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.

someone watches you / you won’t leave the rails

I fell for this Bill Fay song the first time I heard it in the Wilco movie I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. But where Jeff Tweedy’s version is a humble benediction that casts out fear (and which I’ve used on a dozen mixtapes), this version from Damien Jurado and Richard Swift rises up all spectral and echoey, like a lost gospel choir in some knockaround vacant Southern church. Affecting and fabulous.

Be Not So Fearful – Damien Jurado and Richard Swift

Be Not So Fearful (live at the Vic, 1/6/03) – Jeff Tweedy

This is the first track on the collaboration album Other People’s Songs that Secretly Canadian labelmates Jurado and Swift recorded late this summer and released for free. Yup, free.

Go get it here, and read more about the song selection and recording process over here. Swift produced Jurado’s Saint Bartlett album this year, and I once saw Swift open for Wilco — a neat perfect circle of music.

watch the circles take you home

I have two musical items that I would like to share with you tonight related to Admiral Fallow, a sextet from Glasgow that I’ve just been introduced to. This band couples winsomely intelligent, sharply evocative lyrics with ambling orchestral builds — starring both clarinets and foot-stomping in equal measure.

There is an immediately warm similarity to countrymates Frightened Rabbit, and in fact the two will be sharing the stage on several dates this spring. The Admiral Fallow debut album Boots Met My Face will be re-released in March 2011. It’s spun together both fine and real.

Squealing Pigs – Admiral Fallow

You’ll probably be singing along with that song after two or three listens, like I was. You can stream the whole album on Bandcamp; I am particularly captivated by their songs “Subbuteo,” and “Taste The Coast,” — even though the latter may have been written about a cold northern sea five thousand miles from my home near the coast of California, I feel the same way they do about the salty air. The clever simile-lover and poetry-reader in me also stopped short over the song “Dead Against Smoking,” in which a woman with skin the color of a violet golden sky, and inspires this striking chorus:

You’re like gasoline.
You’re like the willow tree.
You’re like a split screen.
But you’re the green in me.

I’m a sucker.

Second item of note: Admiral Fallow frontman Louis Abbott (below in the stripes) recently took part in this rad mini-movement in Glasgow where the city’s finest folk musicians do “wee jaunts,” playing a number of short shows en masse in completely unlikely places, like restrooms, subways, and stairwells. This made me laugh in utter delight; they sound so joyous covering Bon Iver, with their voices reverberating all around them.

I’m on my seventh eighteenth time watching it.

For Emma (Bon Iver) – Admiral Fallow & Blochestra

you get a brick and you drop it down on me

From the earliest roots of music in our souls, I have to think that melody and faith and God and sex and death are all intermingled in a completely inseparable way, at the basest of levels. I am drawn to hearing other people untangle these things in honest songs, through unflinching confessionals. Like the blunt-force emotional honesty in “Wake Up Dead Man” by U2, “In The Dark” by Josh Ritter, “Casimir Pulaski Day” by Sufjan Stevens, or most of the songs by Mumford & Sons or David Bazan (just to name a few off the top of my head), the Deer Tick song “Christ Jesus” is a howl of questioning from the deepest parts of the artist.

This year’s Black Dirt Sessions is a stripped, often-beautiful collection of songs tracing a blindingly difficult year for frontman John McCauley, one that took him close to a breakdown of sorts. Over a piano dirge, you won’t hear a more guttural wail on a song this year – it brings chills to the back of my neck.

Christ Jesus – Deer Tick

Said the bottom of his belly, that’s where he would keep me
Christ Jesus, as I’m floating
you get a brick and you drop it down on me

It’s the time of the week no one sees but me
Christ Jesus, as I’m drowning
and I struggle to breathe, it’s your face I don’t see
Christ Jesus, please don’t leave us
if in peace you’ll keep us
well then you should have believed us

After first being wrongly distracted by McCauley’s plaid kilt and California Raisins tattoos when I saw Deer Tick live at Monolith in 2009, I’ve been letting their music grow into me with its smart tentacles. I’ve mentioned before that Deer Tick reminds me often of Ryan Adams in several of his incarnations (Gold, Heartbreaker, Love is Hell), or perhaps Tom Waits.

This recent video McCauley recorded for The Voice Project is simply arresting, so much so that I had to make it into an mp3 to takeaway.

L.I.E. (The Shivers) – John McCauley

SOLO TOUR DATES: JOHN MCCAULEY & IAN O’NEIL
Fri-Jan-14, Boston, MA – Middle East Upstairs
Sat-Jan-15, Providence, RI – Met Café
Sun-Jan-16, Northampton, MA – Iron Horse
Wed-Jan-19, New York, NY – City Winery
Thu-Jan-20, New Haven, CT – Daniel Street
Fri-Jan-21, Philadelphia, PA – First Unitarian Church Sanctuary
Sat-Jan-22, York, PA – Strand Capitol Performing Arts Center
Sun-Jan-23, Washington, DC – Rock and Roll Hotel

broken hearts and dirty windows

I started my morning with a hearty sing-in-the-shower rendition of “Angel From Montgomery” (those acoustics!) in the sticky warmth of Florida, and am ending it tonight back in the ten degree weather in clear cold Colorado. My sister asked over coffee what song I had been singing, and a discussion on John Prine followed. John Prine has stuck in my mind today, all his perfect lyrical constructions and simple folk truth, and was the soundtrack to my flight home this evening (while I finished Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and openly cried fat hot tears on the plane, but hey that’s another story).

If you own an old pickup truck (or can borrow one) to traverse some dusty roads in the countryside, this year’s Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows compilation of John Prine covers sounds especially good. The title of the album comes from the 1972 song “Souvenirs” (“Broken hearts and dirty windows / make life difficult to see”), and I’ve been meaning to mention this comp for months. The whole record is obviously rich because of the fodder to work with and the superb gathering of artists contributing, but I think Conor Oberst and his Mystic Valley Band contribute my favorite cover of the bunch:

My car is stuck in Washington and I cannot find out why
Come sit beside me on the swing and watch the angels cry
It’s anybody’s ballgame, it’s everybody’s fight
And the streetlamp said as he nodded his head
It’s lonesome out tonight

Stylistically this absolutely fits in with the rollicking twang of their own compositions on 2008′s Outer South, and Conor’s caged, restless energy shines through brilliantly.

But there are so many great tracks on this collection, from the Avett Brothers singin’ about blowing up your TV and moving to the country, to Josh Ritter’s “Mexican Home” (which I got to see him perform live in Telluride), to My Morning Jacket’s “All The Best” (reminiscent of the golden buoyancy of the track they contributed to the I’m Not There soundtrack). Add to that a glowing Justin Vernon, the pensive Justin Townes Earle, the heartbreak of Deer Tick, then pin it all together with Prine’s first-rate songwriting and I am sold.

Stream the whole thing and buy it over on Bandcamp for just ten bucks. They’ve got it tagged with classifications of “indie, Nashville.” Sounds about right to me.

My only frown came from the fact that no one covered “Speed of The Sound of Loneliness,” my favorite Prine tune. Luckily Amos Lee did a perfect one in 2003:

Speed Of The Sound of Loneliness (John Prine) – Amos Lee

but my words just blow away

Liz Durrett is from Athens, Georgia, and has the sort of warmly knowing voice that makes me miss Cat Power just a little bit less. Her first two albums were produced by her uncle Vic Chesnutt, while her latest album Outside Our Gates (2008, Warm Records) was produced by Eric Bachmann of Archers of Loaf / Crooked Fingers fame.

This Cat Stevens song has always been one of my best-loved songs to sing out loud, in all its unadorned perfection and plaintive hopelessness. Liz’s version is haunting and spare, making little chills dance down my spine.

How Can I Tell You (Cat Stevens) – Liz Durrett

The resonant, affecting result here reminds me strongly of another favorite cover treatment, Serena Ryder doing Band of Horses’ “Funeral.”

Liz contributes to a track on the forthcoming Crooked Fingers EP Reservoir Songs II, and can also be heard doing some vocals for Phosphorescent on their album Pride. With some free mp3s and a back catalog worth exploring on her website, also make sure to listen to the beautiful duet she does with her late Uncle Vic for free download.

[thanks as always, D.]

this is an old song, these are old blues

As much as I tried to appreciate the music of Joanna Newsom, her childish mew always made me feel a bit like I was watching Sesame Street, and I stalled each time I tried. But she is no doubt an intensely poetic, smart lyricist, and I found today that hearing her song “Sadie” covered by Texas artist Danny Malone finally brings it out somewhere that I can dig into it.

Danny Malone is from Austin, and this cover is a few years old, off his I Am Not Alive EP. His raw tenor with a hint of warble reminds me of Conor Oberst, or Nate Ruess from The Format (coming to Boulder next Friday with fun.!), both artists I enjoy immensely. The gal who recommended I listen to this cover said, “I didn’t decide that I liked it until the second time through,” but me, the affinity was more immediate.

Disguised as a rambling alt-country tune, this builds and then explodes like some sort of orange sunrise. But hell — what a sad song.

Sadie (Joanna Newsom cover) – Danny Malone

This is an old song, these are old blues
and this is not my tune, but it’s mine to use
and the seabirds where the fear once grew
will flock with a fury and they will bury what’d come for you

And the mealy worms in the brine will burn
in a salty pyre among the fauns and ferns
And the love we hold, and the love we spurn
Will never grow cold, only taciturn…

New Josh Ritter & Dawn Landes: “500 Miles”

As if Josh Ritter and his folk-singer wife Dawn Landes weren’t already cute enough together, now we get to hear their voices together on a free new download. And it is sublime. They sure as heck better have some golden-voiced offspring.

STREAM: 500 Miles (Hedy West cover) [download here]

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Josh sets out on a European tour (more than 500 miles) today, before looping back around through these domestic lands in late autumn. You may recall how much I loved the Telluride shows, so you know I will be there for the Denver stop on 11/11.

All tour dates here: GO.

[photo credit Brian Stowell]