It's been a long week, and I'm up against deadline on several fronts, trying to balance a professional review, impending midterms, and the creation of a virtual school tour with the usual package of parenting, teaching, school committee policymaking and the occasional nap. There's plenty of coverfolk in the hopper, and I'm aiming for a compendium this weekend to clear the decks a bit. But to tide us over, here's a repost from our very first month on the web, featuring Lucy Kaplansky , a singer-songwriter whose longing vocals and way with confessional [...]
First and foremost: To my immense and pleasurable surprise, as of last week, Cover Lay Down has broken into the top 100 over at leading music blog aggregator Hype Machine . Thanks, folks. It is, as always, an honor and a privilege to serve the community, and I appreciate the recognition that such list-making signifies. It's worth noting here that although bandwidth costs rise with each new tier in popularity, we are probably one a very few blogs to make it that high on the list without [...]
Johnny Cash: Cry Cry Cry [ purchase ] Cry Cry Cry: By Way of Sorrow (written by Julie Miller ) [ purchase ] I batted around a few different ideas for my contribution this week, but kept coming back to the phrasing of the theme... and couldn't resist my need to tie together the two incarnations of Cry Cry Cry of which I'm aware: ~ the title of Johnny Cash's song [...]
Though I consider myself a folk blogger first and foremost, as our masthead notes, coversong has its own appeal, both as kitsch and culture. And I make no apologies for the focus, nor do I regret the readership it brings. After all, even if just a few of you get hooked on a new song or artist each week, we all win in the process. Of course, it's worth noting that, as a coverblogger, I'm somewhat of an anomaly. The community of coverbloggers is a small one, and it tends [...]
I was dreaming, but I should have been with you instead... Here at Cover Lay Down, we pride ourselves on our diligent publishing schedule - twice a week every week, Wednesdays and Sundays without fail. Which makes it all the more embarrassing to have passed out on the couch just after supper last night, never to return to full-bore consciousness until the morning light hit the window, warning me of impending tardiness. To be fair, it's been a long week already: parent meetings and a full-period [...]
This is from a Putumayo issue called American Folk. I love that label and all the different music I get to sample. MP3 File
The Louvin Brothers: The Angels Rejoiced Last Night [ purchase ] Lucy Kaplansky: The Angels Rejoiced Last Night [ purchase ] As I alluded to earlier, I'm on my way out the door for my annual double-shot of bluegrass and folk, featuring two weeks in a field with ten thousand folks I consider family, and not an internet connection in sight. It's the closest I come to heaven each year, let me tell you, [...]
One of the primary reasons I focus on coversong here at Cover Lay Down is because I believe that covers are a great way to make the process of discovering new artists both comfortable and familiar. Most of the time, whether the organizing principle of a given post is the interpretive work of one singer-songwriter, or a single artists' songbook, this means a focus on popular songs, and less popular artists performing them. After all, you don't need me to introduce you to Bob Dylan, but you're much less likely to have heard Angel Snow's [...]
Gas isn't getting any cheaper, so now that you're back from the confusingly-named fields and stages of Bonnaroo , where Ben Folds retired his lush, hushed cover of Bitches Ain't Shit (see Fong Songs for a great live-from-Bonnaroo recording), it's time to start looking at a few festivals closer to home. For us, this means our own stomping grounds, here in the American Northeast. And for my money, there's no better festival around than the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival , a four-day, four-stage extravaganza of music, dancing, and live [...]
Bill Morrissey: Texas Blues [ purchase ] The NYC folk revival was an underground hothouse of confessional acoustic music in 1984; many artists felt ready for major label attention, but recording equipment was prohibitively expensive, and demos were hard to come by. In support of this phenomenon, The Songwriter Collective, a long-standing Greenwich Village coffeehouse and songwriter's performing space, started recording and releasing compilation albums of their singer-songwriters once a month as an audio magazine. They called it Fast Folk, and it quickly became the breeding [...]
My younger daughter turns three tomorrow, and we've spent the weekend celebrating with extended family: a trip to the circus yesterday, brunch and a slightly damp walkaround at 19th century "living museum" Old Sturbridge Village today. It's been exhausting, to be honest -- putting the girls in their spring dresses, driving back and forth the length of Massachusetts, and advocating for the kids sanity among the best intentions of so many family members is a lot of work. But I'm grateful for the distraction. Because if I had a chance to really sit and [...]
Thanks to email submissions, new releases and discoveries, and a newly-purchased CD repair kit, it's time for yet another edition of (Re)Covered , a monthly feature here on Cover Lay Down in which we recover a few songs that dropped through the cracks just a little too late to make it into the posts where they belonged. I saw Lucy Kaplansky last month at the UnCommon Coffeehouse with my father; as always, she turned in a wonderful, intimate set, including great covers [...]
I figured it would be fitting to end our contest week with a theme that would help us transition back from the countrified edge of folk. Thus: folk singers covering cowboy songs. Enjoy! Continuing our discussion from earlier this week: back when the world was acoustic, a guitar and a voice could travel a long way, from back porch to prairie campfire, and be different only by context, and the tone it lends. Since then, of course, our sense of genre has [...]
Both Howard and I are doing a fair whack of commuting these days. So there's a lot of time to listen to music, gaze out of the window and think deep thoughts. And I keep finding myself coming over all peculiar on the train. The joys of modern technology mean that I have a veritable treasure trove of sad songs for company and, my God, some of them show no mercy when it comes to plucking at the heartstrings. If you're reading this site, then you'll know what I mean. Still, nothing [...]
Cover Lay Down
Star Maker Machine
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lonesome music
I’ll Just Leave This Here #161
How High Can You Hear? Test Your Hearing Now!
[MP3] Cosmo Jarvis – “Sunshine”
Taste And Try Before You Buy
BAND OF HORSES – The Funeral (Sound Remedy Remix)
