Sep 022016
 

Under the Radar shines a light on lesser-known cover artists. If you’re not listening to these folks, you should. Catch up on past installments here.

Dan Reeder

The first Dan Reeder song I heard was his meditation on death, “Maybe,” featured on an Oh Boy Records CD sampler. Oh Boy is an indie label founded by John Prine, who signed Reeder after hearing his demo cassette. His first album, Dan Reeder, was as one-man-show and homemade as you can get – he wrote it, played it, recorded and engineered it, did the artwork, did all the harmonies, and even made his own instruments. The songs are brief, thoughtful, humorous, and direct – profanity is sprinkled throughout in a way that somehow manages to be organic and not crude. It was the (NSFW) “Work Song” that made me a fan for life; it’s a song with one line repeated over and over, to perfection and beyond. As NPR said, “you’ll want to play it because it’ll ring true inside you, not because it’s gratuitously vulgar.”

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Feb 032015
 

Cover Classics takes a closer look at all-cover albums of the past, their genesis, and their legacy.

OK, where do I begin? Cover Classics is the name of the game, yet few, perhaps, would accord Annie Lennox’s Medusa that status, at least not within the world of critics, who, by and large, were damning, back before it became the norm to decry the later efforts of Ms. Lennox. This isn’t an In Defense piece, so I am not required to address her current standing (to some relief), yet I want to. So what to say of an artist who was once so right, then suddenly so wrong? And is that view still applicable?
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