Nov 302020
 
best cover songs november
Ashley McBryde – You’re Lookin’ at Country (Loretta Lynn cover)

The Country Music Hall of Fame recently presented a video series called Big Night at the Museum, getting modern country and Americana artists to cover Hall of Famers. Lucinda Williams did Johnny Cash, Miranda Lambert did John Prine, and a bunch more. Best by a blonde-streaked hair was Ashley McBryde, a performer who skirts the line between country, Americana, and brawny rock, proving her bona fides on Loretta Lynn’s “You’re Lookin’ at Country.” Continue reading »

Aug 312020
 
best cover songs august 2020
Alex Kapranos & Clara Luciani – Summer Wine (Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra cover)

Clara Luciani is Nancy Sinatra and Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos is Lee Hazlewood on this charming cover. Kapranos wrote, “When the lockdown started, we decided to record [‘Summer Wine’] — more for ourselves than anything else. We wanted to create the atmosphere of an imaginary world away from the confinement we were experiencing. Not that we were unhappy, but the imagination is the greatest medium for escape and adventure… After the lockdown eased off, we got together to film the video with our friends Adrien, Leo, Fiona and Hugo. I love the ideas they had, which suit the mood of the song and reflect our… well, our love of karaoke!” Continue reading »

Aug 102016
 
BowThayer

If you haven’t heard of an instrument called the “bojotar,” don’t feel bad. Only one person in the world plays it: Bow Thayer, an Americana musician up in Vermont. It’s a custom-built combination of the banjo, electric guitar, and dobro. He’s trying to spread the word though, and got a tip from banjo master Béla Fleck. “Béla told me the best way to sell people on the thing is to become a master of it myself,” Thayer said, “to find out what it can really do and blow people away.”

He’s done just that, and his latest demonstration of the bojotar’s prowess comes on a new tribute album to two early American musicians: Dock Boggs and Mississippi Fred McDowell, two obscure rural singers brought to wider attention when recorded by field musicologist Alan Lomax in the ’50s. Thayer titled his tribute The Source and the Servant and has posted his cover of the Boggs song “Sugar Baby” (an excellent demonstration of the bojotar in action) and a note: Continue reading »