Cover Lay Down

It’s still just past the turning of the year. And though we have been away a long, long time, our thoughts still turn to the coverage of it: that which has been on heavy rotation, and intrigued us, and wormed its way into our ears and hearts while we were gone; the things we should have said something about, and now can reconcile.

As always, we aim to celebrate the way artists performing in and around the traditional folk-and-roots categories wring the well-loved and familiar through the transformative urge. And, although this year’s entries blur the boundaries of those categories more than ever, as always, in our dip into the ether of a single sun’s rotation we find delights galore: in tasty and tasteful tributes aplenty, and in the loving call to the forebears and influencers that is the album-length coverset.

But to sift, we have learned, is also to relive the year: every heartache, every triumph, every contemplation. Our foray into the archives of one more suncircle gone by has a predictable effect far beyond that of mere archival rediscovery: the harvest of these seeds and fruit cleanses the landscape; the palate rejoices. And in its own inevitable way, the process is tinged, too, with sadness and loss, as we recall those various moments which were served by song, and say goodbye to them, to move on in the world.

In their way, covers albums are like the winter birds: familiar yet fleeting, hungry and heavy, beautiful and barren, surprising and often rare in the cold. We spend our days all year scouring the skies, and listening through the forest trees, and savoring them one by one as they winnow into our senses. And then, as the year comes to a close, we scatter the seeds, and praise the birds that come, calling each one both harbinger, and a symbol of the year gone by.

For the seventh year in a row, then: Cover Lay Down is proud and humbled to present our Best Of The Year, starting with our very favorite folk, indie, acoustic, roots, bluegrass and Americana tribute albums and covers compilations of 2018, and continuing later this week with a compendium of those single-shot tracks that sung the greatest delight to our deepest selves this year.

May it humble you, too, to remember that the world is ever turning, throwing off the light and heat that sustain and enervate, nurture and hold. And may we live in awe, our soundtrack the flights of a thousand birds we have heard before – though never like this, and never again, in this moment, simply here.

The Year’s Best Covers Album (Single Artist)

+ Laurie MacAllister, The Lies The Poets Tell
+ William Elliott Whitmore, Kilonova
+ Boom Forest, Wisconsin
+ Jack Carty, A Cover and Another
+ Eldin Drljevic, Acoustic Covers
+ John Wesley Harding, Other People’s Greatest Hits
+ Jennifer Warnes, Another Time, Another Place

As we noted way back in January, when folktrio Red Molly went on hiatus last year with the promise of solo product fueled by cohort crowdsourcing, the result was a delight: discs of original songs by Molly Venter duo project Goodnight Moonshine and dobro slinger Abbie Gardner, Laurie MacAllister’s tour de force of a covers album, and the promise of more to come from all incarnations. It’s the covers we’re concerned with here, though, and we’re happy to stand by our original assessment that – although its high production is glossy at times – overall, MacAllister’s The Lies The Poets Tell is a stellar exemplar of contemporary folk, diverse and “sumptuous” in its arrangement and instrumentation, rich with borrowed male-vox duets and stunning in its presentation, a “gorgeous, intensely intimate translation of favorite songs and deep cuts from a veritable who’s who of the songwriter’s songwriter’s scene” well worth its year-end crown.

William Elliott Whitmore‘s Kilonova, which ties for first among several in our (much larger) otherwise-unblogged pile, trends dissimilarly towards the rustic, grungy, alt-country side of folk. Like the deep-voiced Iowa farmer who made it, the album, complete with heavy guitar and a ragged way with voice and melody, aims to pay tribute to a broad collection of songs from a century of influential soundscape, and succeeds in spades; though fans of the mellow may be startled by a few heavier tracks on the covers collection, featuring that full-band country-and-twang Bloodshot Records sound, the majority run towards the sparse and hoarse – and in all cases, there’s something eminently direct, essential, and elegant about these well-rehearsed covers, most of which have featured in Whitmore’s live shows for years. Every cut reveals and revels in the power of coverage and tribute, and – at its best, such as his banjo take on Bad Religion – Whitmore’s adept ability to pull at the roots of punk and country and come up folk makes the record, and his own, shine like the sepia sun.

Other runners up this year trend towards the soft, the private, and the less polished. Wisconsin, a name-your-price session shared on Bandcamp early in the year by 2015 Cover Lay Down Christmas coverage celebrants Boom Forest, represents perhaps the lowest fidelity recording ever in this category, but it’s worth it: a gauzy fever dream recorded straight to hissing old-school cassette in the frozen Wisconsin winter, fragile and flushed with fleeting warmth and intimacy. Similarly, Jack Carty’s A Cover And Another series, released one by one as videographic living room recordings and subsequently streamed as a wholecloth collection, comes out raw but clear, at times unpolished but always clearly beloved, the face to face smallroom social media performance as servant to the folkways bringing forth joyful, honest renditions of both familiar and often overlooked songs from the ether of a mid-generation memory, with Springsteen, Elliott Smith, Joni and Gillian Welch tunes held against The Church, Radiohead, Death Cab For Cutie and more. Eldin Drljevic’s quiet late-night, one-take meditations on songs from Bon Iver to Depeche Mode to The Beatles are beautiful, primordial, and essential in their own way. And although John Wesley Harding‘s aptly-titled Greatest Other People’s Hits is a hybrid, with past recordings curated alongside previously unreleased interpretations of the likes of Lou Reed and George Harrison, the collection stands as a solid set, worth celebrating whole alongside the rest of them.

Those who, like I did, grew up on Jennifer Warnes‘ Famous Blue Raincoat, a gentle, loving interpretation of the Leonard Cohen canon, will also relish the way she tenderly takes on Pearl Jam, Mark Knopfler, Ray Bonneville, and others thirty years later on Another Time, Another Place, filling the room with the soft, full ringing production power of horn-based arrangements, swelling strings, and the precision of a crystal crooner’s voice mellowed and still mostly unmarred by time. It’s not for everyone, especially the indiefolk crowd – but as a coda throwback to the softer side of revival folk, where Linda Rondstadt and Joan Baez hold sway, and Lucy Kaplansky and Eliza Gilkyson still perform, it holds its own.

• Laurie MacAllister ft. Jimmy LaFave: Poison & Wine (orig. The Civil Wars)
  (from The Lies The Poets Tell, 2018)

• William Elliott Whitmore: Don’t Pray On Me (orig. Bad Religion)
  William Elliott Whitmore: Fear Of Trains (orig. Magnetic Fields)
  (from Kilonova, 2018)

• Jennifer Warnes: Just Breathe (orig. Pearl Jam)
  Jennifer Warnes: I Am The Big Easy (orig. Ray Bonneville)
  (from Another Time, Another Place, 2018)

• Boom Forest: All I Have To Do Is Dream (orig. The Everly Brothers)
  (from Wisconsin, 2018)

• Eldin Drljevic: It Ain’t Me Babe (orig. Bob Dylan)
  (from Acoustic Covers, 2018)

• Jack Carty: Under The Milky Way (orig. The Church)
  John Carty ft. Blair Dunlop: Let Down (orig. Radiohead)
  (from A Cover And Another, 2018)

• John Wesley Harding ft. Kelly Hogan: It’s Only Make Believe (orig. Conway Twitty)
  (from Greatest Other People’s Hits, 2018)

The Year’s Best Covers EP (Single Artist)

+ Andrew Combs, 5 Covers And A Song
+ Twisted Pine, Dreams
+ Harmless Sparks, Something Borrowed
+ Vanessa Carlton, 6 Covers (singles)
+ Ana Leorne, unreleased songs

Quite a strong showing in this category this year. But you’ll forgive us if we give our strongest kudos to a half-pint collection that admits, right up front, that it’s got an original in the mix.

Stylistically, Nashville singer-songwriter Andrew Combs claims to straddle “classic country and contemporary pop”. But notably, and as acknowledged by baseline tags on Bandcamp and elsewhere, his 2018 release 5 Covers and a Song fits neatly in the americana and folkworlds, where it stands out as a stellar exemplar of the modern relationship between folk song and folk sound. Combs has a fine string-and-horn arranger and producer in Jordan Lehning, and the ensemble he’s assembled here brings a rich sound to a wide diversity of influences and songcraft: The Strokes with a dab of high-fuzz Los Lobos horns and can-bang madness, a wash of pulsing indiefolk in the Blake Mills; the languid Nillsson-esque dreampop of Lucinda Williams ballad I Envy The Wind; above it all, a voice versatile and yearning, and covers worth collecting, and savoring for hours.

Still-rising New Englander band Twisted Pine‘s covers album Dreams, on the other hand, is imperfectly perfect: a robust but fractured approach, highly arranged yet with instrumentation just understated and rough enough, makes each track a light, lighthearted acoustic gem. Wisps of dancehall pop, rock, and disco hits flit like memory in these barebones yet eminently rhythmic bluegrass settings; it’s no secret we have a soft spot for the young, energetic acoustic quartet sound, but it’s been a long, long while since we heard a four piece so joyfully playful with the edges of formality, or enjoyed it half as much.

Meanwhile, though tiny at four total tracks, early EP-of-the-year contender Harmless Sparks, brought to us in February when we were still blogging semi-regularly, remains at the top of the list, thanks in no small part to gorgeous, spare, practically languid electro-dreampop settings of My Favorite Things and more as promised. Ana Leorne’s equally slight collection of unreleased songs, released in March to celebrate and support International Women’s Day, offers a beautiful voice ravaged by time and “electroclash” in previous band The Clits, now encased in a gentle setting that rings of a young Bonnie Raitt’s drunken and revealing Jabberwocky Club bootleg session. And although technically it’s not an album at all, we’d be nowhere without an honest nod to Vanessa Carlton, whose sextet of midyear singles would have been blogged if we were blogging. Spanning Robyn, Karen Dalton, Neil Young, Lucinda Williams, and more, as a cobbled-together collection, the set rings true and tried – a shimmery wash and gloss of plugged-in guitar, layered echo-chamber voices and long-held chords laid over tense heartbeats; popfolk, unresolved.

• Andrew Combs: Don’t Tell Your Friends About Me (orig. Blake Mills)
  (from 5 Covers And A Song, 2018)

• Twisted Pine: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (orig. The Beatles)
  (from Dreams, 2018)

• Harmless Sparks: Girls Just Want To Have Fun (orig. Cyndi Lauper)
  (from Something Borrowed, 2018)

• Ana Leorne: You Said Something (orig. P.J. Harvey)
  (from unreleased songs, 2018)

• Vanessa Carleton: Needle In The Hay (orig. Elliott Smith)
  (from YouTube, 2018)

The Year’s Best Tribute Album (Single Artist)

+ Lights, Scorpion B Sides Covers
+ Lindsay Ell, The Continuum Project
+ Jake Armerding, Graceland Live

We’ve yawed wide with our definition of folk in considering this year’s best tribute albums. And we’ve split the category, too, the better to distinguish the single artist homage (which generally springs from a singular place of deep respect and kinship) from the curated tribute (more diverse in source and thus sentiment, with artists each pouring their heart into a song which may or may not have deep personal relevance to them). The result is a one-of-a-kind situation: here, three solo artists paying tribute not just to other artists, but specifically to individual records by those artists, offering deep yet restless intersections, moments in their particular time and space…and in our subsequent category, a wide range of well-curated artist rosters, many self-declared and known centrally in other genres, which blurs the line between mixed-genre collections and more narrow tributes aimed at a particular ear or range on the radio dial.

If there’s more electric echo than acoustic stringwork in our solo set, it’s because the fruit justifies the orchard boundary. Lindsay Ell‘s rework of John Mayer album Continuum serves as case in point: with prominent electric blues and a soulful voice crossing at Beale Street and Nashville, Canadian newcomer Ell won kudos and top end-of-year Billboard honors last year in the Country category for 2017 debut The Project, but the combination here on album number two is a percussive yet minimal delight equally comfortable in my father’s blues collection and on the folkshelves here at home. And although most of Jake Armerding‘s live and predominantly acoustic Graceland set, released as an exclusive bonus for those who donated to his Octave Mandolin album crowdsource campaign, was recorded pre-2018, and its tracks pulled from what seems to be audience recordings and muddy soundboards, as a project, it’s a delight all the same, showing love and chops, and featuring strong back-up work in live sessions from a variety of fellow Boston-and-beyond folkgrass players.

Our top album of the year here, however, is not just a hybrid cross; it’s also forbidden fruit. Canadian popsinger Lights was forced by her label to take down all streaming incidence of her full-album take on Drake’s Scorpion B Sides; you can still some of it via YouTube, but most of it is gone from the ether. And what a loss: Lights’ 2015 live in-studio acoustic Hotline Bling was a mere harbinger of what she can do with Drake in the studio; her covers of Jaded and After Dark here are exquisite, and the rest equally sublime. You can certainly hear the production finesse, but this isn’t pop so much as the lightest touch on the acoustic dream-realm, delicate where the original was plaintive, lending a sheer of abstraction and resignedness to what otherwise would not reach nearly as far, or as well. Find it, with our blessing.

• Lights: That’s How You Feel (orig. Drake)
  Lights: Summer Games (ibid.)
  (from Scorpion B Sides (Covers), 2018)

• Lindsay Ell: The Heart Of Life (orig. John Mayer)
  Lindsay Ell: Gravity (ibid.)
  (from The Continuum Project, 2018)

• Jake Armerding: Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes (orig. Paul Simon)
  Jake Armerding: Gumboots (ibid.)
  (from Graceland (live), 2018)

The Year’s Best Tribute Album (Multiple Artists)

+ I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats: All Hail West Texas
+ MOJO Presents Green Leaves: Nick Drake Covered
+ When The Wind Blows: Songs of Townes Van Zandt

We named I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats, a tribute to Mountain Goats album All Hail West Texas, a strong contender for Year’s Best Tribute Album back in January; though at that time less than half of this glorious collection had been released, it was already clear that a) it would be awesome, and b) not all of it would be folk by most stretches of the imagination. Completed in April after a long track-by-track season, the overall album does what it sets out to do and then some, showing just how versatile and wide-ranging in influence and flexibility John Darnielle’s songwriting can be, with Andrew Bird, Erin McKeown, Amanda Palmer, Craig Finn, and other altfolk faves in the mix. The last two entries in the series prove the rule: though the covers come from opposite ends of the Americana spectrum, the slow build into a Wilco-esque haze of Holy Sons’ Source Decay fades perfectly into the uplifting, masterful fingerpicking and sweet voice of Carrie Elkin at album’s end.

In other label-and-project news, MOJO magazine continued its long tradition of excellent coverage with a tribute to Nick Drake; if it’s second here, it’s only because the lesser tracks are just good. But the best tracks are amazing: beautiful, tender, as fractured and frail in their own way as the originals, with Vashti Bunyan, Judy Dyble, and more from the weird and delicate end of folk taking us through the painful, distant haze that represents the short but potent legacy of Nick Drake.

Finally, though sprawling at 32 tracks and – like so many other massive collections – not without its weak spots, When The Wind Blows, this year’s Townes tribute, is more solid than most, with stellar turns from a predominantly masculine set of red dirt and clay crooners and songwriters. Subgenre stalwarts Slaid Cleaves, Gurf Morlix and Joe Ely bring consistent, respectful performances; newer-comers, from Ben Bedford to Matt Harlan to The Orphan Brigade, are more playful as they pass the torch around.

• Holy Sons: Source Decay (orig. The Mountain Goats)
  Carrie Elkin: Absolute Lithops Effect (ibid.)
  (from I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats, 2018)

• Lisa Hannigan & Luluc: Saturday Sun (orig. Nick Drake)
  Joan Shelley: Time Has Told Me (ibid.)
  (from MOJO Presents Green Leaves: Nick Drake Covered, 2018)

• Session Americana: My Proud Mountains (orig. Townes Van Zandt)
  Bocephus King & Flophouse Jr.: Rex’s Blues (ibid.)
  (from When The Wind Blows: Songs of Townes Van Zandt, 2018)

The Year’s Best Tribute EP

+ Craig Cardiff, Upstream Fishing All The Words, He Is: A Birthday Tribute to Bob Dylan
+ Matt Nathanson, Pyromattia
+ A Fond Farewell: A Tribute to The Music of Elliott Smith

I’ve become a huge Craig Cardiff fan this year, mining his archives for a plethora of covers albums and b-sides, all the while bemoaning the data gap between Canadian and American folk which presumably kept me from discovering this one-time Juno winner (and long-time Rose Cousins collaborator) for so long. The prolific Cardiff produced two coversets in 2018: an excellent Christmas album (cheerily titled Winter! Winter! Winter!), and Upstream Fishing All The Words, He Is, a five-track tribute to Dylan, the reigning king of covered song and a fresh-minted Nobel Laureate, that rings with angst and simple, subtle arrangements rich with strong guitar and soulful voice and the barest of accompanying riffs and ringing loops. Spin back in time, too, for sweet late-2017 half-covers EP release Novemberish (Songs From The Rain), and 2010 all-female-artist tribute Mothers and Daughters.

If Matt Nathanson‘s predominantly unplugged acoustic rock tribute to Def Leppard is a surprising second, it’s because, well, they’re hardly an obvious influence on Nathanson, an artist more known for riding the modern indie-driven popfolk line. But Nathanson gets kudos and credit for Pyromattia, which pulls the bare bones and sinews out of the grunt and grunge with an acoustic unplugged approach that calls back to the alternative pop of Toad The Wet Sprocket, Crowded House, and other balladeers and front porch rockers of the same era.

And if New Jersey tribute A Fond Farewell muddles genre, well, so did its tributary Elliott Smith, whom this short, sometimes-staccato farewell honors effectively. The six-pack runs a surprisingly broad range – from an urgent, ominous take on Between The Bars to the richly orchestrated indie-mystical ambiance of Zach Russack’s Waltz No. 1 to Joe Cirotti’s album-ender, far from perfunctory, in its fine, fragile, and fractured Rambling Jack Elliott-meets-Elliott Smith fingerpicking style.

• Craig Cardiff: All Along The Watchtower (orig. Bob Dylan)
  (from Upstream Fishing All The Words, He Is: A Birthday Tribute to Bob Dylan, 2018)
• BONUS: Craig Cardiff: The Book Of Love (orig. Magnetic Fields)
  (from Novemberish (Songs From The Rain), 2017)

• Matt Nathanson: Pour Some Sugar On Me (orig. Def Leppard)
  (from Pyromattia, 2018)

• Joe Cirotti: Somebody That I Used To Know (orig. Elliott Smith)
  (from A Fond Farewell: A Tribute to Elliott Smith, 2018)

The Year’s Best Traditional Album

+ mammiferes, Olema
+ Anna & Elizabeth, The Invisible Comes To Us

Those looking for gentle takes on ancient song, go elsewhere: put simply, this year’s best pair of traditional albums raze the boundaries between folk tradition and the environment, remixing culture and community into something visceral, and more than simply music. If they stand alone in their category, it is because theirs is a total reclamation.

Of them, the lesser-known “futurefolk” collective mammifères earns its honors for taking the sonic remix to the next level fully realized, and for the sheer potency of the collection fully de- and reconstructed: a collage of sound with an experimental polish, punctuated by all the blips and wailing electronica that buries and drags these songs into the vastness of the variable world. Aa a full-length debut, Olema claims to channel its tradition through a particular place in California, and apparently, that place is a chaotic, organic stew, a pastiche of sound. We described lead vocalist and bandleader Lukas Papenfusscline’s previous placement in our Year’s Best back in 2016, as a “hallucinogenic field recording from the road”, but Olema is eminently more jarring and realized, with Jazz and jamband elements and a terrifying tone transforming the songs of our centuries into the rantings of madmen. Essential, in all meanings of the word; a divine, disquieting artifact of the folkways. Lomax would be proud.

It’s equally hard to know how to categorize The Invisible Comes To Us, both musically and in terms of compositional framework. Built around the Middlebury College archives of song collector Helen Hartness Flanders, the album – the third from celebrated newtrad players Anna & Elizabeth, and as such frequently recognized in other year’s end folk and coverage blogs – features broken, battered folk songs heavy with the rich sounds of electronica and field recordings, yawing wide among dreampop, altfolk, and more offshoots of the traditions, yet rooted firmly in the raw acoustic ambiance of its forerunners. In its best moments, it’s like listening to the US version of the British psychedelic folkscene emerge in whole-cloth. A little less raw, a little more sweet, putting The Invisible Comes To Us back up against mammiferes’ Olena nets a twinned pair: this one, more gently undone, which spins sound from the ether, and the other, which dissolves songs into it; one which sees the world as encroaching, the other as integrative and organic as static on the radio. Not a bad year for the tradition, indeed.

• mammifères: saro (trad.)
  mammifères: tell old bill (trad.)
  (from Olema, 2018)

• Anna & Elizabeth: Ripest Of Apples (trad.)
  Anna & Elizabeth: Virginia Rambler (trad.)
  (from The Invisible Comes To Us, 2018)

Best Coverfolk Video Series

+ Imaginary Future

In some previous years, we’ve found enough great YouTubed coverfolk delights out there to justify a separate video feature; in others, in the interest of time and sanity, we’ve merely included a handful of favorites here, at the end of our album feature. This year, only one artist’s series stood out, but it’s a perfect, quiet coda to our celebration of 2018: a whole wonderful year of coverage from Imaginary Future, aka singer-songwriter Jesse Epstein, whose marriage to YouTube star Kina Grannis is notable in part because her voice can be heard in harmony with his own occasionally here, and the duo sounds great.

Epstein invites comparison with Grannis, who appeared on Cover Lay Down as recently as our end-of-year 2017 video feature; his nom de plume is taken from a lyric in one of his wife’s songs. But Imaginary Future is also very much a sincere solo act, with a quietfolk approach all his own. Arrangements are sparse, with a second harmony line dubbed in for most choruses, and set in similar tempos (slow) and tone (wispy). Song selections go broadly into various popular genres, but trend consistently towards simple love-and-hope songs done simply, too: Let It Be, Lean On Me, The Cranberries’ Dreams, Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together. There’s even a sameness about these video settings, too, each one close in and intimate, that helps hold the constant output together as a series.

Where other folk cover series at least attempt some diversity, in other words, Imaginary Future sticks to what he does best: delicate performance, tender tribute, and settings that serve the songs. It works, and – like every other song that came through our ears and hearts this year, and lingered long enough to be found worthy of this year’s list – we’re glad to have found him.

Imaginary Future: Let’s Stay Together (orig. Al Green)

Imaginary Future: Let It Be (orig. The Beatles)

Imaginary Future: Feels Like We Only Go Backwards (orig. Tame Impala)

Imaginary Future: Wild World (orig. Cat Stevens)

Always ad-free and artist-centric, Cover Lay Down enters our second decade digging deep at the ethnographic intersection of folkways and coversong thanks to the support of artists, labels, promoters, and YOU.

So do your part: listen, love, like, and above all, purchase the music, the better to keep it alive. And if, in the end, you’ve got goodwill to spare, and want to help keep the music flowing, please, consider a year’s end contribution to Cover Lay Down. All gifts go directly to bandwidth and server costs; all donors receive undying praise, and a special blogger-curated gift mixtape of well-loved but otherwise unshared covers from 2017-2018, including exclusive live covers from our very own Unity House Concert series.