Cover Lay Down

It was a long lonely year, and we missed plenty, we’re sure – a natural artifact of a life lived on the road more than ever, halfway between home and hospital, and work and worry, that kept us from these pages for too many months between the covers of the calendar.

Here in the boyhowdy house, the children – now teenagers, teetering on the cusp of fragile womanhood and a robust maturity – still struggle to manage their illnesses and pain; each school day is a triumph, even if they can only make it in for an hour or two; their strengths and curiosities are increasingly clear and under their control, even as their bodies and their futures remain uncertain. Two hours away, my father fails slowly but surely, his independence increasingly scaffolded by care companions and the plastic accoutrements of age as the strengths of body and brain fade into late-stage early-onset Parkinson’s.

The things we have let falter in the face of such unpredictables are those that once served our souls, and our communities. We pare down our avocations, our calendars overscheduled with check-ins and check-ups, and the forever prospect of upheaval.

January comes on cold, and its hungry fires demand our attention.

But here in the rooms where we listen and write, the new year comes on slow and hopeful nonetheless. The barred owl and kestrel that the elderchild has come to care for as she discovers her avocation remain caged, unreleasable for life, even as she struggles to fly free on her tether of pain and unpredictability. The crafts and designed artifacts the wee one – now tall of stature – brings to painstaking life in the small hours of her insomniac existence take on their own life, too, bold and beautiful, even as their maker still founders to manage the distraction of body and brain. We come to appreciate the small, perfect moments of grace and gravity in ways we could not before.

And here, in the midst of it all, we take the weekend to ourselves. We sift through the tagged and the bookmarked, marking the songs that shouldn’t fade. And in the end, we come up for air with the ones that lasted: fifty tracks, coverfolk all; an afternoon’s worth of folk, roots, and acoustic performances that still shimmer, weeks and months after our discovery.


There’s something for everyone in this year’s three-hour mix, from alternative acoustic indiefolk to Scottish traditionals, from deep roots Americana to gypsy jazzfolk to new-wave alt- and post-folk, from classic-sounding folk radio cuts to the timeless, rare and rarified strains of what folk is at its most fragile and broken. Throw in the delicate, the wild, the beautiful and the strange, and we’ve once again found ourselves looking back at a year of powerful coverage, equally definitive and boundary-stretching in its celebration of the reimagined and the reconstructed, the torn apart and the tenderly treated.

Listen through in order, and feel the set ebb and flow – or just download the zip and shuffle to your heart’s content. Make the songs yours to savor, or keep them in the background, a soundtrack to a life lived courageous and well.

But listen, regardless. Find in each carefully-selected gem a symphony, and a cry to the world that there is still beauty and worth in the consideration of our inheritance of song, and of the world that contains it. And as always, if you like what you hear, follow the threads back to the source, to purchase and share your own favorites, the better to keep the music and the music-making going – for our children, and the generations to come.

The world is good, and its music our eternal sustenance. Let us listen, and be whole again.

The Year’s Best Coverfolk Singles:
A Cover Lay Down Mix (zip!)

• Travis Knapp: Speed of the Sound of Loneliness (orig. John Prine)
• Lotte Kestner: Drive (orig. The Cars)
• Angie McMahon: Everywhere (orig. Fleetwood Mac)
• Jamie Cullum: (Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night (orig. Tom Waits)
• Our Native Daughters: Slave Driver (orig. Bob Marley)
  
• Laura Stevenson: Jesus, Etc. (orig. Wilco)
• Bobtown: American Girl (orig. Tom Petty)
• Chase & Sierra Eagleson: Amsterdam (orig. Gregory Alan Isakov)
• Good Lovelies: Song of the Magi (orig. Anais Mitchell)
• Chatham County Line: Think I’m In Love (orig. Beck)
  
• J Hacha De Zola: Bury A Friend (orig. Billie Eilish)
• Charity Stow: Walkin’ After Midnight (orig. Patsy Cline)
• aeseaes: Realiti (orig. Grimes)
• Lisa Crawley: I Better Be Quiet Now (orig. Elliott Smith)
• ECHO: The Bitter End (orig. Placebo)
  
• David Baron and Donna Lewis: Running Up That Hill (orig. Kate Bush)
• Smith & McClennan: Better Than War (orig. Willow Macky)
• Jaime Michaels: They Call Me Hank (orig. Greg Trooper)
• Soak: Bloodbuzz Ohio (orig. The National)
• Walk Off The Earth: Back To You (orig. Selena Gomez)
  
• Ruston Kelly: Weeping Willow (orig. The Carter Family)
• Rising Appalachia: Cuckoo (trad.)
• Bonny Light Horseman: Bonny Light Horseman (trad.)
• Dan Navarro: Sweet Sixteen (orig. Billy Idol)
• Sonia Stein: Upside Down (orig. Diana Ross)
  
• Ada Pasternak: My Favorite Things (orig. Julie Andrews)
• Catherine McGrath: Grace (orig. Lewis Capaldi)
• Overstyle: Smells Like Teen Spirit (orig. Nirvana)
• Rain Perry: Johnny Appleseed (orig. Joe Strummer)
• Josh Ritter: Old Old Fashioned (orig. Frightened Rabbit)
  
• Luke Jackson: Who Knows Where The Time Goes (orig. Sandy Denny)
• Mountain Man: Take Me Home, Country Roads (orig. John Denver)
• Jake Xerxes Fussell: Drinking Of The Wine (trad.)
• Amy Speace: Kindness (orig. Ben Glover)
• Angharad Drake: Fade Into You (orig. Mazzy Star) 
  
• Deer Tick: Too Sensitive for This World (orig. Ben Vaughn)
• J.S. Ondara: Heart Of Gold (orig. Neil Young)
• Little Mazarn: Dancing In The Dark (orig. Bruce Springsteen)
• Fruit Bats & Vetiver: I Must Be In A Good Place Now (orig. Bobby Charles)
• Ultan Conlon: Fisherman’s Dream (orig. John Martyn)
  
• Ransom Pier: Fruits of my Labor (orig. Lucinda Williams)
• Hurricane Roses: Best Dress (orig. Damien Jurado)
• Grayson Erhard & Morning Bear: Crazy (orig. Gnarls Barkley)
• CLOVES: Blowin’ In The Wind (orig. Bob Dylan)
• The Weepies: Backstreets (orig. Bruce Springsteen)
  
• Hitman Hooker: Please Please Please (orig. The Smiths)
• Hallowell: Tho’ Dark Be My Way (trad.)
• Whitehorse: St. James Infirmary (trad.)
• Shannon LaBrie: All By Myself (orig. Eric Carmen)
• INGS: It’s You I Like (orig. Fred Rogers)
  
  
  

Always ad-free and artist-centric, Cover Lay Down has been digging deep at the ethnographic intersection of folkways and coversong since 2007 thanks to the support of artists, labels, promoters, and YOU.

So do your part. Listen, share, and above all, follow the threads. Purchase the music you love, and in doing so, support the arts and the artists in their struggle to thrive and survive.

And if, in the end, you’ve got goodwill to spare, and want to help keep the coverfolk 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 2018.