Seuras Og, Author at Cover Me

Seuras Og

Seuras Og is an old enough to know better family Dr in Birmingham, UK, having taken the easy option of medicine upon failure to get work in a record store. By now drowning in recorded music, he has thought it about time to waste the time of others in his passion here, as well as a few other places dotted about the web.

Review: Andrew Bird & Madison Cunningham’s ‘Cunningham Bird’

Posted by Seuras Og at 2:30 pm No Responses »

Oct 242024

If you don’t recall the story, Fleetwood Mac were down on their luck, reduced to the trio of Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and his wife, Christine. Fleetwood was looking for a good studio, and the folks at Sound City Studios showed him what they could do by playing him Buckingham Nicks. The ever-resourceful Fleetwood took a leap of faith and asked Buckingham to join the band. Not without my girlfriend, he said. The deal was struck, and the band subsequently became huge, with more people associating Fleetwood Mac with their breezy AOR Californicana than the blues band of the decade before.

You can make the case that Buckingham Nicks provided a lodestone for the whole next few decades, and not just for Buckingham and Nicks. So why is it not a worldwide household item? Astonishingly, there has never been any official release of Buckingham Nicks on CD. A relative failure in its original vinyl iteration, only under-the-counter bootlegs, often incorporating additional outtakes, have ever been released in the format, despite high demand. Buckingham himself has asked for this repeatedly, but no go, for reasons uncertain.

This is where Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham come in. Continue reading »

In the Spotlight: Peter Frampton

Posted by Seuras Og at 10:00 am 1 Response »

Oct 172024

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!

Peter Frampton has been everyone and everywhere at once, with that bloody thing in his mouth. He’s also been anonymous and relatively unknown. Neither pendulum peak has stopped this Brit having a career that’s lasted 50 years and counting. Me, I would say a (belated) induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a spotlight well worth acknowledging, in anyone’s book and by anyone’s reckoning. So, let’s have a look at that career.
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Review: Ian McNabb’s ‘Fleetwood McNabb’

Posted by Seuras Og at 1:30 pm No Responses »

Oct 102024

OK, skip the awful title and possibly, too, the cover, but as tributes go, Ian McNabb’s Fleetwood McNabb is pretty solid. McNabb is arguably better known, in America anyway, as the prime force behind the Icicle Works, still sometimes touring under the name, give or take the availability of various ex-members. Aside and away from that, he has an enduring solo career with dozens of releases. We’ve seen him here before, his covers set of 2018, Respectfully Yours, getting a Covers Classic polish. Always, it seems, a fan of the Mac, through their myriad shape-shifts, Fleetwood McNabb is a tad different from many tributes to the band, in that it starts in the ’60s British Blues Boom and travels all the way to almost the last extant incarnation. So South London to Malibu, and all points between. Including the bits few recall or even know about.
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Review: ‘Silver Patron Saints: The Songs of Jesse Malin’

Posted by Seuras Og at 10:00 am No Responses »

Sep 232024

You’ll know Jesse Malin possibly best from his address book, stuffed full the big names who are more than happy to sing alongside him. This does him a disservice, as his four-decade-plus career, two-plus of which have been as a solo artist, has produced a glut of well-received albums, nine in the studio and two live. So, regardless of heavy friends, you could say Jesse Malin can stand perfectly well on his own two feet.

Except now, tragically, he can’t. Malin sustained a spinal stroke in May of last year, effectively severing his spine, decimating any use below the level affected. He is now paralyzed from the waist down. He is 57, so still in his prime, as an exponent of muscular heartland rock and roll music.

Time to put that address book into use. Actually it was they that came to him, so as to enable Silver Patron Saints: The Songs of Jesse Malin to exist. This package serves as both benefit and tribute, and it has quite the roster, with a list of the great and the good rubbing shoulders with the simply celebrated.

So we got Bruce Springsteen, always one of Malin’s biggest champions, side by side with Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. There’s also representation from some of the seers of urban “rawk”, Willie Nile and Alejandro Escovedo. Lucinda Williams (who produced one of his albums) appears, as do a number of Brits, including Elvis Costello and Graham Parker. In fact, given it has always been the UK that has given Malin some of his staunchest support, his releases often on or for record companies based there, there is also support from a younger wave of UK artists perhaps less acknowledged this side the pond, artists like Frank Turner.

How do you begin best to describe the sort of music made by Malin, without just listening those who provide similar? My best bet is to suggest it the sort of music you would enjoy listening to in a bar, with, preferably, a bevy of electric guitars, pounding piano bolstered by an organ backdrop, impassioned vocals and, perhaps, some cheese cutter sax. That the bass and drums are driving should come as a given. So far, so E Street band, but they weren’t the first and certainly not the last. And with Silver Patron Saint boasting 27 tracks (available on triple vinyl or two CDs), where to begin? Continue reading »

Review: Robyn Hitchcock’s ‘1967: Vacations in the Past’

Posted by Seuras Og at 11:00 am 2 Responses »

Sep 172024

Given that Robyn Hitchcock hails from a day where content may not always match the label, his succinctness of title is here pitch perfect. 1967: Vacations in the Past is a set of songs, all of which came to fruition during the (first) summer of love. Hitchcock formulated the selection to bookend his memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left. The jacket copy states, “In January 1966, Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for his green Dalek sponge and his family’s comforting au pair, Teresa. By December 1967, he’s mutated into a 6 ft 2-inch rabid Bob Dylan fan, whose two ambitions in life are to get really stoned and move to Nashville.”

Along the subsequent way, he has become an individual and idiosyncratic voice, as near instantly recognizable for his quirky worldview as for his never more English vocals, despite spending much of his career, and much his success, in the US. (And yes, he subsequently lives in East Nashville, answering on of his ambitions.) Starting off with college radio favorites, the Soft Boys, and then moving forward through and into Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, he now has a solo career, lasting throughout most of this century. He’s never shy of performing cover versions, especially in a live setting, complementing his own prodigious output. Why, not two weeks ago we were considering his Dylan set, Robyn Sings.

The joy of 1967 is that you don’t have to be familiar with Hitchcock’s memoir (although you might wish to be, I recommend it). It stands perfectly as a stand alone, a snapshot of what the 14 year old boy might have been daydreaming to, on the radio. And you don’t really have to have been there yourself either, the selection, by and large, tendis more toward the big hitters of the year, most of which left a long and illustrious footprint. But I bet you never heard ’em much like this!
Continue reading »

Five Good Covers: “Light My Fire” (The Doors)

Posted by Seuras Og at 2:00 pm 2 Responses »

Aug 232024

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

Just what is is about the songs of the ’60s that gives them such legs? Are they that amazingly good? Did they appear on enough soundtracks that they embedded themselves in my brainpan? Or is that just my fantasy, born out of a familiarity as long as the life of the songs?

“Light My Fire.” Perfect example. The song started life in L.A.s proto-underground, written and performed by the Doors, one of many groups plying their trade on the strip at the bars, seedy and otherwise, dotted along its trajectory. Jak Holzman, president of Elektra Records (they’d signed the Doors’ friendly rivals Love), liked what he heard enough to give them a contract. Shortly after, they moved to the studio, recording “Light My Fire” and the rest of their debut and eponymous album fifty-eight years ago this week.

Released in April of 1967, in an edit of the full-length version, the “Light My Fire” single spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard chart, getting a further boost when Jose Feliciano delivered the first cover, itself a top-five hit. Over the years, that original version has seen it regularly populate various best-of lists, helping it attain platinum sales by 2018.

Via many of the saccharine cover versions that followed swift behind the Doors’ own rendition, arguably the plight of any perfect song construction, it has been latterly seen as some MOR staple, slipping further and further away from the original menace inherent. Pity. Second Hand Songs shows upwards of 310 versions, and not all of these are weird, cheesy cabaret staples. (You want cheesy? Try Nancy Sinatra, or Shirley Bassey, or the New Jordal Swingers. You want weird? Well, you couldn’t get much weirder than Mae West……) Thankfully, we found five that are not.
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