I told myself it was all something in her / but as we drove I knew it was something in me

This happened tonight not far from my home in Colorado. Gregory Alan Isakov is a state treasure, and I am a sucker for Springsteen covers that make me take in my breath sharply when I really should be sleeping.

have i come here to play jesus to the lepers in my head?

So all I could do was lay on my living room floor and listen to this version over and over. Hearing the way Damien Rice softly and darkly teases this song into something shatteringly his own, there’s not really other appropriate responses or actions while listening.

One (U2) – Damien Rice

From the forthcoming Q magazine compilation covering my favorite U2 album, I found it especially amazing how Damien totally changes this song just through switching a few pronouns from “you” to “me,” and the hesitancy in his voice, the inhalation of breath. With a few twists of vocabulary, he shifts all the blame and redemption woven through this song squarely onto his shoulders. I heard it in a way I haven’t heard this song in a long time.

i asked you to enter, and then i made you crawl
and you can’t be holding on
to what i’ve got

when all i’ve got is hurt

when you were mine / you were kinda sorta my best friend

Portland’s John Heart Jackie (along with Justin Harris from Menomena) take on Prince’s 1980 lovesick ballad, weaving a swanky little few minutes of atmosphere, in the middle of a tour no less. Impressive.

When You Were Mine (Prince) – John Heart Jackie

GO SEE: John Heart Jackie play Boulder’s Laughing Goat on Sunday, Denver’s Walnut Room on Monday, and Fort Collins’ Everyday Joe’s on Tuesday.

Oh, I also still love the version Crooked Fingers did on that ace EP.

my pourin’ tears are running wild

I’ve been told by a few friends to keep my ears open for Caroline Smith & The Goodnight Sleeps, but I hadn’t really listened until I came across this blues cover today (originally made popular by our good soul-soother/breaker, Ray Charles). It gives me all sorts of chills. Listen to her wail — I love it when musicians surprise me.

Drown In My Own Tears
live at Rock Shop, Brooklyn (Oct 11, 2011)

Caroline’s from Minneapolis, and her sophomore album Little Wind is out now on United Interests. Two songs from that:

Tanktop
Calliope

[video via the lovely Sarahana]

Eef Barzelay (Clem Snide) can cover for me any old time

I’ve said before that I honestly think Eef Barzelay of Clem Snide is one of the most piercing, insightful, weirdly-perfect songwriters making music right now. I saw him live a few years ago in support of his 2009 release Hungry Bird, and his literacy and ability to emotionally incise caught me in an ambush. I commented that it was like an SAT study party, and we could invite John Darnielle and Colin Meloy and I would die happy. Around that time, this was one of my most-listened to songs, with its bluesy melody that somehow manages to feel effervescent through the weight. When Eef repeated the line over and over again – “We are just bracing for the impact by loosening our limbs…” something in my chest still tightens. “Every single one of us has a kitten up a tree.”

Born A Man – Clem Snide

Eef also has this superhuman knack for covering songs in the best possible way, where you stop and hear something in a way you never did before. It’s like when you are washing dishes at the kitchen sink and pause to look up out the window because you hear a thunder crash with the approaching storm, and suddenly your whole yard is bathed in this eerie greenish light. It’s still your yard, the one you’ve sat in a hundred times, but all of a sudden it is foreign and strangely beautiful.

After releasing a startlingly seriously-pretty EP of Journey covers in June, this week Eef released a new cover songs album of selections suggested by fans. The most surprising has got to be his take on Nine Inch Nails’ “The Becoming,” and the purest the rendition of “In the Aeroplane Over The Sea.” Take a listen:

And this remains my all-time favorite cover I think he could ever do – instead of Nico’s halting German alienation, we get a warm hymn, laced with that gorgeous, sad, knowing cello:

I’ll Be Your Mirror (Velvet Underground) – Clem Snide

SHOW ALERT: Eef plays this weekend in Armstrong Hall on the Colorado College campus, opening for Minnesota slowcore pioneers Low (Sunday night, 7pm). It is interesting to note that Armstrong Hall is so very close to Shove Chapel, home of the chapel sessions.

we chase misprinted lies

The 1994 Jar of Flies EP from Alice in Chains was a favorite of wee 15-year-old Heather, an alt-country twanged collection of seven songs that melded the moodiness of AIC with occasional pop flourishes (witness “No Excuses”). That album is one of the few from my collection during those high school years that still holds up relatively well (also, my unparalleled artistic skills in drawing the AIC logo in pencil on my binders).

I’m pretty excited to hear Ryan Adams take on “Nutshell” from that EP, the b-side to the tour-only 7″ he is selling on his current European dates. This cover reminds me of some of his haunted 29-era songs. The other side of the single is “Empty Room,” a new tune that finds Ryan and wife Mandy Moore harmonizing.

Nutshell (Alice in Chains) – Ryan Adams


This is also not the first time Ryan has taken on the songs of Staley & Co. He’s a fan.

Fuel/Friends Chapel Session #4 :: Strand of Oaks

I try real hard not to peg musicians based on appearance, but when you meet Strand Of Oaks for the first time (aka Tim Showalter) you can’t help feel that he should maybe have a CB radio handle and/or make music that sounds like The Allman Brothers. But then he wraps you in a big bear hug and you learn that he used to be a second-grade teacher, and you realize he is a study in contrasts.

His music made my jaw drop the first time he heard it live, there in the church. It was completely unexpected. I am not savvy in the use of pedals and effects in music; as far as I am concerned, it may as well be magic. From the first song “Kill Dragon” that Tim played in the big gorgeous church, there was this polyphonic, shimmering wall of sound that he created with just him and his guitar. It sounded like a thousand pipe organs, or angels, or something extraordinary.

As I interpret it, this first song is about wrestling with talking to a God that seems to have vanished: “Lately he hasn’t been listening to me / I guess he’s a man and he’s meant to leave.” In the void he’s left, Tim traces the litany of things that have gone awry in his life (deaths, sickness) and says he is coming up with an interesting new prayer – to run away with Mary. A little surprised the walls of the church didn’t like, you know, crumble all around us.

Tim writes thoughtful, piercing songs about sleeplessness, faith, and that which we’ve lost. This music is mesmerizing.

CHAPEL SESSION: STRAND OF OAKS
Kill Dragon
End in Flames
The Golden Age (Beck)

ZIP: STRAND OF OAKS CHAPEL SESSION

If you like this music, check out Strand of Oaks’ haunting, gorgeously wrought album Pope Killdragon, and his cover of Joe Pug’s “Hymn #101.” Tim also sang on that cover of “Hard Life” with Joe Pug in this same chapel session.

ALSO: That Beck cover he did reminds me of the version that Beck himself did, also in a chapel – Union Chapel in London.

brighten my northern sky

Northern Sky (Nick Drake) – Denison Witmer

been a long time that I’ve waited
been a long that I’ve known
been a long time that I’ve wondered through the people I have known

oh, if you would and you could, come blow your horn on high

[via]

just before our love got lost you said

I’d heard of 22-year-old Brit James Blake for the riveting imagination he brings to his hazy, glitchy downtempo music that is currently taking the UK (and beyond) by storm. The songs I had heard were glazed, breathy, blissful.

When I was in Los Angeles last week, my friend Garrett played me this Joni Mitchell cover that Blake did on BBC1, and we just sat sprawled on the couch and listened about ten times on repeat in the growing darkness. Neither of us moved to turn it off. It was nothing like what I had heard from Blake before. This cover is an elegy, the soulful excavation of the moment a heart actually breaks. The androgynous, haunting quality of his voice here immediately impacted and riveted me in a way that I can’t remember since Jeff Buckley, or maybe Antony & the Johnsons. Be prepared to bleed, as she warns.

A Case of You (Joni Mitchell) – James Blake

And if you don’t know the original — still some of the most piercing lyrics I think she’s written, but it’s so hard to tell.

A Case of You – Joni Mitchell

Just before our love got lost you said
“I am as constant as a northern star”
and I said “constantly in the darkness
where’s that at?
if you want me I’ll be in the bar…”

I would still be on my feet

sunset’s just my lightbulb burning out

I’ve long had loud, clattery, live cover versions of this song in my arsenal of cry-into-your-coffee music, but thankfully Adam Duritz sat himself down in a quiet room with his piano and a will last week to record a bunch of Valentine’s Day cover songs, and this was the fruit.

Oh My Sweet Carolina (Ryan Adams) – Adam Duritz

Other songs he posted for download last week included versions of material from Steve Earle, Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan. God bless the internet and prolific musicians at home.