Spartan effort, to be sure, but it has been a tired, empty day. So we’ll just get straight to the YouTube Cover Theater, where the talents of anonymous people are shared online because they have a camera and somewhere to host their artistic abilities. This week’s featured cover artist is indie-favorite Gillian Welch. I spent all of Tuesday night studying listening to her music, so it seemed a fitting way to wrap up the week.
First, there’s this incredibly solemn version of I Dream a Highway:
Sam and Sue play around with a song you might have heard here or there:
Catrina Rogers handles Gillian’s standard, Time the Revelator, with a lonely AM vibe:
And since many people may not know Gillian’s work aside from that tune and a few movie appearances, I’ll include a video of her covering a song herself.
One day someone will invent an instrument even my talentless hands can master. And I’ll start a band, and we’ll find another band that likes to do ensemble pieces. And we’ll play medium-tempo stuff and swap out the leads. Somewhere along the way someone will come up to me and say “Why don’t you play The Weight?”
I will say “Because it has already found perfection.”
Just the fun stuff today as most everything else wasn’t really a lot to talk about. So we’ll play the music, making the point once again that the world is full of artists in their bedrooms, kitchens and garages and they just needed YouTube to come along and help show them off.
This week’s featured artist being covered are Minnesota’s favorite sons, and one of my favorite bands, The Jayhawks. They have a large catalog and a small, devoted following. There aren’t a ton of covers on YouTube, but what you get is choice.
From Rainy Day Music:
I’d be willing to bet a lot of Jayhawks people find this to be an underappreciated song, this is Smile, from the album of the same name, as performed by Marco Ferri:
I might have put Russ in this space before, but here he’s playing The Yankee’s favorite Jayhawks song, Angelyne, in split screen, on a 2kulele.
That’s also from Rainy Day Music. We make up our own lyrics to that one. Usually it has to do with pancakes.
There doesn’t seem to be a proper cover of my favorite Jayhawks song, from the woefully under-appreciated Hollywood Town Hall, so I’ll just put the official video here:
It is startling. I’d say “They look so young!” And then I realize that video is almost 20 years old. Mark Olson, the guy with the straw hat, turns 50 this year. Gary Louris is sneaking up on 60. Two years agoOlson and Louris recorded an album. They’re due to release another record in what is considered their classic band lineup later this year.
Nothing of import to share, just a day of Email and reading and phone numbers. So we’ll get right to the good stuff, the magnificent return of a weekly feature that proves the point there is plenty of art out there just waiting for a play to show off, like YouTube.
The premise is that a musician is picked and we display a small handful of non-professional musicians covering their work. The musician this week is actually a band, Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros. They started out with their initial success online, so who knows where the people you watch today will end up.
First off Eric Smalls offers up his take on a song called Janglin. You’ve probably heard the original in a commercial here and there. Smalls makes it a bit more mellow. His mother, if you read the comments, really likes it. You might too.
Andy Glover plays 40 Day Dream and he gives it a nice little sound.
This is the song for which most people know Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. There are predominantly more covers of this tune on YouTube than any of their other ones. And while I don’t generally like kids singing, because it is just novel or odd or both. (But not your kid. Your kid sounds great.)
This little girl is adorable and and will blow you away.
That video has 5.8 million views. And you can see their website here, which I think just got invented toward the end of that video.
As for the band, they have a really cool three-page website.
Here’s how they play Home, on Morning Becomes Eclectic, which has remained one of the best radio shows in America for decades.
Enjoy the next cover you hear. There’s usually a great deal of love behind them.
When the day was done and the weekend begun we let our feathers down. This is a screech owl. We also saw two kinds of vultures. Did you know that they are very curious about circles? It has to do with how they find food. So if you make a circle with your thumb and forefinger they will stick their head right through it looking for meat.
We met all different kinds of hawks from the Raptor Center. We renewed our friendship with the golden eagle Tiger (War Eagle VI):
We saw her last football game flight a few years back. I have great pictures of her from there.
We also saw Spirit, the bald eagle, again:
This is the Football, Fans and Feathers program, where the raptor biologists and volunteers show off their charges. They fly them from release buildings right over guests’ heads. So, yeah, I have a few nice pictures. You can see them all in the photo gallery.
At Pie Day we sat in the romantic South’s Oldest Rivalry corner at Byron’s. That’s the painting that was hanging directly over the booth. There was also the famous Dye-Bryant hunting photograph, a shot of the scoreboard from the first Iron Bowl in Auburn. These are tidy little pieces of local lore. We were eating barbecue under them all.
We retired home for pie. We picked up an Oreo ice cream pie last week for The Yankee’s birthday. She pronounced it excellent, so we’ve been nursing it until tonight.
Journalism links: Be aware of the punctuation on your resume. I’m convinced this is never perfect. Or that it changes. I blame the screech owl. The block by block summit was a great watch today. They are promising archived video soon. Do check it out if you’re interested in community journalism. And, finally, one more good argument for location-based reporting:
(B)ecause this person is announcing to the world that they’re there, that increases the likelihood that they’re willing to talk. Instead of going to a place, or cold calling, or going up to people and interrupting them or going on a fishing expedition, you can find very specific eyewitness sources.
Working reporters can make things like Four Square and Gowalla an incredibly valuable resource. I’m still not interested in using them as a personal tool.
YouTube Cover Theater returns and this week’s tribute belongs to Coldplay because … mostly because I like this one, which validates everything I need to know about the band:
I liked this one more before I realized it was Coldplay, but this young lady does a nice job here:
She has a few more covers on YouTube, and they’re all great. I am a new Orla Gartland fan.
One more:
Give people a camera and a few spare minutes and they’ll show you their art.
And, just for fun, here’s Coldplay explaining their relationship to Billie Jean and her kid:
Tomorrow: Football! See you there. (And don’t forget to check out the raptors.
