Feb 142025
 

In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!

Laura Cantrell

Laura Cantrell is one of the best-known Country Music artists in the United Kingdom. Something about the purity of her voice and the clarity of her vision has a particular appeal to the British. For a quarter of a century, since her debut LP, she has been adopted by the small number of mainstream DJs that cover Country music in the UK, and she has cultivated that opportunity. Any musician who is managing to make a living from their art knows that any audience is something to be appreciated, and Cantrell has reciprocated the love. The crowdfunding for her last recording received disproportionate subscriptions from the UK, and the gratitude when it eventually came out was significant.

Born in Nashville and thus marinaded in America’s art form, Cantrell has spent much of her singing and alternate professional life in another city far from the country mainstream, New York. By choice or circumstance, she has established herself away from musical metropolises of her field, but that does not mean that she does not have a deep knowledge and appreciation of the genre. She also performs and records in Nashville. For many years she hosted a country music show on the radio, and she has a particular knowledge and appreciation of the role of women in country music, the well known pioneers and those whose stories were lost for whatever reason. Her song “Queen of the Coast” is an appreciation of Bonnie Owens, a considerable talent in her own right, but who spent much of her life backup singing and doing domestic duties for her husbands, Merle Haggard and Buck Owens.

Throughout her career, she has mixed her own songs with covers, covering similar stories, of universal themes with personal angles, often with the greats of the music accompanying her.  The stories are familiar but the delivery is unique to her.
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Feb 122025
 
jarvis cocker california dreamin

Jarvis Cocker is one of many artists featured on Los Angeles Rising, a new compilation which is raising money to help those affected by the recent California wildfires. Cocker’s cover of the Mamas & the Papas “California Dreamin,” is featured alongside a new PJ Harvey song, and previously unreleased tracks by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Primal Scream.

The album, which is raising money for Sweet Relief, the organization set-up to help musicians and those in the music industry. The album is produced by musician Kevin Haskins and producer Nick Launay. Haskins said, “This harrowing experience and witnessing the monumental destruction of entire communities, inspired Nick and I to team up to create a compilation album to raise money for the less fortunate. We reached out to our musician friends for unreleased recorded gems and the response was incredible! PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Primal Scream, Gary Numan, and Devo are just some of the artists that rushed in to help.”

Cocker’s “California Dreamin'” includes backing vocals by Kim Sion (Cocker’s current partner) on the sparse cover. The song was originally written in 1963 when the group was stuck in a rough New York winter and found themselves longing for California’s warmer climate. Rolling Stone ranked the song #420 in their list of the top 500 songs of all time.

The new compilation is available on Bandcamp.

Feb 112025
 
courtney barnett lotta love

Courtney Barnett is among a group of musicians who are contributing Neil Young covers to a new album to raise money for The Bridge School. The album is titled is the first of two and titled Heart of Gold: The Songs of Neil Young. On top of Barnett, it will include contributions by musicians Eddie Vedder, Fiona Apple, Brandi Carlile and others.

Barnett covers Young’s “Lotta Love,” which first appeared on Young’s 1978 album, Comes a Time. In the press release, Barnett said of the song and Young, “‘Lotta Love’ is one of my favourite Neil songs and the lyrics feel especially relevant at this moment in history. It’s a real honour to be part of this tribute helping to raise funds for The Bridge School.” Continue reading »

Feb 112025
 

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

If Led Zeppelin had made Physical Graffiti a single album rather than a double, “Boogie with Stu” would not have made the final cut. “Filler” is a dismissive term, but that’s what it was. (Of course, one band’s filler is another band’s gem.) The song was just a spontaneous jam, really, recorded in 1971 on an out-of-tune piano as they worked on Led Zeppelin IV. But when Zeppelin suddenly had an extra album-side to complete in 1975, they cleaned up the old recording and tossed the result onto side four, practically as an afterthought.

“Boogie with Stu” is treated like an afterthought, too, in those always-interesting and usually contentious discussions about Zeppelin covering and plagiarizing other artists. Sure, let’s talk “Dazed and Confused” and Jake Holmes, “Whole Lotta Love” and Willie Dixon, “The Lemon Song” and Chester Burnett, and all the other cases. But the discussion rarely gets around to the strange case of “Boogie with Stu” and Ritchie Valens. Or if it does, it’s only as an afterthought yet again.
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Feb 112025
 
amy irving

Amy Irving, best known as an actress but also an accomplished singer, has also been friends with Willie Nelson for over 40 years. Co-stars and lovers on-screen and off while making the movie Honeysuckle Rose, they have remained close ever since. As a public acknowledgment of their closeness, Nelson has helped Irving curate an album of his songs that best suit Irving’s voice and sensibilities, and have a narrative arc around friendship. The album Always Will Be will be out soon and the title track has now been released as a single. It is a lovely piece, further enhanced by the presence of Amy Helm. Continue reading »

Feb 102025
 
casino hearts jesus doesn't want me for a sunbeam cover

“Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” was originally written by The Vaselines as an answer song to the early 20th century children’s Christian hymn “I’ll Be a Sunbeam.” But everyone knows it as “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam,” the name Nirvana gave it when they included it in their MTV Unplugged show. That concert turned into an album that became the most successful album from that series. And so the world knows the song by an incorrect name. Continue reading »