Cover Lay Down

What a month it’s been for coverfolk, with over a hundred newly-recorded live #coversfromhome posted on our Facebook page in just the last 30 days alone. Our cup runneth over, and we’re doing our part, hitting PayPal and Venmo links when we can to keep the music coming and the artists fed as the time of no touring continues; we hope you, too, are finding our daily shares fruitful and fulfilling, and doing your part to support the industry through sharing, commenting, and donating as you can.

But even as the inevitable trend towards live and lo-fi living room sets continues, so does the industry, in parallel. Artists shut into their homes are still releasing albums and other collections of studio-recorded music formally, even if they cannot tour to support their release. Paying for product, and passing it along, too, remains the very best way to support them. And with Bandcamp announcing that they will henceforth waive all profits on the first Friday of each month to support artists hit hard by the pandemic shift, there’s no better time than the present to purchase.

Today, then, we return to these virtual pages, to feature and celebrate the best studio recorded covers albums, tribute sets, and coverfolk singles that have crossed our ears since our last regular feature, way back in February. Read on for news of new releases from old friends and familiar voices – and as always, if you like what you hear, remember to do your part, as a patron and fan, to help keep the music, and the musicians, alive and thriving in a time of need.

We first featured Colorado singer-songwriter John Statz way back in 2012, and again several times afterwards, after a deep dive into his back catalog, subsequent release Tulsa, and a wonderful opening set for Jeffrey Foucault at Signature Sounds label-driven venue The Parlor Room up in Northampton revealed a few more great covers worth celebrating, and a tendency towards concrete comfort in both his songwriting and generally sparse, heartfelt performance that lingers long and serves the soul in equal measure. But nothing could have prepared us for the rich, resonant shift in sound that new album Early Riser, which drops Friday into an uncertain world, brings to the canon – and so we’re especially thrilled to be bringing forth an exclusive today, gifted by the artist himself, that typifies both his inimitable style and sensibility, and the mature cohesion of the album’s chosen production dynamic which supports it so well.

In short, Early Riser is a powerhouse: it should go far, if the new world of stay-at-home production can push it. Strong, well-calibrated arrangements and instrumentation – flush with Wurlitzer organ and pedal steel, steady drumbeats and high, distant trumpets, alto harmonies sweet and rich like an instrument up against Statz’ shaky head-voiced lyrics and lead – bring depth and balance, justifying the slow, treasured journey through verses and choruses hopeful and determined, straightforward and plainspoken, prescient as hell. Taken as a set, the album teeters on an unsettled edge of coming to terms with the world, with a stunning range and depth of emotion that collapses the lines between contemporary folk and bluesy country rock and true-blue soft Americana. And it aches with a poet’s soul as Statz struggles to simplify the world, and come to terms with the ways it challenges and holds us.

As with his previous recorded works, Early Riser includes a single cover. But where Frightened Rabbit’s Old Old Fashioned and Statz’ 2015 Radiohead waltz embedded themselves among the songwriting, offering tiny, simple comfort midway through solid sets, his take on Joni Mitchell’s Come In From The Cold is a coda steeped in longing, a long, slow build to nowhere just barely tenable at eight minutes, and deliberately so; a tease and a tension, just right for the age, and perfect for the album; a howl in the dark, leaving us safe and welcome in an unsettled world. The timing could not have been better, after all. Listen, and come in, too.

• John Statz: Come In From The Cold (orig. Joni Mitchell)

• John Statz: Old Old Fashioned (orig. Frightened Rabbit)
• John Statz: Motion Picture Soundtrack (orig. Radiohead)

It’s been a long time since we last heard from self-taught North Carolina native Jeremy Squires here at Cover Lay Down: seven years, to be exact, since he released the delicate, softly melodic pair of lo-fi coversongs which capstone new release A Collection of Covers, which hit the streets just as they were closing down, back in mid-March. But happily, the newer tracks on the collection fit right in with the songs that brought us in to begin with, the hipster heart only that much more fulfilled by a short EP-length set of emptiness. Here you’ll find Nirvana, Jason Molina, Pedro The Lion, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and more turned haunting and hollow, raw and sultry, just out of reach in range and reason, stripped-down and steeped in an artist’s history of depression and seclusion. The fragile heart is revealed, and tenderly offered, in tinkling bells and stand-up box piano and slow strummed guitar. Devastation is wrestled from songs that once shouted anger to the world. Each melancholy movement is more precious than the last, and oh so tenderly treated – offering equal evidence of scars and healing, even as they comfort and chill, delight and differentiate.

Rachael Kilgour is a familiar voice here on Cover Lay Down, thanks to an achingly gorgeous set of solo albums that mine the depths of the torn-out soul, with themes of divorce and reconciliation and a longing for a simpler life, and an upcoming project featuring songs for her father, revealing truth and tenderness in the mining of the broken heart’s desire, and it’s need to be free. And so we were initially wary, to note that Sound an Echo, the new Rachael Kilgour duo project with fiddler Sara Pajunen, is a singer-songwriter’s tradfolk pairing, with a debut album And We’ll All Go Together short but rich with songs so carefully constructed and arranged, they hardly shift when performed live on screen from Kilgour’s foyer, as we’ve seen and shared on Facebook.

But if the songs of this new project originally come from a different, more distant heart, their performance belies how deeply that heart becomes intertwined in the right hands and voices. Paired with Pajunen, whose voice is equally strong in harmony, the singer-songwriter’s turn towards the tradition is personal as anything, and deeper than one might expect, voicing reclamation of the very heartbeat that is folk music. This set of traditional American folk songs could have been a throw-away, but it isn’t, thanks to sparse arrangements, harmonic interplay between fiddle and plaintive voice, and the innate hope, humility, and sweetness that touches everything Kilgour performs. Instead, in the duo’s hands and voices, the tradition sings itself anew. No higher compliment, nor fate, can we offer, beyond the performance itself.

We spotted Lauren O’Connell here last month, when Bandcamp’s first round of artist supportive give-backs drove her to record and release a tiny collection of Quarantine Covers; since then, she’s added several new tracks to the collection of songs recorded solo in her home in California, and her recent take on That Thing You Do is especially dear, an apt tribute to songwriter Adam Schlessinger of Fountains of Wayne, who wrote the Academy Award-nominated song for the film of the same name way back in 1996, and was, sadly, one of the first artists to pass from the coronavirus.

But if regular readers recognize the name and voice, it’s for good reason: O’Connell has been a constant companion here, with slight, spare interpretations of Neil Young, Iris Dement, David Rawlings, Randy Newman, Oh Death, and more featuring frequently in our mixtapes and songwriter features, most of them sourced back to her first covers album, released just before we moved the blog to its current home. And so the slow release of singles leading up to the eventual release of not one but TWO new covers albums, comprised of songs mostly unheard by all but a few, recorded exclusively for Patreon over the years but spiffed up a bit in the studio afterwards, is a joyous promise, indeed – as is the split between, with the first album coming in a bit more acoustic, and the second featuring a set of songs totally transformed into perfect hipster folkpop, and beautifully, achingly fleshed out in the studio, over the course of the year gone by. Take a listen to the two released so far – a lovely Jeff Tweedy number, and a take on popular Big Star cover tune Thirteen that adds much to the canon – and then either join her Patreon page to access the albums now, or wait in sufferance as the songs drop one at a time, every two weeks, on all the usual platforms, until the eventual release of both Covers II and Covers III.

One-time Nickel Creek cofounder Sean Watkins was here recently, too, thanks to a beautiful early 2020 release with neotradfolkers The Bee Eaters featured in our February (Re)Covered roundup, complete with covers of Warren Zevon and Paul Simon that rang in the head for days after we first played ’em. But Watkins has been busy this year, and new release brother sister – a partnership of sound and songs recorded with sister Sara of Grammy-winning trio I’m With Her – has its own quirky charm: sibling voices in diverse settings, from the sparse and almost unadorned to the boogie-woogie fiddle-and-kick of barnburning closer Keep It Clean, a Watkins Family Hour drawn close and intimate as its title. Here, a video version recorded at fave YouTube cover house stories recently – not on the album, but worth the Green Day vibe transcribed into smallfolk – joins our favorite album cover, another Zevon song, this one sweet and aching in its simplicity, every note a masterpiece.

• The Watkins Family: Accidentally Like A Martyr (orig. Warren Zevon)

Finally, news of a different kind of project: free recordings for the taking, all covers of the same song, prompted and curated by one-time teen sensation and current activist and community rabblerouser Janis Ian (yes, THAT Janis Ian) in the early stages of our communal separation. The song is new, and the mechanism as much her style as the song itself; both sheet music and songbook are offered openly, with an offer that those who record it will also share their interpretation on her own page. And happily, the song itself – appropriately titled Better Times Will Come – isn’t bad, nor inappropriate for this sort of thing: catchy, open to broad interpretation; inspirational, without being too twee or unrealistic.

When we first caught wind of Better Times Will Come, we assumed it would attract an older crowd – this is, after all, Janis Ian, whose fame was greatest decades ago, at seventeen, though her respect among her peers has only grown as she has come into her own on the folk circuit more recently, decades past the restrictions of industry and youth. But the breadth of song and coverage that is emerging as the project takes flight speaks to that broader, deeper respect within the community, both for Ian herself, and her way with words and melody. As such, the almost twenty and counting coversingers of the song shared on the webpage now include not only John Gorka, Christine Lavin, and Cliff Eberhardt with Louise Mosrey, but Natalia Zuckerman, Casey Dreissen, and even Frank Turner, in a surprisingly upbeat take complete with tambourine and a high energy base and guitar strum we could not, in good conscience, choose not to share here, as well. Listen, and then head over to the Better Times Will Come project page, to download them all.

• Frank Turner: Better Times Will Come (orig. Janis Ian)
• Natalia Zuckerman: Better Times Will Come (ibid.)

Always ad-free and artist-centered, Cover Lay Down has been on the web since 2007, thanks to kind support from artists, promoters, and YOU.

So do your part: listen, and then follow links back to the sources we provide, to share your love with those who make this all happen. And though it should go without saying, as always, when you find what you love, please be a patron, too: buy the music, or the t-shirt, from artist-friendly sources like Bandcamp; donate to newly-formed artist support funds, join Patreons and Kickstarters, and follow Venmo and Paypal links to give back if you can, the better to keep the music flowing in these troubling times.

There comes a time in every New England winter where the endless snow begins to weigh heavy on the soul, threatening to crush the heart. Hope sputters as we teeter on the edge of resignation. Every weather report is like a curse. Spring becomes but a dream.

Which is to say: the mailbag is stuffed to overflowing with the good stuff again, and we’re pleased as punch to finally have a chance to steep in it all. Today, then: news and new tracks from some of our favorite artists of yesteryear, with a second set to follow towards the end of the week. May their vibrant energy serve as a perfect antidote to the numb, dumb eternity of February.

Caroline Herring was an early favorite here on the blog, an anomalous southern voice on the Massachusetts-based Signature Sounds label whose 2007 album Lantana chilled us so powerfully with its haunting portrayals of character and place, and its perfect balance of serenity and emotional investment, that we could not help but reach out for our very first interview in celebration of follow-up CD/EP set Golden Apples Of The Sun/Silver Apples of the Moon, with its fine covers of Cyndi Lauper, Kate Wolf, and Lefty Frizzell.

The literate singer-songwriter’s newest project I Will Go Into The Day, which dropped January 11, is nominally a children’s album, one that wholly succeeds in its attempt to “set to music the magic and wonder of childhood, and celebrate the joys of imaginative play”; as long-time proponents of kidfolk, we’re excited to steep in it on those merits alone, and eager, too, to share the album’s two covers – a sweet children’s choir version of traditional song John The Rabbit and a translated take on 1940s yiddish composition Donna Donna that transforms the tune cleanly into a powerful Appalachian lullaby. But we’re equally thrilled to find this natural antidote to the bleeps and distances of the technological life simmering with more for the mature and discerning ear, with songs that call like wistful sirens to adult nostalgia and centeredness even as Herring’s gentle guitar and warm alto warble soothe at the surface.

Caroline Herring: Donna, Donna (orig. Sholom Secunda)

Caroline Herring: John The Rabbit (trad.)

Thanks to some sweet harmonies, timeless originals from mournful to majestic, and reverent, pitch-perfect takes on Norman Blake’s Church Street Blues and Townes Van Zandt’s Loretta, Our Lady of the Tall Trees, the debut album from “new old-time” singer-songwriters and master instrumentalists Cahalen Morrison and Eli West, was one of our favorite releases of 2012; their subsequent set at Freshgrass was the highlight of our weekend, and we said so here, in a feature that seems to have been eaten by our subsequent move from one server to another. Their brand new sophomore effort I’ll Swing My Hammer With Both My Hands finds the pair comfortable with their sound: masterful licks from mandolin, banjo and guitar twine with that lonesome duo sound exquisitely on ballads and kickers alike, making the album a fine follow-up with range and resonance, an equal mix of cowboy folk and true blue bluegrass from one of the most duly and well-celebrated young duos on the scene today. Check out upbeat original Livin’ In America, lonesome heartbreaker Down In The Lonesome Draw, swinging fiddle-and-mandolin waltz version of Louvin Brothers classic Lorene, and more over at their webpage, and then snag the album via Bandcamp.

Cahalen Morrison & Eli West: Green Pastures (trad.)

Cahalen Morrison & Eli West: Voices of Evening (orig. Alice Gerrard)

It’s rare for us to come back to an artist so soon after first discovery. But as noted in our most recent New Artists, Old Songs collection back in January, Molly Tuttle isn’t just a co-lead vocalist and guitar/banjo player for The Tuttles with AJ Lee, she’s also a budding Berklee-trained talent of her own – and her sets with both the Berklee Bluegrass crew and with her own sidestage trio at last weekend’s Joe Val Bluegrass Fest had the crowds nodding and smiling, leaving us looking for more. Happily, Tuttle proves her mettle and then some with a five-track self-titled duo EP released in early February with trio member and fellow Berklee-trained fiddler John Mailander, now available via Bandcamp, featuring lilting coverage of Joni Mitchell, traditional bluegrass tune Moonshiner, a fine original set from Molly and John, and a surprisingly sweet, robust take on country music singer-songwriter Keith Whitley’s I’m Over You that channels Kasey Chambers’ best country heartbreak.

Molly Tuttle and John Mailander: Morning Morgantown (orig. Joni Mitchell)

Molly Tuttle and John Mailander: I’m Over You (orig. Keith Whitley)

Midwestern singer-songwriter John Statz, who named his last release for the single cover among its potent narrative portraits of granite and field, was one of our favorite discoveries of 2012, and the proof, as always, is in the pursuit: since then, we’ve dug deeply into his back catalog, picking up older albums from his formative years, fallen in love with the longing and despair he brings to his live take on Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel No. 2, and found depth in his plainspoken poetry and joy in his celebration of the world as it is, leaving us eager to help spread the gospel.

Statz recently holed up in a Vermont snowstorm to record a new album, with fellow Wisconsinite and Cover Lay Down fave Jeffrey Foucault on board as producer and back-up musician; after catching the pair together at Northampton venue The Parlor Room in December, and recording a couple of covers to boot, we’re eager, indeed, to hear the results. But those looking for an early fix need look no farther than 12 August, a live duo album from Statz and fellow midwestern folk troubadour and honest storyteller Josh Harty that drops today. Minimally produced, with a live session sound that celebrates the intimacy of song and place, the album features gentle performances of originals from each artist, plus covers of Greg Brown, John Prine, and more; head over to Bandcamp for streaming, digital download, and physical copies.

Josh Harty & John Statz: Paradise (orig. John Prine)

Josh Harty & John Statz: Worrisome Years (orig. Greg Brown)

John Statz w/ Jeffrey Foucault: Old Old Fashioned (orig. Frightened Rabbit)
(live from The Parlor Room, December 2013)

Finally, at least for today: they may have earned their place on the mainstage through top audience honors in the 2012 Emerging Artist’s Showcase, but their impromptu hour-long set in the sunwarmed vendor area at this year’s Falcon Ridge Folk Festival simply blew us away, with a cover of Ophelia, a couple of traditional barnstormers, and a small set of raw originals delivered with a combination of explosive energy and unceasing craftsmanship that both reinforced and transcended earlier comparisons to the Avett Brothers. Now, fresh off an onstage gig as the musical accompaniment for the American Repertory Theater’s winter production of Robin Hood, neotraditional Americana stringband Poor Old Shine are back home in their native Connecticut, and back on our radar with two holiday homages: a haunting Blind Willie McTell tune filmed by flashlight in a California cabin last Halloween, and a brand new Valentine’s Day delight that transforms 80’s Huey Lewis and the News soundtrack hit The Power Of Love into a loving living-room slowdance featuring their cosmic blend of old-time instrumentation and footstomping wail, trading off lines and harmonies like The Band in their very best bootleg days. Back To The Future, indeed: I’d say these guys are going places, but all I see is up.

Poor Old Shine: The Power Of Love (orig. Huey Lewis and the News)

Poor Old Shine: Lay Some Flowers On My Grave (orig. Blind Willie McTell)

Looking for more Cover Lay Down in your life? “Like” our Facebook page for new coverfolk from CLD fave Al Lewis, ongoing updates from the blog and beyond, and more bonus streams and videos shared as we find ’em. And stay tuned for a second round of new 2014 releases and one-shot cover tunes from more artists previously celebrated here, including great new discoveries from Cheyenne Mize Marie, Amy Black, Juliana Richer Daily, and Charlie Parr.