Jackson C. Frank is one of those names that just insists on being investigated. He’s a near mystical/mythical figure from the 1960’s, with a back story that shreds any other to ribbons, so wracked it is with tragedies both accidental and self-inflicted. Golden Mirrors: The Undiscovered, Series 1, from erstwhile Bad Seed Mick Harvey, sees him again team up with Amanda Acevedo, a singer, artist and film maker from Mexico to pay tribute to Frank. The pair put together a melancholic album of orchestrated noir in 2023, Phantasmagorian Blue. This is the first in (what the title suggests is) a series of uncovering artists who influenced them, while residing possibly under the radar of many of their audience.
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Cher — Walking in Memphis (Marc Cohn cover)
Cher’s pushing 80, but, as seen most recent on the SNL 50th concert, she can still command a stage like nobody’s business. At the recent Love Rocks benefit concert in NYC, she reprised her ‘90s “Walking in Memphis” cover, complete with full Elvis costume, pompadour very much included.
Dååth ft. Paul Masvidal from Cynic – Run (Air cover)
A heavy-metal cover of the least heavy group of all time (they are French, after all): Air. Dååth (you “know it’s heavy with that punctuation in the name) writes: “Our version of “Run” has been a long time coming. It’s a creepy, weird song I’ve wanted to cover since I first heard it… This is a weird song. If you haven’t heard it, listen to the original, then ours. To do it justice, we needed an unconventional mix that could also go full metal. Gautier Serre, of Igorrr, was the obvious choice. If he can handle Igorrr, he can handle this—and being French, he already knew the song. The result is truly unique. If you’re expecting pure extreme metal, you might be disappointed—and that’s fine, because we do what we want.” Continue reading »
Sometimes it is the lower key and lesser heard that most catches the ear, and Adam Holmes a prime example. If you follow the contemporary Scottish folk (and beyond) scene, you may well know Holmes already, for having one of the more soulful instruments in the country, a warm burr with a distant flavor of John Martyn. Starting off as a member of neo-trad outfit Rura, Holmes’ singing and songs were a tidy contrast to their instrumental elemental fare of fiddle, flute and pipes. With time, the mix became perhaps too schizophrenic, he needing a platform to stay on stage the whole set. This he found, forming a band, the Embers, lasting for a well-received year or three.
Since then he has been on his own, give or take a duo, with Heidi Talbot, and a brief membership of Anglo-Scots folk-rock supergroup, The Magpie Arc. A veritable one man industry, he releases his own albums and sorts out his own gigs and shows, no middlemen to sour the pitch. As such, the gap between he and his audience is thin; if you fancy him writing a song for you, or for him to play in your own home, he will; contact him, via his website.
Songs for My Father, the second of two recent releases, each dedicated to cover versions, is in his father’s memory, the songs of his childhood and his father’s record collection. (The earlier one, last year’s The Voice of Scotland, covered more the traditional songs he grew up with, together with a couple that have near earnt that same soubriquet: we included “You Are My Sunshine” from that set recently.) Holmes’ father, dying of throat cancer, made a last request his son record his favorite songs; it was a task that took Holmes ten years to work up the initiative to address.
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In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.

It doesn’t seem five minutes since this, less than two years ago, with the publication of his memoir Sing Backwards and Weep seeming a good time to celebrate his apparent immunity to death. Even in a world becoming nervously aware of the pandemic, he seemed then a figure above such inconvenience, a latter-day Keith Richards made flesh, even in recovery. Little then did we know what his second volume would reveal, Devil In a Coma ripping apart that semblance, the Devil possibly in that very coma at the time of that article’s writing. I guess the assumption was that he had fully recovered from that further near-death, making last week’s news all the more astonishing and upsetting. At the time of this writing the cause of his death remains unknown. I hope he went in peace.
Not the place to regale and remind of his derring-do; others have done that better and by more right elsewhere. Here we celebrate, again, his winning way with the songs of others, his uncanny instinct to possess and inhabit the writings of other artists, as if the words had been written solely for his sepulchral tones. I don’t like the Devil comparison, however many coming up against him in their own lives might, preferring the image that he had the voice of God, with no need of any article, indefinite or otherwise. Sure, an older God, a vengeance-is-mine God, where forgiveness has to be earnt, much as he too tried to atone for his past behaviors, a forbidding God not to be taken in vain.
Hyperbole? Why not? Enjoy these ten further covers and sink one in his memory.
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Check out the best covers of past months here.

aeseaes – Realiti (Grimes cover)
Bandits on the Run – Back to Black (Amy Winehouse cover)

Jackson C.Frank was what you would call a musician’s musician. While his stark, windblown folk sound was revered and respected by his peers during the ’60s, he was for the most part utterly invisible and unappreciated by the general public.
He is primarily remembered as a peripheral character in the lives of far greater known artists. Paul Simon produced his first and only album in 1965. Nick Drake covered no less than 4 of his songs. Sandy Denny, the legendary Fairport Convention vocalist, was romantically involved with him for several years and one of her finest recorded moments is a song about their relationship. Continue reading »