Chicago-based indie musician and producer NNAMDÏ has released an alluring cover of Kacey Musgraves’s “Lonely Weekend.” Drawn from the 2018 genre-expanding blockbuster Golden Hour, which earned Musgraves the Grammy for Album of the Year, “Lonely Weekend” is both a charged album opener and, relatively speaking, a deep-cut in her catalog.

On his cover, NNAMDÏ maintains Musgraves’s immediate, electric energy while burrowing deep into the arrangement’s esoteric surprises and insularities. The cover feels like a trip inside the many dreamy and refracted moods of NNAMDÏ’s titular indoor weekend. One minute, an propulsive banjo reel winds up and around in the mix; the next, jarring clusters of drippy, bassy vocal harmonies lazily loll around down below. By the time the song emerges into a deserved, expansive coda at the 2:26 mark, NNAMDÏ’s delicate arrangements and roving musical curiosities have coalesced into something truly progressive, refreshing, and limitless. Continue reading »