Dec 162024
 
forecast road

“Road” is a brief track from Nick Drake‘s final album, Pink Moon. It has very few lyrics and, like nearly everything on Pink Moon, is just Drake’s voice and guitar. It’s still a reasonably popular cover, with around 20 versions, likely due to its presence on what is now his most famous album.

John Mailander is a Nashville bluegrass musician who has worked extensively with other artists, such as Bruce Hornsby, and has released two solo albums. Most recently, he’s formed Forecast, a sort of bluegrass-jazz fusion sextet. Originally they were formed to tour his solo material but since they’ve put out an album and will be releasing a new on in 2025.

The first striking thing about their new cover of “Road” is its length. It clocks in at nine and a half minutes which is much, much longer than the original. But Mailander and company rush to get the lyrics out of the way, singing the first stanza earlier in the performance than Drake does in his original.

The rest of the piece is a jam featuring an extended solo from Mailander himself on fiddle and a colourful mix of live playing, samples and loops. Like many jams, the performance strays away from the song a bit, with so much going on, but then the climax features a big restatement a of the main vocal line before what sounds like some fairly free improvisation as the song ends.

It’s very far from Nick Drake’s original. And it’s cool to hear a band that likes to blur genre boundaries taking inspiration from a brief song by a man with just a guitar and creating such a lively jam.

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