Dec 122011
 

Chris Whitley was one of those artists his fellow musicians adored (Springsteen, Petty, and Richards among them) that never got the fame he deserved. He died of lung cancer in 2005, but Little Silver keep his legacy alive on a new cover. The husband and wife duo of Steve Curtis (of Hem) and Erika Simonian tackled Whitley’s “Dirt Floor.” The duo turn the track from a bluesy folk song into an intimate bedroom ballad and we’re pleased to premiere it below.

The hushed atmospherics and fragile beauty recall similar folk duos both new (the Civil Wars) and old (Richard and Linda Thompson). It’s the first cut available from their upcoming covers EP Dress-Up, which drops early next year. Curtis tells us how they chose the track:

Chris Whitley’s Dirt Floor came out in 1998 and has the undignified distinction of being the last album I absolutely wore out on cassette tape. Hem’s Dan Messe made a dub of it for me when I first moved to NYC, and I can very distinctly picture myself at points all over town with those songs serving as the running soundtrack in my headphones. Each track on the short album is strong enough to knock the unsuspecting clear over, and at various points through the years Erika and I have approached the songs with both caution and reverence with an ear to possibly covering one of them. The title track here is one that we eventually decided that felt we could hear ourselves in, and it then fell right together in this live take.

Download “Dirt Floor” below.


Check out more Little Silver at their website or Facebook.

Cover Me is now on Patreon! If you love cover songs, we hope you will consider supporting us there with a small monthly subscription. There are a bunch of exclusive perks only for patrons: playlists, newsletters, downloads, discussions, polls - hell, tell us what song you would like to hear covered and we will make it happen. Learn more at Patreon.

  3 Responses to “Little Silver Delivers Intimate Bedroom Cover of Chris Whitley’s “Dirt Floor” (Cover Me Premiere)”

Comments (2) Pingbacks (1)
  1. […] We’ve got a new EP coming out early in the New Year, a covers record called Dress-Up! We’re wracking ourselves a little to do the songs that we love some decent justice — to cast them in a new and personal light, as one would hope anyone tries to do when stepping up to a cover. And so the set list has changed a little over the months, as we cry “uncle” to some songs, and others that we didn’t even expect to do so fall together easily. “Dirt Floor” is one song we’ve had our sites on for years (and one our good friends Ollabelle took for a great ride this year too). Cover Me just ran a nice piece about the track, and is offering it as a free download as well. Check out the story (and hear the song!) here. […]

 Leave a Reply

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)