Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett comes across as the ideal artist to cover the Lemonheads classic ‘Being Around’. Her almost lazy drawl is not a million miles away from Evan Dando’s as showcased in this recent performance for Sirius XMU. Courtney’s reading of the track owing more to the acoustic version of the song found on the Lemonheads ‘Mrs Robinson/Being Around’ EP than the twangy original from ‘Come On Feel The Lemonheads’. Dando himself was no stranger to covers, that EP itself contained tributes to Simon And Garfunkel and Smudge, the Australian band he would often cover and also work with.
Barnett, often referred to as a quirky songwriter and tacklng a song with lines like ‘If I was a booger, would you blow your nose’ manages to inject a lot of emotion into the song. She makes her interpretation sound a lot more lovelorn than the original yet manages to keeps the song’s goofy and infectious charm.
