We're braving it alone this week, the wee one, the elderchild and me. And though this meant an especially sniffly, snuggly Monday night, happily, the four stages of grief have passed quickly in such intense, obvious circumstances, leaving us accepting, if not yet perfectly balanced in our adoption of the adapted dance that is life with Daddy. If I'm nervous but grateful for the chance to try, it's in no small part because my time with the kids is too often stolen from Mama's world. From the moment we find ourselves on the [...]
Traditional death ballads aren't a dime a dozen on the modern papcharts, but they're a recognizable form among the folkways. Most deal frankly with unrequited and/or unequal love and its aftereffects, with gruesome detail and haunted characters; most go so far as to show the callousness of humankind through ghosts and body parts transformed, though history suggests that such lascivious imagery was more commonplace in the Puritan and previous worlds, where the funerial was a family affair, life lessons were taught and learned through song, pining could kill, and death in its stark bodily form was an everpresent [...]
I've written about my father several times here on Cover Lay Down, citing him as a friend and fellow folkfan whose companionship I cherish, especially now that I have children of my own. I've written about my wife, too, and my children, when the occasion warranted it. But other than a 2008 feature on Mothers of the Folkworld , we've skipped over Mother's Day for four years running - leaving my own mother conspicuously absent from these virtual pages. If I've avoided taking the time to parse the particulars of our often volatile [...]
I'm of an age where Tim Hardin 's Reason To Believe is heard first and foremost in the voice of a late-career Rod Stewart - an inauspicious echo for a song so powerful, and so well-covered. But a good coverwatcher learns to spot trends among the liner notes as he gathers in the sheaves. And so, with today's culminating feature, we come to honor a gradual and growing awareness of the work of the sixties and seventies singer-songwriter among a generation of artists and fans born after his rise and fall from grace [...]
We've got an unusually large post today, both to acknowledge a growing backlog of recent projects from familiar, beloved folk artists, and to make up for our recent vacation-driven absence from these pages. Read on for an unheard-of 20-track (Re)Covered set , focused around a plethora of new releases and recordings from singer-songwriters and bands previously featured on the Cover Lay Down radar screen... I've known of Halifax-based singer-songwriter Rose Cousins for years, though almost exclusively through her rich and ongoing collaboration with a number of local [...]
As noted yesterday, we're in Puerto Rico for an extended vacation, lazily hopping around the eastern side of the island in fits and starts. Old San Juan was my kind of town, and the perfect port of entry: just touristy enough, with authentic architecture and blue cobblestone streets, fine funky coffeeshops, and the most beautiful green labyrinth of a hotel, with resident parrots and a view of the sea over La Perla off the balcony. But two days in the city was more than enough, and now we're in a stunningly spacious rental home in Ceiba, with [...]
Sunday, April 15 Dear Reader, Traditionally, when yours truly takes off for other climes, I leave behind a feature set or two of place-relevant coverage . But we're off to San Juan in the morning for a long school break in the sun, with a spring in our step and an island-hopping itinerary on our mind. And unusually, there's not much in the way of coverfolk from Puerto Rico to be found in the aether. So here's a few tracks about going places, pre-posted as a letter to [...]
Our thoughts and prayers go out this weekend to 62 year old Australian-born pop superstar Robin Gibb, founding member and long-time lead singer of disco trailblazers the Bee Gees, who is reportedly fighting for his life in a London hospital after a long struggle with cancer. In his honor, we're recovering a June 2008 feature which mines my origin as an audiophile and pays tribute to the seminal work of the Bee Gees through an expanded set of folk-tuned coverage. Gibb and his brothers may have spent their careers on the far end of [...]
Before we were slaves in Egypt, we were Joseph's brothers and their wives, working at the right hand of a seemingly benevolent pharaoh. But as more modern freedom movements have reminded us over and over again, trust in institutions is a trust misplaced, for power shared unilaterally is power that can be withheld. 400 years and a dozen generations, and we find ourselves both enslaved and feared for our potential power as usurpers. And yet. Without Pharaoh's breeding program, we would not have become a people. Without the pressure of [...]
Seattle indie singer-songwriter Damien Jurado is an experimentalist at heart, a literate musician who built his career on a cult following, early collaborative work as an indie rock band member with high school compatriot David Bazan, and a set of early self-released, cassette-only lo-fi experimental recordings featuring found sounds, neo-punk sensibilities, and carefully constructed, heartbreakingly elegant deconstructions of tonality and narrative images. And though more recent albums, such as 2010 masterwork Saint Bartlett and aptly celebrated new 2012 release Maraquopa, feature rich harmonic elements and hollow, crystalline atmospheres mixed with the rhythmic and sonic nuances [...]
It's finally Spring, though the warm winter shuffled our sense of season a bit this year. And just as the turning of the calendar has brought an early bloom of daffodils and crocuses to the garden, so has it revealed a growing set of cover collections and tribute albums, each featuring a beautiful bouquet of songs of and from artists we love. Today, we gather in these new and newly-found releases, providing news of the good stuff, a coverlovers delight. Enjoy! Boston-based folk foursome Pesky [...]
South By Southwest , the hippest multi-day, multi-venue industry bash in all the land, has finally drawn to its inevitable conclusion, and all across the country, artists and music bloggers are stumbling back to their daily lives a little wiser, a little wearier, and a whole lot more hungover. There's a tiny fragment of my heart that lives forever in jealousy of those musicians, promotional types, and hard-core blog-authors who clutter my feed with their legendary experience this time of year. But although I have spent much of the past week living vicariously [...]
I think of metal and its various forms only peripherally, as some other tribe's music, acknowledged as valid yet neither understood nor experienced from the outside. But because metal rose in the sixties and seventies, a warped response to blues rock and the psychedelics that raised intensity to a level previously unheard, I have always known it; its culture is largely unchanged in nature, focusing on a core fashion and the shared experience of the live event, even as it attracts new generations. And, as within our ever-popular 2009 exploration of Punk through coverage , though [...]
As noted on our Donate page , here at Cover Lay Down we insist on remaining ad-free and non-profit - the better to focus our attention and your support on those artists we tout week in and week out, thus making it possible for them to keep their hands and voices in the game full-time, for the benefit of all. But making and reinforcing connections between musicians and the community they serve isn't free. The amount of bandwidth it takes to serve our growing readership runs well over a terabyte of data [...]
A coverblogger's inbox is always full, and though much of what we receive is off-genre or original, following the threads of inspiration is often a fruitful pursuit. But regardless of source or format, inevitably, the ongoing collection reaches a critical mass. And when it does, it becomes imperative to share, lest we find ourselves unable to move on for fear of losing track of the good stuff. Today, then, we return to the mailbag to spread the word on the best song interpretations we've received from fellow bloggers, artists, managers, promotional folks and [...]
A coverblogger's inbox is always full, and though much of what we receive is off-genre or original, following the threads of inspiration is often a fruitful pursuit. But regardless of source or format, inevitably, the ongoing collection of "the good stuff" reaches a critical mass. And when it does, it becomes imperative to share, lest we find ourselves unable to move on for fear of losing track of the good stuff. Today, then, we return to the mailbag to spread the word on the best song interpretations we've received from fellow bloggers, artists, [...]
I had other plans last night - dance class chaperonage and an early fast food supper out with the kids; a long school committee meeting; a late-night blog entry that bowed to a particularly delicious crop of video-driven mailbox coverage. But Mother Nature had a different idea, and here, in a town ravaged by October blizzards and June tornadoes, we've learned to listen to her insistent ways. And so, after months of startling sun and warmth, and what was surely the driest season on record, winter came at last to our little pocket of [...]
I had other plans last night - dance class chaperonage and an early fast food supper out with the kids; a long school committee meeting; a late-night blog entry that bowed to a particularly delicious crop of video-driven mailbox coverage. But Mother Nature had a different idea, and here, in a town ravaged by October blizzards and June tornadoes, we've learned to listen to her insistent ways. And so, after months of startling sun and warmth, and what was surely the driest season on record, winter came at last to our little pocket of [...]
Though her emergence dates back to the mid-seventies, Dublin singer Mary Black doesn't write much of her own material; instead, her work is firmly grounded in the rich Irish tradition of folk discovery and interpretation. Her dozen solo albums include both new songs written by songwriting partner-in-crime Noel Brazil and traditional folksongs from the vast annals of the British Isles, but the bulk of their tracks are comprised of pliant, plaintive takes on songs from the catalogs of contemporary singer-songwriters from both sides of the pond. Black's history reads as a typical [...]
It's been a long haul these last couple of weeks, with new projects and courses to teach at work, and budget season fast approaching at the local school committee table. School vacation was cancelled, and the skies and ground remain dry as a bone despite the calendrical claim of New England February, leaving us grey and wan in the pale light of almost-winter above the equatorial line. And here at home, the stress is sky-high, thanks to an unfortunate incident at the beginning of the month that turned us into a single-car family struggling to make ends and [...]
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