It’s been a while since we heard from Laurence Collyer aka The Diamond Family Archive, but his covers album The Wanderer is one of the best of the past decade. He’ll take songs by The Eagles, Billy Joel, and Dire Straits (a lot of Dire Straits) and warp these pop hits into fractured, fragile ballads. The results are mesmerizing every time, and that’s still true on his new covers EP, the November installment in a monthly EP series.
The songs this time around are more folky than the ’70s and ’80s AM-radio hits he often covers. The reason, he tells us, is that he drew not from his own record collection but from his parents’. “I’ve chosen songs I remember from my childhood,” he says. “Songs that my parents played to me. Songs that, in my world, existed on old stretched cassette tapes. Songs that I feel I’ve always known.”
Old and stretched are good descriptors for these covers too, whether it’s his haunted duet on the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” or a shimmering slow-burn of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Listen to and download the whole EP below.
Check out more from Laurence at Bandcamp. And – good news – he tells us there’s a sequel to The Wanderer in the works!