Wednesday, June 29, 2011

music in the middle: Ben Howard

a little piece of lovely from watch.listen.tell.

voices: pure. cello: rich. guitar: left-handed. performance: raw.

love.







I will do my best to be posting on Fridays again.

Friday, June 3, 2011

friday phonics: v38 - covers

Just wanted to do something different this week, so I thought I'd post some of my fav covers. (c: I do love it when a band can take a bad song and improve it or take an amazing song and put their own story in it. Covers can be fantastic or they can be fail...here are some of the former.

First off, how about some Elbow coving Massive Attack. Yes please.


I really love it when an artist or band can take a heavy metal song and strip it down to it's bare bones. Here's Justin McRoberts doing just that to NineInchNails' Head Like a Hole. Brilliant.
(the album version of this has some really fantastic piano on it, but I wanted to post the live version here)


I love love love love love this cover of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean by the Civil Wars. So good there aren't words.


Then you have the freaking talented Punch Brothers taking on the Strokes. Here's their mind-blowing cover of Reptilia.


Finally, I wanted to share the project that kind of prompted the idea to share covers. Peter Gabriel recently decided to do a covers album of a pretty wide range of artists, both veterans and newbies...it's pretty amazing. But he didn't stop there, the whole idea was for him to cover all of these bands on an album called "Scratch My Back..." and in turn all of the artists he covered would cover a Peter Gabriel song on a second album called "...and I'll Scratch Yours". Beautiful.

Here is his cover of Bon Iver's Flume.


...and here is Bon Iver's cover of Come Talk To Me




If you have the time, here is a little documentary on the project with thoughts from both Peter Gabriel and Justin Vernon. It's pretty great.