeed to come to terms with each other.

The result is a particularly bittersweet relationship, and I know that my mother and I both regret that we have not yet been able to overcome that which we share to grow closer, and more respectful towards each other.

It’s hard to love in another what you struggle with in yourself – hard, too, to pair such characteristics across the table and expect clarity in understanding. Living with my mother is more often than not a tightrope walk of polite watchfulness in our relations. Even when we find ourselves in moments or months of balance, the voice in my head that cannot so easily trust is always working to push me back down the mountain to its base, where I must begin the Sisyphean struggle anew, for the sake of our family, and our families.

Don’t get me wrong: I love my mother. I admire how hard she worked to maintain a family in my childhood, when my father was working long and absent hours to give us the lifestyle he and she agreed was best for all of us. I appreciate the words of comfort and support she has offered me in my hours of need, even if I could not and would not hear them wholly in the moment. My parents’ divorce several years ago gave me a chance to see her for herself, and the opportunity to watch her grow and thrive as a person of faith and innate optimism. And the ways in which this – all of this – has illuminated my own sins and challenges, clearing the path for me to make peace with my own faults and failures, and through them, to make peace with her, is easily acknowledged, though it remains elusive in my grasp as a tool for relationship building.

I cannot claim to have finished my journey; if I am not yet ready to come out and say that my mother is my friend, it is because of that which I cannot yet love in myself. But although I am hardly a praying man, my mother’s urgings towards meditation have not gone unheeded; I know, and hope she sees, that on my own side of that proverbial table, I have been gathering strength for a peace between us, one that grows more urgent even as it grows closer every day of our lives. And I know, too, because she has shown me, that faith is not only possible, but a vital cornerstone to a life lived honestly, and well.

To my mother, then: to whom I owe not only life, but the abilities and lessons that let me feel and see such life as a joyous, wondrous miracle every day. For that, I love her deeply, if not yet so well. And with that love at my back I will work until my final breath to forge and solder the ties that bind us, until our relationship is something we can both cherish and celebrate together.




Download our Mother’s Day Mix as a zip file!

5 comments » | Holiday Coverfolk, Theme Posts

Vacation Coverfolk: Where We’re Going To
(Postcards from the past, songs from the present)

April 18th, 2012 — 12:55 pm





Sunday, April 15
Dear Reader,

Traditionally, when yours truly takes off for other climes, I leave behind a feature set or two of place-relevant coverage. But we’re off to San Juan in the morning for a long school break in the sun, with a spring in our step and an island-hopping itinerary on our mind. And unusually, there’s not much in the way of coverfolk from Puerto Rico to be found in the aether.

So here’s a few tracks about going places, pre-posted as a letter to the future for your midweek enjoyment. We’ll return in a week, shaking the sand from our shoes with a set of great new music from recent releases.



4 comments » | Theme Posts, Uncategorized, Vacation Coverfolk

Let My People Go: Songs of The Exodus
(Musical Metaphors of Power, Privilege, and Oppression)

April 7th, 2012 — 11:13 am





Before we were slaves in Egypt, we were Joseph’s brothers and their wives, working at the right hand of a seemingly benevolent pharaoh. But as more modern freedom movements have reminded us over and over again, trust in institutions is a trust misplaced, for power shared unilaterally is power that can be withheld. 400 years and a dozen generations, and we find ourselves both enslaved and feared for our potential power as usurpers.

And yet. Without Pharaoh’s breeding program, we would not have become a people. Without the pressure of death which brought Moses to the reeds and rushes, we would not have returned to Pharaoh’s right hand, where we could be heard. Without the madness, God would not have come to us, enflamed enough to convince a reluctant, stuttering prophet to raise his staff, and lead the people of Israel into the desert, and the great unknown of an uncertain future.

It took oppression and slavery to make a people of Israel; darkness is a forge unparalleled in our hearts. No wonder there is so much hope in the modern retellings of this story – hope, and compassion for those who continue to perpetuate the enslavement of others merely by choosing not to recognize their own privilege as a base condition for cultural imbalance. No wonder the figures of Moses, Pharaoh, Joseph, Joshua, and the Israelites have become metaphors for their own roles in the story – as flawed leader, scapegoat oppressor, untrusting and meek oppressed; as brave General, as prideful and arrogant prophet.

We tell their stories from every perspective, for they are all us. May we learn, once again, from their zeal, and their mistakes. May we continue to work for the day when all peoples can be free – from each other, and from their own fears.




Looking for more biblical songs? Head over to collaborative music blog Star Maker Machine, where we’re just finishing up a full week of themed posts on the subject!

1 comment » | Holiday Coverfolk, Theme Posts

On Making Time:
Temporal coverfolk, and a plea for support

March 11th, 2012 — 02:49 pm





As noted on our Donate page, here at Cover Lay Down we insist on remaining ad-free and non-profit – the better to focus our attention and your support on those artists we tout week in and week out, thus making it possible for them to keep their hands and voices in the game full-time, for the benefit of all.

But making and reinforcing connections between musicians and the community they serve isn’t free. The amount of bandwidth it takes to serve our growing readership runs well over a terabyte of data each month, and you just can’t get that sort of pipeline without paying for it. And having technical support at our fingertips means ensuring that the blog, and its coversongs, are here when you need them.

And so, a couple of times a year, we come to you, our beloved readers, asking for support to keep the music flowing.

Why now? Primarily, because the coffers are low. It costs about a hundred dollars a month to cover our costs, and right now, the account has just enough in it to take us into April. Without your gift, the clock runs out.

But in my mind, there’s also a strong parallel between the clock-change of Daylight Savings Time and the pacing of the paycheck-driven life. I’ll be thinking of it when I rise in the dark tomorrow to leave for work on time. And I’ll be pondering its manifestations as I dwell among the various stressors that keep us in tension with the time and attention we spend here on these pages.

And these days, I spend a lot of time thinking about money. It’s budget season in our schools, and with the Federal jobs bill gone dry, my role on our local school board has turned once again to our annual examination of how to make do with less. Contact negotiations continue in the inner-city school system where I teach, leaving me uncertain of what the future might bring, or even whether I might still have a job when the process is over. Taxes are coming due, causing us once again to sit at the kitchen counters of our memories and figure out just where our money goes, and whether we’ll need to get second jobs just to afford the basic, bare lifestyle we enjoy.

I did not join the school board to manage money, but I recognize that our yearly exploration of the district pocketbook is an important lens through which we reexamine our priorities on the ground. I did not join the teaching field to get rich, but the choice of weekends and summers off has its costs, to me and to my family.

Time, as they say, is money. And the way we ration and gather these precious resources is often less dissimilar than we’d like to admit. Our resources are always limited: to give and take an hour here, a dollar there, is to be deliberate about what we have to give, lending our hearts to that which we think serves ourselves and our communities most.

And so we come to you today with hat in hand, asking only that you take a moment out of your busy life to help out, and – in doing so – become a proud supporter of our mission.

If you’re a regular contributor, we encourage you to consider renewing your commitment, the better to perpetuate that which you take for granted.

If you haven’t donated before, we ask that you consider throwing a few dollars into the pot, the better to ensure that we’ll be here for months and years to come.

Give to Cover Lay Down, and help us sustain the words, the music, the artists and the community.


Because it’s time.



Cover Lay Down has been proudly serving artists and fans at the intersection of folk and coverage since 2007 thanks to the support of readers like you.

2 comments » | donate, Theme Posts

Making Peace With The Wild Things:
A Prayer For My Students

February 5th, 2012 — 07:09 pm





Student grades are due tomorrow, but we went to church anyway – we had to sing, and anyway, after two years of semi-regular practice as a Unitarian Universalist, I have come to a place in my life where I find peace and solace in shared practice which starts and ends with love and service, togetherness and open-ended truths, and a shared commitment to social justice.

Much of this is due to the particulars of our chosen worship setting. The UU church which we attend is in transition, with an interim minister who has my undying respect; wise, and gentle, with a knack for bringing new texts and ideas to the table, presenting them clearly and coherently, and then braiding them together to reveal the thing which we needed most of the world in that moment.

I experience her sermons as a kind of miracle of the mind, that binds my soul and body, and answers my unspoken need. Even when I am distracted by my own thoughts, her bright, intelligent prompting provides an avenue for me to come to myself with new eyes, and with a renewed determination to accept that which has been lurking in my heart and mind.

And in this case, a sermon on blessings and failures, and how we so often fail to allow ourselves to experience the joys and sadness they should bring us, has brought me back to my students.


The students I teach are ill-prepared for success. They are the product of a city that is stacked against them, a community that is in too much of a hurry to address the deep foundation issues which would support true progress, a system that is under too much pressure to make it look like things are working. They come to my ninth grade classroom with fifth grade reading skills, without the stamina to be learners for more than a few minutes per class day, with anger against me for enforcing the most basic rules, and an image of the classroom as a competitive space, where they win if they can overwhelm the lesson, or if they can sleep successfully, and thus avoid confronting their unpreparedness.

They also come, if indeed they come at all – one in five students is absent on a given day – with long histories of pitting themselves against the world, which make them almost unteachable for most of the semester, until and if we can delay the curriculum long enough to get into their hearts. Most of them are incapable of experiencing joy or sadness at all, let alone the empathy we assume is prerequisite for understanding a text. Instead, they experience only despair and bitterness, disappointment and pride – emotions they cannot acknowledge, to themselves or others, lest they appear weak, and lose the only game they know.

A few of them manage to survive and move forward, and a tiny, tiny percentage aim to thrive. But these are the minority: just 25% of students in the city where I teach even graduate from high school within four years, and it’s not hard to see why. Last week, a boy in one of my classes taunted a girl into attacking him; in the aftermath, his lack of ownership in instigating the fight was both frustrating and expected, but it was his comment that “It wasn’t a fight; she’s a girl” that reminded me just how unprepared these almost-men and almost-women are to accept even the basic conditions that we believe are necessary to help them move forward.

We do what we can for them, and sometimes more than we can afford, in an environment where each student gets just two minutes of my individual attention, if that, per day. In tiny slices of time we struggle to push our way in, to learn who they are as individuals, to identify the gaps between where they are and where the curriculum assumes they are, and construct a pathway for them that bridges their particular chasm.

But half a bridge is no better than none, and it may be worse, given that it contains so much false hope. In the end, it is our lot to hold them responsible for their actions, lest we become part of the machine that lies to them, and tells them that they are ready. It hurts to fail so many, but it would hurt more to pass them along without merit or ability, to undermine their next classes, to perpetuate the lie that a good heart, however buried and patinaed, is evidence of success.

And so many fail. Despite unanswered parent phone calls and teacher conferences full of hopelessness, long unattended after school sessions offered, a hundred new attempts at kind words and coaxing, over half of the 80 final grades I will enter into the database before the sun rises tomorrow are F’s. Of the remainder, another half are within the D range, marking their recipients as desperately unprepared academically but willing to struggle just enough to produce something that hints of promise, though probability says that not one of these 20-or-so students will pass sufficient classes this year to move on, leaving them stuck in the eternal-seeming limbo that is another ninth grade year.

Only four of my students from last term earned an A of any sort. Only six earned B’s. And of those, there are still one or two who only bothered and blossomed in my class, or perhaps one other – they liked me, but in a manner untranslatable to other teachers’ style.


How did we get from sermon to city? These things are related, somehow, though they are hard to untangle. But today, in church, as the minister read a section from Everything I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, I was reminded that my students do not know what we taught them then, if indeed we taught them at all.

And although the time for sharing had passed, suddenly, in the middle of the sermon, I wanted to say a prayer for my students.

I wanted to light a candle for my beloved failures, curled up against the world so tightly that, like fists, all they can do is destroy.

I wanted to cry, and ask forgiveness; to say that I really did do everything there is to do, and let the feelings simply be, in the community I trust, even as I despair in the peace of my beloved wild things, who tear at me until the bell rings, and the clock runs out, and it is too late.

I wanted to, but I didn’t.

I offer it here, instead.



12 comments » | Theme Posts

Sing Me A Story, a Poem, A Play:
Songs Inspired By Literature, Covered In Folk

July 11th, 2011 — 04:03 pm





I had hoped to spend Sunday bringing you news of YouTube ukelele sensation Sophie Madeleine’s cover-a-day-for-a-month promotion, and of the new 34-song Herohill tribute to Gordon Lightfoot – a pair of recent projects which transcend the usual scope of tributary.

Instead, I found myself drowning in the depths of scholarship, studying frantically for a state teaching license test in English next Saturday, the results of which could make or break my employment next year.

Good thing other bloggers got to the aforementioned mega-compilations instead. Because here, today, we can offer only compromise: a set of folk covers which celebrate and re-imagine songs based on well-known books, poems, and plays…


The Massachusetts Teachers Educator Licensure test in English (gr. 5-12) is highly canonical, which is to say that passage depends on one’s familiarity with both the classics of every era, genre, and developmental phase in literature from around the globe, and the various and sundry ways in which academics talk about, teach, and examine such texts.

Ay, poor me: though well read and an excellent tester, it’s been two decades since I last sat in a formal classroom environment for the study of English. I’m not just out of practice; I’m wholly unfamiliar with a good half of what the test covers, both because it never came up in my study of the classical English poets, and because a surprising amount of that content is either new or newly reincorporated into and/or contextualized in the increasingly global, politically correct canon. (And most of that, of course, has not a white of relevance to the modern English classroom. Yet it remains on the test.)

And so while all around me the household prepares for our annual jaunt to the folkfields, here I sit, cramming my poor summer brain with poems and plays, plots summaries and themes, critical perspectives and obscure poetic tropes. I dream in iambic pentameter, muttering about Whitman and Wollencraft, 8th century Chinese poetry and multicultural lit; I wake to a haze of vocabulary terms which merely describe the intuitively obvious, and the minute details of dozens of no-longer-in-vogue developmental strategies for teaching reading.

Happily, there’s fodder here for both sides of the brain. Well-read musicians of all stripes and genres have taken on the canon over the years, and though many of these are either too new, too metal, or too obscure to have prompted much in the way of acoustic covers – see, for example, Kris Delmhorst’s Strange Conversations, which bases an album’s worth of songs around her favorite poems; Pink Floyd’s magnum opus Animals, which is based on George Orwell’s anti-totalitarian novelette Animal Farm; a huge swath of Iron Maiden’s output – there’s just enough solid coverage out there to make it worth a feature.

Still looking for a good cover of The Police’s Don’t Stand So Close to Me, which both cites and retells Nabokov’s Lolita. But these will suffice, as a quickie, before I head back to the stacks.

  • Train: Ramble On (orig. Led Zeppelin)
    (from One and a Half [out of print], 1999)
    - based on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy

17 comments » | Theme Posts

Memorial Day Coverfolk, Redux:
More songs for soldiers past and present

May 29th, 2011 — 12:08 pm

As in previous years, we’re off today, cleaning house and burning the social calendar at both ends for the long weekend. So here’s our traditional Memorial Day post, plus a growing set of bonus tracks for our regular readers.





For most of my life, the military has been an abstraction. Though war itself lives everpresent in our newsdriven culture, and memorial statues and parades a recurring part of community, my concept of life in the armed forces, and the risks and stresses thereof, is based on popculture parables, mostly: fictionalized movie and television portrayals fleshed out by fleeting glimpses of men and women in uniform in airports, reporting to places I cannot imagine, to carry out tasks I could not describe.

My connection with family members who have served has been long after the fact. My father spent some portion of the sixties as a clerk typist in the Coast Guard reserves, but other than a truly dorky picture which he kept in his bedside drawer, and a few well-worn tales of short-haired inspection wigs and furloughs which I have evoked over the years, I could not identify those parts of him, if any, which were forged in service to his country.

Similarly, though my grandfather’s work developing radar in the Army is an important part of the family mythos, it was long over by the time I came to consciousness. Though I carry his dog tag in my wallet, the man I knew as Grandpa was a quiet shirtsleeved man, his service so much a part of who he had become that I never really considered how his military past had made him until it was too late to ask.

Surely, both of these men, and the usual assortment of greatuncles, met men along the way who never came back. But their stories are not mine. Their losses, if any, are their own. And so, for most of my life, Memorial Day has been a secular holiday, atheistic, with no trace of sentiment.


But teaching in a school with an ROTC program means living with a daily reminder of the armed forces as peopled by real, three-dimensional human beings. Students show up in class crisp and confident in uniform; I pass them in the hallways lined up for inspection, or pacing out their cadences.

Jerome and Lori Anna, my two 2009 graduating ROTC seniors, were still just kids, off to Prom on Thursday, on the cusp of graduation. This year, Pam fills the same shoes, wearing her dress uniform under her graduation gown at class day last Friday. Their lives are ahead of them, but their choices were limited. For them, service is a way out of the inner city, perhaps the only one available to them. It will pay for college, and help them focus their abilities. It will give them a future.

And so they choose to lend their bodies and hearts to the protection of our shores and skies. And their very real and present future — fighting wars, combatting terrorism — lends new credence to the need for memory.

May they serve proud, like our fathers before us, and our grandfathers before them. May their service be swift, and their burden light. Rest assured; we will remember them.



Repost Bonus Tracks, Memorial Day 2010:



Repost Bonus Tracks, Memorial Day 2011:



Cover Lay Down posts new coverfolk features and songsets twice weekly.

103 comments » | Holiday Coverfolk, Theme Posts

After The Rapture: Songs of Ascendance
(Covers of Dylan, John Prine, John Gorka & more!)

May 22nd, 2011 — 11:30 am





Dylan’s 70th birthday is nigh upon us, and as he seems to still be walking the earth after the predicted Rapture has come and gone, we can only assume that either he wasn’t any worthier than we, or – once again – the extremists have proved themselves no more able to predict God’s timing than the rest of us.

Me, I’m quite proud of myself for not giving in to the temptation to release a mess of helium-filled blow-up dolls to the heavens down on main street. Instead, I spent a long evening with friends around the campfire, making music and reveling in the earthly delights of drink and debauchery until the wee hours. And the news of the rapture lent a tone of gratefulness to the whole proceedings, making it feel better than usual to be here – giving us something to thank Rev. Camping and his evangelical followers for, after all.

Heaven is a rich minefield for folk artists, of course, calling back to the age-old spiritual/secular split in musical history which symptomized the larger turn towards the secular as western society emerged from the dark ages. In the abstract, the term is everpresent, both as a literal call to the Christian concepts which frame so much of our society, and, used metaphorically, to represent a kind of nirvana state, an ideal to which the community and culture aspires.

But the idea of ascendance is both more specific and more problematic. In these visions, Heaven is not just a spiritual center, a place to which we rise, it is a destination made concrete, one that chooses us as much as we choose it. And whether oblique or direct, the songs which address the Rapture and its accompanying apocalypse ring of hope and doomsday, their twinned tension encapsulating the universal, everpresent question of worth with which we all struggle in our darkest moments.

Today, then, as a companion to Rapture-themed sets from Cover Freak, Town Full of Losers, and fellow Star Maker Machine collaborator Any Major Dude With Half A Heart, we present a set of coverfolk lighthearted in its thematic relevance yet heavy on the gospels of grace and ascendance, beginning with a trifecta of tracks originally written by that born-again earth-bound savior, Bob Dylan, and ending with a tongue-in-cheek coda from Jill Sobule. Floridian young’uns Jubal’s Kin’s version of the 19th century hymn Come Ye Sinners, especially, comes highly recommended – but as always, all herein are well worth the listen.

71 comments » | Bob Dylan, Theme Posts

May I Suggest: Mayday Coverfolk

May 1st, 2011 — 11:19 pm





I speak of two Mays on this warm, sunny Spring afternoon: of the request, and of the calendar. Yet the two terms are related, in their way. For Spring is a metaphor of rebirth, and “mother may I” is a sort of rebirth, too: of the moment, of the allowance to move forward, of the soul.

Appropriate, I think. This past year, I’ve given myself permission to act again, treading the boards for the first time since a failure to learn my lines in time caused my high school director to cut Ionesco’s Rhinocerous down to a 45 minute play. I’m writing poetry again, listening to the insistent muses after almost a decade of carefully, painfully training myself to turn a blind ear to the inner voice, for sanity’s sake. And I allowed myself to let this blog go “temporarily”, knowing that my lifelong tendency has been to abandon – only to prove myself by coming back with a vengance, and with no less than three posts a week since we returned.

I’ve been busy, to be sure. But busy with the right things, for once in a lifetime. Just as “may” is both an arrival and a promise, so has my life finally become as much about future as present. Learning to not just embrace but actually, finally, to be in those times to their fullest is both a test of character and a vehicle for yet another stage of life: the one where the center doesn’t just hold, it fuels the self, because you trust it to.

Learning to embrace the fear of falling, of course, is part and parcel. But to say “I may” is to give yourself a gift of progress, of procedure, of trust and faith and love.

We all deserve another chance. And in the end, the only one who can give it to us is ourselves.



433 comments » | Theme Posts

For The Birds: Wild Avian Coverfolk
(Cover Lay Down Returns, On Wings and a Prayer)

April 17th, 2011 — 12:15 pm





It’s Spring, and that means rebirth: when the earth reemerges from the earth, covered in last year’s leaves. When the morning is filled with brave still-chilled birds, proffering a soundtrack for our triumphant return.

It’s also school vacation, and that means our annual trip down to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where we join up with family members more typically spread far and wide across the country, enough to spill into two adjacent houses. In past years, as with most of our excursions to various and sundry parts of the world, finding ourselves in another state meant Vacation Coverfolk features on local music and musicians. But we’ve done North Carolina, via James Taylor, Doc Watson, Elizabeth Cotten, and others, in years past. And truly, this year, coming here feels more like coming home than ever before.

And so, instead, I find myself marveling at the feathered referents which have populated this year’s journey, and the flight from stress it has grown to represent. After a mad all-night dash down the coast, our shore-line arrival featured a sunrise peppered with gulls and plovers; when we finally arrived at our secluded rental home just after breakfast, we were stopped by some sort of grey, bewildered finch peering at us from her nest by the front door. The three story deck of our borrowed home looks out over a backyard lagoon populated by grazing Canada Geese and proud egret families. Robins and red-winged blackbirds pepper the lawn, their bright colors a constant flash in the landscape.

Last night, just before supper, an osprey swirled down out of the sky like the impending storm, catching a fish in his talons just yards from our wondering faces. Farther off, on the sound past the narrow treeline, the gulls dip and sway and coast on the breeze alongside their smaller compatriots. Crows, doves, and white-throated long-beaks of unidentified species hop from branch to branch at eye level in the gnarled trees. The world is full of mating calls, of whoops and twitters, of all the calls that mark this territory as theirs, and us as guests.

But we are welcome, and for the first time in a month or more, I, too, am free to swoop and play, feel free enough to join them in their flight. For the birds, then, and in honor of our freedom: some wild avian coverfolk, with a promise that the set, like Spring itself, is but a harbinger of more to come.




After a long hiatus, Cover Lay Down is back on track with new coverfolk features and songsets posted at least twice weekly. Stay tuned in the days and weeks ahead for new and newly-discovered covers from the folkworld, including a close look at Britfolk sensation Thea Gilmore, Spring house concert and Summer festival previews, and more!

726 comments » | Theme Posts, Vacation Coverfolk

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