Cover Commissions: Tinyfolk

 Posted by at 2:17 am  3 Responses »
Mar 052010
 

Cover Commissions is a monthly series in which a featured artist produces a special cover for this blog. Readers choose the song from a list of suggestions provided by the artist. Any artists interested in participating in a future installment, please email Cover Me at the address on the right.


This month’s featured cover artist was passed my way by James Eric, who longtime readers will remember kicked off our very first Commissions (which actually makes this the one-year anniversary of the series). Tinyfolk is the brain child of Russ Woods, an Illinois native and absurdly prolific musician who, having just graduated school, already has five album, a bunch of EPs, and a smattering of compilation appearances to his name.

Woods records low-fi tunes either on his own or with Meghan Lamb of Iron Like Nylon. What started out as a series of twee pop nuggets (lots of ukulele) have evolved to include synthesizers, strings and all the other elements of, you know, actual production. Best of all, he gives everything away for free at CLLCT, Last.FM, Muxtape and pretty much anywhere else you turn (his latest is at Rain Above Records).

Best of all, for us at least, he has done a ridiculous number of covers. Poke around that CLLCT page and you’re likely to find dozens tucked away on various albums, EPs and comps. One of his best is “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus, a one-hit wonder in the purest sense that the only single she ever released was a hit. Tinyfolk’s cover comes with a video especially for all you pixilated-hose lovers out there.


Like I mentioned, Tinyfolk has covered a lot of songs. Here’s a sampling. Poke around CLLCT for his takes on David Bowie (“Five Years”), They Might Be Giants (“Stormy Pinkness”) and more.

Tinyfolk – (There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me (Burt Bacharach)

Tinyfolk – Will You Be There? (Michael Jackson)

Tinyfolk – You Can Call Me Al (Paul Simon)

What song will he cover next? Your call. Below are ten song choices, each linked to a YouTube video where you can listen. Check out the originals, listen to Tinyfolk’s other stuff, then pick which song he should cover in the poll on the right. While I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up covering every last one of them eventually, at least you can tell him which to do first.


Voting closes in one week, so get deciding! Vote in the poll on the right.

Cover Me Presents: Kristy Brannon’s "Say It Ain’t So" (Weezer Cover)

 Posted by at 4:48 pm  No Responses »
Feb 252010
 

Cover Commissions is a monthly series in which a featured artist covers a reader-selected song for this blog. Any artists interested in participating, email me at the address on the right.


These days Weezer is an unfunny joke, but it seems the classics don’t go out of style. In January’s poll for what song you wanted Kristy Brannon to cover, “Say It Ain’t So” won by the biggest landslide in Commissions history. I think that’s what the pols would call a mandate.

Unfortunately, frontman Rivers Cuomo probably won’t stop making YouTube-meme videos or party jams with Lil Wayne anytime soon. Fans must content themselves with Blue Album and Pinkerton, albums that have provided consolation in one form or another to disillusioned and isolated teenagers (ie. all of them) since time immemorial (ie. 1994).

Brannon strips bare the daddy issues of “Say It Ain’t So” with an acoustic cover that sounds so natural you forget that the original was actually pretty loud. She describes the recording process:

I learned to play guitar doing Weezer covers so I’m really glad I got to do this song! Weezer has to be one of my favorite bands, [but] I wasn’t that familiar with this particular song until I started using Pandora radio and it came up a million times. Eventually it was so stuck in my head that I had to learn it to play it myself.

I recorded the guitar track first and put on headphones to sing so I wonder what my roommate thought hearing me sing a song with no music over and over again in my room. I tried to sing it really quietly but it sounded so creepy and way too high pitched so I eventually just turned the mic around. It sounds like I’m far away but I kind of like that sound.

A far away recording seems thematically appropriate for a song with lyrics like “This way is a waterslide away from me that takes you further every day.” Whatever that means.

Kristy Brannon – Say It Ain’t So (Weezer)

Check out Kristy’s website and MySpace for more info, then go download her new EP The Untold Story for free at BandCamp.

This mp3 may be freely shared with the artist’s blessing. Post it on your blog, send it to your friends, tweet it to the world. When you share this though, please include a link to this site. Cover Commissions is a monthly occurrence. Check back for future installments.

Cover Me Presents: Brady Harris’ "Heart of Glass" (Blondie Cover)

 Posted by at 6:19 pm  1 Response »
Feb 042010
 

Cover Commissions is a monthly series in which a featured artist covers a reader-selected song for this blog. Any artists interested in participating, email me at the address on the right.


When Blondie released “Heart of Glass” in 1979, the New Wave pioneers were accused of abandoning their roots for the emerging disco sound. For once the critics may have a point, since the tune was written as a funky blues number before producer Mike Chapman got his hands on it.

“We didn’t expect the song to be that big,” guitarist Chris Stein responded. “We did it as a novelty item to put more diversity into the album. It’s not selling out; it’s only one song.”

November Cover Commissions artist Brady Harris takes “Heart of Glass” back from disco. He takes it way back. Here’s what he has to say:

I always admired how Blondie could move comfortably from genre to genre – hit to hit.
 “Heart of Glass”, like most well written songs, lends itself easily to multiple stylistic interpretations and genres. Perhaps unconsciously taking a cue from The Lovin’ Spoonful, I decided to go with an Americana-30s kind of vibe when recording this arrangement.



I laid down the acoustic guitars and a scratch vocal here at my own humble home studio then I took the song to my friend, multi-instrumentalist John Adair and his studio in Santa Monica. John laid down the mandolin, banjo, upright bass, lead guitar, piano, backing vocals, etc. I re-cut my lead vocals there and we were done but for the mixing, which John did the following week. 



Musical geek-out note on the recording: I love how on the last “Ooh-ooh, ooh-oh” you can hear the bass reach up and grab the melody riff that the mandolin’s been playing the whole song, like some poor grunt reaching for the spotlight at the last possible moment.



Thanks to John Adair!

And thank-you, Ray!

No, sir, thank you. The rich folksy swing is sure to revitalize this oldies classic for anyone sick of the disco-cheeze original.

Brady Harris ft. John Adair – Heart of Glass (Blondie)

Check out Brady’s website and MySpace for more tunes (highly recommended: his Cover Charge album, featuring takes on the Vines, Culture Club and more) and catch more John Adair at his site or ‘Space.

This mp3 may be freely shared with the artist’s blessing. Post it on your blog, send it to your friends, tweet it to the world. When you share this though, please include a link to this site. Cover Commissions is a monthly occurrence. Check back for future installments.

Cover Me Presents: The Broken Chimneys’ "For You" (Bruce Springsteen Cover)

 Posted by at 6:24 pm  No Responses »
Jan 282010
 

Cover Commissions is a monthly series in which a featured artist produces a special cover for this blog, chosen by blog readers via poll. Any artists interested in participating in a future installment, email me at the address on the right.


During his fall tour, Bruce Springsteen pulled the standard seat-filling trick of playing classic albums in their entirety. Most shows got usual suspects Born to Run, Born in the U.S.A. or Darkness on the Edge of Town, but for the tour’s final night in Buffalo, Springsteen threw a mean left hook, playing his debut Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. front-to-back for the first tiwme ever. As he said introducing the performance, “”This was the record that took everything from way below zero to…one.”

No, Greetings did not make much of a splash in its 1973 debut. The best legendary music critic Lester Bangs could muster in his tepid Rolling Stone review was, “He’s not the new John Prine.” At the same time, Robert Christgau snidely commented, “It takes real conviction to save ‘But did not heed my urgency’ with ‘Your life was one long emergency.’”

The urgency/emergency couplet comes from album highlight “For You,” either a romantic appeal or a suicide plea, depending on who you ask. It features Springsteen’s early hyper-literate lyrics, like all of “Desolation Row” compressed into four minutes.

And this brings us back to The Broken Chimneys, our Cover Commissions artist way back in August. The newest music creation from author/satirist/songwriter/ghost tour guide Adam Selzer, the Chimneys took on “For You” because of reader vote. After many months of arranging, recording, and overdubbing, the finished product is here. Here’s their description:

The Broken Chimneys spent some time in Milledgeville, GA, a town with about seven prisons, a mental hospital, miles of ghettos, and smokestacks reaching like the arms of God into a beautiful sky of soot and clay. Adam spent a whole summer listening to early Springsteen while he delivered pizza. He’d never heard those first two albums before that year, but fell in loves with the street poetry, the Dr. Seuss-style rhymes about masturbating teenagers and sages of the subway.

But his favorite was “For You.” The Broken Chimneys originally tried to do a punk version, reasoning that most punks have had the experience of loving someone whose “life was one long emergency,” but it never quite came together. So they did a chamber music-ish version, inspired by the piano arrangement on the first Springsteen tape Adam owned – the Bryn Mawr ’75 bootleg.

Download the bootleg that inspired the cover over this way, but not before you listen to the Chimneys’ haunting “For You,” recorded exclusively for Cover Me.

The Broken Chimneys – For You (Bruce Springsteen)

Pick up the Broken Chimneys’ latest album Satan’s Parents Basement, from iTunes, then check them out on the soundtrack for the new book I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked It. Plus, check back here next week for Brady Harris’ November Cover Commissions entry and February’s poll!

This mp3 may be freely shared with the artist’s blessing. Post it on your blog, send it to your friends, tweet it to the world. When you share this however, please include a link to this site. Cover Commissions is a monthly occurrence, and the more attention this draws the more exciting we can make future installments.

Cover Commissions: Kristy Brannon

 Posted by at 2:39 am  No Responses »
Jan 222010
 

Cover Commissions is a monthly series in which a featured artist produces a special cover for this blog. Our readers choose the song from a list of suggestions provided by the artist. Any artists interested in participating in a future installment, please email Cover Me at the address on the right.


Our 2010 Cover Commissions season kicks off with an up-and-coming songwriter straight out of the heartland. Bloomington, Indiana that is, home to John Mellencamp, David Lee Roth…and Kristy Brannon.

Not that Kristy sounds much like the local rock stars. Her quiet confessions come instead from the female songwriting tradition of Norah Jones or Sara Bareilles, proving once again that with smart lyrics and a pretty voice it doesn’t take more than an acoustic guitar to make a point. She describes herself as an “indie folk female version of Bright Eyes” and she’s not far off.

You can check out more info on Kristy from her website or MySpace page. Personally, I recommend hitting the website, if only to check out her blog which features endearingly meandering thoughts on everything from Space Ghost to dreams about marriage proposals from aliens. There you can also download Kristy’s latest EP, The Untold Story, for free after checking out the sample below.

Kristy Brannon – Mea Culpa

Kristy makes her cover debut here on Commissions, selecting ten songs that range from pop-punk rockers to alt-country crooners. Which one will she cover? It’s up to you!

The choices are listed below, each linked to a YouTube video. Listen to the songs, listen to Brannon’s original material, then pick which song she should cover in the poll on the right.


Voting closes in one week, so get deciding! Vote in the poll on the right.

Cover Commissions: We Are the Willows

 Posted by at 1:44 am  No Responses »
Dec 172009
 

Cover Commissions is a monthly series in which a featured artist produces a special cover for this blog. Our readers choose the song from a list of suggestions provided by the artist. Any artists interested in participating in a future installment, please email Cover Me at the address on the right.


The sound Minnesota’s Peter Miller creates as We Are the Willows isn’t easy to describe. Here’s how other people have tried: “He holds your hand through the maze of contradictions like a tour guide brimming with whatever he calls ‘soul,” writes one site. “If Schroeder from Peanuts grew up listening to Elliott Smith, it’d sound something like this,” says another. Perhaps the most telling description comes from this University of Wisconsin student breaking into tears watching Miller perform.

Indeed, it’s hard to listen to the haunting melodies of We Are the Willows without being moved. Like an earthier Sigur Rós, Miller conjures grand soundscapes to envelop his curious and questioning lyrics. To record his just-released album A Collection of Sounds and Something Like the Plague he roamed all over Minnesota with a laptop microphone capturing the sounds around him. Those are real birds chirping you’ll hear, and a real train rushing by.

“I tried to reinvent all these things in my surroundings to make them into something different,” Miller told Minneapolis’ City Pages. “A train going by doesn’t mean anything more than a train going by. But the song it’s in, it can be something completely different than what it is. It can be reinvented. So all these sounds, they become something else.”

This sonic map soon became an actual map, depicting Minnesota with the typical “water, bridge, tunnel” landmarks replaced by “died a little bit on the inside” and “nick and i practice karate.” Here it is in miniature (click on the image for a larger version).


Originally a side project from Miller’s popular indie quartet Red Fox Grey Fox, We Are the Willows has taken on a life of its own as bloggers everywhere discover the haunting beauty laced through Miller’s songs. Check out this video of him performing for Minneapolis’ The Current last month.


You’re ahead of the game after watching that. Now you can avoid the oft-made mistake of thinking that bell-clear tenor comes from, well, a girl. No, that’s really him. Here are a couple more samples, from his pay-what-you-want A Family. A Tree. EP.

Now that tender tenor comes to Cover Me for December’s Cover Commissions. You know the drill, but here’s a refresher. Below are eleven songs, each linked to a YouTube video. Listen to each song, listen to Miller’s original material, then pick which song he should cover in the poll on the right. You’re dealing with one hell of a voice, so choose carefully!

The Contenders

Voting closes in one week, so get deciding! Vote in the poll on the right.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries