A certain melancholy characterizes the songs of the world now. Piano and strings serve the mood as much as the slow guitar. New song lyrics and releases speak of coming to terms with, missing, absence: familiar themes of hope and longing magnified in every fraught moment. Covers come this way, too. Poignant songs; poignant versions. Melancholy wrung from the masking chords of the synth-pop seventies and yesterday: pop and grunge; rock and roll, all painted with the veneer of unsettledness that characterizes the world. Here to hold us. Here, to bring the familiar into the strange. Softly. Wi ..read more

What a month it’s been for coverfolk, with over a hundred newly-recorded live #coversfromhome posted on our Facebook page in just the last 30 days alone. Our cup runneth over, and we’re doing our part, hitting PayPal and Venmo links when we can to keep the music coming and the artists fed as the time of no touring continues; we hope you, too, are finding our daily shares fruitful and fulfilling, and doing your part to support the industry through sharing, commenting, and donating as you can. But even as the inevitable trend towards live and lo-fi living room sets continues, so does the indust ..read more

Just a quick stop-in today, to let you know that we’ve been sharing live covers throughout the day on the Cover Lay Down Facebook page as we find them: living room and garden takes all, solo and without full bands for the most part, all created in the time of isolation and fear, each as beautiful as the single six-song sample found above. Blues run the game among these #coversfromhome, for the most part – even the spate of tributes to John Prine and Bill Withers which joined the stream in the past few days have remained soft and sorrowful. But there’s joy here, too – joy in sharing, and ..read more

It started last Thursday, with a short set from Kris Delmhorst’s living room; her concert at Club Passim that night had been cancelled at the very last minute, in reaction to concerns about contagion in close quarters, and so she turned to the airwaves for an online set, to benefit herself, the club, and the staff that would have worked there that night. The results were a harbinger, and a blessing: a crowd much, much larger than Passim itself can hold, and an outpouring of donations – enough to support all involved, and enough to seed what is now, just one week later, a virtual ..read more

Looks like we’ll be home for a few weeks, thanks to late-game honest-to-goodness State of Emergency declarations at every scale of government. We’ll have time, now, for that backlog of sound. And we’re looking forward to sharing. Because we’re all going to need some good strategies to fight the loneliness, in the days to come. For a few hours, there, we were out in it: sharing fears as we wound up teacher planning sessions for putting schoolwork online “if it happens”; chatting lovingly and too long in the parking lot with friends and neighbors stocking up on nicotine and bee ..read more

There’s so much to share: a new favorite YouTube sibling duo; still-unfeatured covers albums and singles from Karine Powalt and Ruston Kelly, Rachel Kilgour and Tracy Grammer; our afternoon at the Joe Val Bluegrass Festival, where The Lonesome Ace Stringband rekindled our appreciation for the clawhammer and fiddle trio and young bluegrass quintet The Tinder Sweethearts wowed the crowd with a Billy Joel cover and a Billie Eilish mash-up; the way fat, lazy snowflakes tease us outside our March windows before the temperature soars once again past 40, triggering the nagging ..read more

Yes, folk fans and cover lovers, we’re back in earnest after a slow set of tributes to the past, eager to take on the new and the novel. And where better to begin than with the truly familiar and beloved: folks we’ve heard before, like Anais Mitchell, Sean Watkins, and Sam Gleaves, and cherished; whose voices, songs, collaborations and song choices have long brought us comfort and hope in the long winter. Today, then, in an attempt to return to normalcy, we turn to our (Re)Covered feature, in which we track recent developments in coverfolk and configuration from artists we’ve celebrated he ..read more

It’s hard not to write about David Olney without name-dropping. When the 71 year old touring folk musician and “founding father of Nashville Americana” died quietly on stage during a performance this weekend, the world lost a songwriter’s songwriter, known at least as well in the deeper branches of the folk and bluegrass worlds for his collaborative work with Steve Earle, Del McCoury, Tim O’Brien, and Emmylou Harris as for his ongoing work as a touring and recording artist in his own right, on the circuit since arriving in Nashville in the early seventies. The bluegrass and folkhouse labels ..read more

Three summers ago, we drove together up the country on the trail of social justice, from New Orleans to the great gentrified factories at the base of the Great Lakes. The Birmingham Jail, a historical marker in a small weedy quarter-lot alcove, up against, sure enough, a modern jail and police station, just under the highway. The Maya Lin memorial chalice, at the foot of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Alabama capitol building, all silent on a Sunday. The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and the shuttered Goodwill storefront at its base. Homeless people in the park in Birmingham ..read more

It was a long lonely year, and we missed plenty, we’re sure – a natural artifact of a life lived on the road more than ever, halfway between home and hospital, and work and worry, that kept us from these pages for too many months between the covers of the calendar. Here in the boyhowdy house, the children – now teenagers, teetering on the cusp of fragile womanhood and a robust maturity – still struggle to manage their illnesses and pain; each school day is a triumph, even if they can only make it in for an hour or two; their strengths and curiosities are increasingly clear and under ..read more