Review: The Sam Chase’s ‘Covered’

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Dec 092025
 

I am not sure how much traction (The) Sam Chase elicits in his home state of California, but over here in Blighty, courtesy a magnificent little festival called Maverick, he is always guaranteed a welcome. He, and his band, The Untraditional, cut quite the rug with his hoarse holler, belting out songs of a country hue, a punk attitude and a sometimes chamber-folk setting. This all makes for a beguiling combination, a rich mix of sandpaper and silk. Over the years he has worked solo, as a trio and now with his a 7 piece band behind him. That’s a lot, but, with cello, violin and trumpet, augmenting the more familiar guitar, keys, bass and drums, flickering remembrances of Van Morrison’s Caledonia Soul Orchestra wouldn’t be that far off point. And, yes, all seem present for Covered:, endeavoring to both compete with and comfort his foghorn fusillade.

To be fair, Chase’s voice gets dialed down a tad across most the selections here, culled from a bevy of the usual suspects: a Dylan, a Prine, a couple of Waits, balanced with CCR, Nirvana and one from the pirate cabaret of The Crux. The overall effect is strangely chameleonic, as he affects to occupy the persona of each individual singer, in character if not always sound. The difference comes largely from the arrangements, which tend toward the dusty roadhouse of amplified acoustica with drums. This renders a fluency to the flow of Covered:, a congruency that makes for a set that is all his own, however familiar the songs may or may not be.
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Review: Rufus Wainwright’s “I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Wainwright Does Weill”

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Nov 212025
 

Wainwright Does WeillSongs are always about time and place. The time and place where the composer conceived them, with a new set created when a new person hears them and associates them with a place, lover, or friend. You can say the same about a cover version.

Kurt Weill’s best-known songs come from a place of emotional turmoil, at a time of national confusion and fear. There was some resolution on the former, but the wider issue turned into an international catastrophe. This is always the challenge of covering the songs of interwar Germany. How can you capture the sense of the time and place that the songs came from, when you know the disastrous outcome?

For instance, Alan Cumming played Emcee in Cabaret hundreds of times in London and New York, and even at the Kennedy Center. He knew how the show was going to end. The reason that he won a Tony Award for the production is that he could hide that knowledge from the audience at the exuberant start of the show, but could still generate the necessary pain at the end. When Ute Lemper recorded her wonderful Weill album in 1988, she was doing so in West Berlin before the Wall came down. She does not hide that she knows where the chaos of the Weimar  Republic led, and how the story had gone. She saw it every day, and that is what drives the album’s emotional intensity.

Rufus Wainwright, a Canadian citizen, has chosen to release an album of Weill songs from a period when an angry but complacent nation wandered mistakenly into disaster, without seemingly seeing it for what it was, until it was too late. Perhaps because some of them were having too much fun, or were too selfish to care about others. Who knows why?

Wainwright clearly knows these songs very intimately, and feels them closely and strongly. He may have been listening to them since before he was born. His parents would be familiar with one of the greatest songwriters of the period, and both he and his sister Martha have performed versions of them over the years. He has said that Canadian Opera singer Teresa Stratas’ interpretations were his touchstone in developing his love for the songs. He has exquisite musical knowledge of the genres that Weill operated in, having written operas, worked in jazz, and lived in the home of the Moritat. Also, he has a huge linguistic advantage, having loved in three of the languages that Weill created songs for, and has lost in at least two of them (his marriage to a German seems solid).

All of this means that, whatever the driver for doing it now, we are on solid ground. I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Wainwright Does Weill features a series of tracks with the Pacific Jazz Orchestra, recorded live, with occasional guest artists. It is a marvel and a joy.
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Review: Willie Nelson’s “Workin’ Man: Willie Sings Merle”

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Nov 112025
 

Workin' ManSo, here we are, another year and, not so much another Willie Nelson album, but another Willie Nelson tribute album, seeing him paying respect to another of his old buddies. This time, following discs dedicated to Ray Price, Harlan Howard and Rodney Crowell (astonishingly only six months since the Crowell set!), we have Merle Haggard in the frame.

Of course, the problem for a site like this, is that when Willie loves a song–and he loves a lot of ’em–he sings ’em again and again and again. A cover lover has to be on their guard and make sure that any earlier rendition, by or including him, wasn’t the first outing ever for that song. All but one of these songs have been covered previously by Nelson, frequently alongside Haggard, but my research suggests they had all had their original recording un-Willied, so to speak, all coming from Haggard alone, usually with his band, the Strangers.

Haggard and Nelson had history together, dating at least as far back to the early ’70s, each bit players on the Nevada Casino circuit. Haggard, four years younger, after an early life plagued by insolvency and petty larceny, had hardened his ambition to become a country singer. It was hearing Johnny Cash sing “Folsom Prison Blues,” as a twenty-year-old inmate in San Quentin, that lit his fuse. Nelson, who had already quit Nashville disappointment, was seeking alternative routes to satisfy his muse, with the two bonding and becoming part of the eventual “Outlaw Country” movement. Over the years they frequently appeared together, bolstered by a set of four shared duet albums, between 1983 and 2015, the last only a year before Haggard’s death.

Here the recordings have taken shape over the space of several years, between the myriad other projects that Nelson has forever on the boil. As such there are other old friends to respect; this record contains the last recordings of Nelson’s sister Bobbie and longtime drummer Paul English, who died in 2022 and 2020, respectively. The rest of the musicians are all also familiars of what Nelson calls the Family Band, producing the by now familiar mix of loving looseness, all helmed here by Mickey Raphael’s production, his harmonica a warm presence throughout.
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Review: Chrissie Hynde’s ‘Duets Special’

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Oct 172025
 

Chrissie Hynde has been a rock star for more than fifty years. The Pretenders have not been together quite that long, but Hynde was already making her name as a girl about town and rock-star-in-waiting in London. She has lived the life full-time for all of that period. It is a surprise, then, that she does not fully appreciate the credit that has accrued with that history, and how people still want to hear what she has to say.

Supporting their tenth Album in 2023, The Pretenders initially booked themselves into smaller venues, before it became clear that they had underestimated the love that the world had for her and the band. Eventually the tour went so well that a live album was made and released. Did Hynde not think she was in the class of National Treasures that could call on her friends to make a duets album? The story is that a friend had to remind her that it was an opportunity, if not a duty, to do so. Consider Duets Special an opportunity/duty fulfilled.
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Review: ‘I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina’

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Sep 082025
 

Jason Molina was the man, the inspiration, the words and, most of all, the voice behind Songs: Ohia, and Magnolia Electric Company. A major force, he died too young, aged 39, a victim of his battle with alcohol, and it is perhaps only now the importance of his legacy is making itself extant. Had he got sober, and maybe a bit happier, he would undoubtedly be where Jason Isbell is now today, Kindred spirits both, each had a canny way around a maudlin melody, built over with keenly observed lyrics, often those born of experience. And boy, was he prolific, issuing a torrent of albums, often more than one a year, as well as leaving a cache of tapes behind for his record company, Secretly Canadian, to slowly sift through.

Those good folk at Run For Cover Records are responsible for this curated compilation, and, in recognition of the circumstances of his passing, 10% of the profits of each copy of I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina will be donated to MusiCares® Mental Health and Addiction Recovery Fund. (Is it me, or is there not an all-too-tragic run of similar recordings just recently?) The contributors tend towards fellow travelers in the dusty outlands of contemporary gothic country noir, the broodier end of Americana, if you must, with MJ Lenderman, Sun June and Hand Habits (Meg Duffy) perhaps the best known. The songs traverse the whole of Molina’s catalog, with one song emanating from his posthumous stash.
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Review: Belinda Carlisle’s ‘Once Upon a Time in California’

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Sep 012025
 

Once Upon a Time in CaliforniaBelinda Carlisle wouldn’t be the first boomer to look back on her formative years through rose-tinteds, as she does on her new release Once Upon a Time in California, and I dare say she won’t be the last. The erstwhile singer of trailblazing L.A. new-wave punkettes, the Go-Go’s, she has been clean and sober these last 20 years, and, if her releases no longer rattle the upper reaches of the charts, she maintains a strong fanbase, especially in the U.K. and Australia.

Given this is Cover Me Songs, it is worth mentioning, if only in passing, the last two albums that Carlisle has made, if only to refute the idea that this project might just represent more of the same. In 2007 she issued Voila, a set of French chansons, sung in that language, and in 2017, Wilder Shores, made up of chants from the Sikh religion, and sung in Punjabi. That’s a bit, different, eh, as are each the albums.

Once Upon a Time in California harks back to safer ground, mostly to the songs of Carlisle’s childhood in Southern California. Rather than seeking to put any new spin on the large print ballads that these most are, it is her voice that is the single identifying factor for the set; it’s mixed high and proud, awash with luscious string arrangements and spry studio polish. Were it not for that voice, this might come across as too much. Amazingly, it doesn’t, unless I too am similarly nostalgic for balmy and long childhood days. Born on Britain’s rainy south coast, I don’t think so, other than in envy.
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