Glen Phillips: Released
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On-air coverage is the sensitive coverblogger's bread and butter: many artists perform songs live that they never record, and the purity of sound from an in-studio bootleg is far superior to stage recordings, with none of the crowd noise and fuzzy recoding quality that so often undermine clarity and comfort.
As such, I am an avid collector of such performances, with a huge collection of in-studio recordings that combine coverage and originals alike. And because it is coverage and interpretation which bring me to this particular soundtable, I fully intended to start the week off here with a favorite cover or two from the usual haunts: folk sources such as Austin's KUT, Boulder's KBCO, Boston's WBUR, and Philly's XPN, and the practically infinite number of pop stations which host acoustic sessions in-studio (and occasionally release the best of these in album form in frustratingly small batches, creating an infinite series of rarities).
But then I dug up this 2005 World Cafe recording from Glen Phillips, the former Toad The Wet Sprocket frontman whose solo work in recent years has turned towards such tracks as this: gentle, hopeful, melodic and deep, dipped in the sparsest of harmonies for maximum effect. And, as a bonus, I discovered that the whole set is available on archive.org.
Coverage, and more contributions, to come, I guess. In the meantime, this will serve to spread the beauty.