Just a quick note to let folks know that, although I'm holding off on posting anything of real significance this close to the move, thanks to some amazing benefactors and patronage, I'm hoping to have good news and a new site address sometime later this week. (Of course, there's always room for a bit more encouragement as the process continues; if you haven't had a chance to offer your support, please check out our call for patronage below.) The plan is to resume regular twice-weekly posting, with the depth and breadth [...]
Just a quick note to let folks know that, although I'm holding off on posting anything of real significance this close to the move, thanks to some amazing benefactors and patronage, I'm hoping to have good news and a new site address sometime later this week. (Of course, there's always room for a bit more encouragement as the process continues; if you haven't had a chance to offer your support, please check out our call for patronage below.) The plan is to resume regular twice-weekly posting, with the depth and breadth [...]
This is from his newest album, Chameleon. MP3 File yousendit
I've tried to keep the metablogging to a minimum here at Cover Lay Down. I appreciate that people like to know about the man behind the curtain, but writing about technical difficulties smacks of navel-gazing narcissism: you come here for the writing and the music, not blogging about blogging. So if you're coming here for the music, welcome, and feel free to scroll to the end of the post for a few relevant tracks. But a few of you have asked. And so, in a nutshell: after an incredible month [...]
I've tried to keep the metablogging to a minimum here at Cover Lay Down. I appreciate that people like to know about the man behind the curtain, but writing about technical difficulties smacks of navel-gazing narcissism: you come here for the writing and the music, not blogging about blogging. So if you're coming here for the music, welcome, and feel free to scroll to the end of the post for a few relevant tracks. But a few of you have asked. And so, in a nutshell: after an incredible month [...]
So far this week, we have already seen some of Bob Dylan’s remarkable range as a songwriter. He is equally adept at love songs, political songs that become generational anthems, and who-knows-whats that nevertheless resonate with people. But something interesting happens with “Man Gave Names to All the Animals”. The song was originally included on Slow Train Coming, Dylan’s somewhat notorious album where he embraced born-again Christianity; as such, the song is part of a suite of songs which function as an eloquent expression of faith. Dylan’s arrangement of the song was a rock-reggae hybrid. But the covers [...]
I had the pleasure of attending Farm Aid on Saturday, and in between great acts like Neil Young, John Mellencamp, Steve Earle, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, and The Elms, there was a lot of talk about the plight of the family farmer. I hadn’t thought that much about the dirt since I went strawberry picking in elementary school and couldn’t find one clean enough for my standards. So for those of you who also forget about the hoe and plow-wielding among us, who are on hard times indeed, here’s a little reminder. And oh, check out [...]
Ever since I chose teaching as a career, Labor Day has been doubly relevant for me: an annual return to the classroom-as-job-site marked by a national holiday in celebration of the organized workplace. This year, however, after leaving a teaching position that just wasn't working out, and subsequently spending the summer carrying hope from one interview to the next, I find myself in a bit of limbo. Which is to say: for the first time in over a decade, labor day looms, and I don't have plans to be anywhere the day [...]
What should we say about something that sounds so like the past that it almost seems out of place in the modern day? The Moondoggies got me thinking such a thing with their Band meets Grateful Dead sound on their debut record for the feisty little label Hardly Art (The Duchess and The Duke, Le Loup). The record is pleasant enough (ie my wife didn't ask me to change it `til the guitar jam halfway through track 3), but it really does conjure up images of Woodstock, the 60's, and little pink houses. [...]
By the time we finally caught pregnant, we had both been teaching for a decade, and that meant the baby name books were right out. After we discarded the archaic and the merely odd, the names that were left were invariably overfamiliar -- we knew "that kid", and thus the name came with baggage we just could not accept. So we took a look at ourselves. Liberal folk, to put it politically, with a sense of adventure, and a love of the world for what it was. We wanted [...]
Walsh Farm: the gorgeous new site of Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival After over thirty years on the same site, for most regular festivalgoers, the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival experience has become intertwined with the landscape of the farm which hosted it, from the steep hill which formed a natural mainstage amphitheater to the even steeper hill which separated the entrance and parking areas from the main camping and festival site. So when the organizers of Grey Fox announced at this winter's Joe Val Festival that [...]
I grew up in the suburbs, where wildlife was scarce, though we had our share of squirrels and birds, and the occasional rabbit sighting in the backyard. When we wanted to see larger animals, we generally headed out to Drumlin Farm , a working farm run by the Audubon Society, where caged birds of prey lined the path to the chick hatchery, the pigs and sheep gave birth every spring, and you could always spot the queen in the glass-lined, thin-sliced beehive, if you looked long enough. There was a pond, too, for crawdad spotting. [...]
Though my father hasn't missed it in decades, I haven't been able to attend the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival since I started teaching over a decade ago -- something about the way a last gasp of hunker-down-and-teach takes over public education as we approach state testing, and the long downhill slide toward the end of the school year. But every year as we hit the last weekend in April my mind begins to muse upon the great acts I saw down there the few years I made it: Los Lobos, the Indigo Girls, Taj [...]
It's been some week here at Cover Lay Down. Features on popular singer-songwriters Billy Bragg and Paul Simon brought us to the top of the charts at musicblog aggregator The Hype Machine and a linkback from New York magazine's Vulture blog. On Friday, almost 900 of you visited the site, a new record; download tracking shows that many of you came in for one song, but stuck around to try something new. Welcome, kudos, and thanks for validating our goals here at Cover Lay Down. But a slow [...]
Cover Lay Down
Keep the Coffee Coming
Star Maker Machine
The Stranger Dance
Cover Me
songsillinois
MP3: Daft Punk – “Horizons” (RAM Japanese Bonus Track)
Listen to producer Jacques Greene’s “On Your Side,” featuring How To Dress Well
