Cover Lay Down

A certain melancholy characterizes the songs of the world now. Piano and strings serve the mood as much as the slow guitar. New song lyrics and releases speak of coming to terms with, missing, absence: familiar themes of hope and longing magnified in every fraught moment.

Covers come this way, too. Poignant songs; poignant versions. Melancholy wrung from the masking chords of the synth-pop seventies and yesterday: pop and grunge; rock and roll, all painted with the veneer of unsettledness that characterizes the world. Here to hold us. Here, to bring the familiar into the strange. Softly. Wisely. Wistfully.

They’re mostly acoustic, these covers. Mostly solo, too, or at least done at home – like everything is, and has been, since the world shrunk down to staircases and silences, with nowhere else to tour or play, bandmates quarantined in different cities, and all of us alone, in our own darknesses.

The quiet suits our mood, our modality. The circularity of coverage soothes, quelling the adrenalin with the warm comfort of familiar.

Here, then. Songs, plucked from the viral air. Voices we love and long for, come to us in our affliction. Hope and heartache, to meet us where we are. Silences sounded, to sit inside, and let the mind cease its restless movements. That we may be at rest, if only for an hour.

Notes from Isolation: A Cover Lay Down Mix [zip!]

• Aoife O’Donovan: Not Dark Yet (orig. Bob Dylan)
• Sarah Jarosz: I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (orig. U2)
• Tallie Gabriel: Who Knows Where The Time Goes (orig. Sandy Denny)
• Jenny Reynolds: I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry (orig. Hank Williams)
• Molly Tuttle: How Can I Tell You (orig. Cat Stevens)
• Gillian Welch: Hello In There (orig. John Prine)
• Joshua Radin: Lean On Me (orig. Bill Withers)
• Reid Jamieson: Isolation (orig. John Lennon)
• Kate Rusby: Carolina In My Mind (orig. James Taylor)
• Kris Angelis: Wheels Of Laredo (orig. Tanya Tucker)
• Sam Amidon: Light Rain Blues (orig. Taj Mahal)
• Emma Swift: I Contain Multitudes (orig. Bob Dylan)
• Kama Vardi: These Days (orig. Jackson Browne/Nico)
• Tyler Nail: Waterbound (orig. Dirk Powell)
• Passenger: Someone You Loved (orig. Lewis Capaldi)
• William Fitzsimmons: Angel From Montgomery (orig. John Prine)

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