Homonyms: Wrecking Ball

Emmylou Harris: Wrecking Ball

[purchase]

Gillian Welch w Old Crow Medicine Show: Wrecking Ball

[unavailable, purchase studio version]

I suspect that we are going to see this week how certain metaphors strike different songwriters. A wrecking ball is a fine example to start with. Emmylou Harris makes a pun on the word ball, and her narrator invites a boy to a dance. The danger is implied rather than stated, and the song is an eloquent statement on the sense of personal danger that can come with the beginning of a new relationship. For Gillian Welch, her narrator is the wrecking ball of the title, and it is her life and prospects that get demolished. Welch’s Wrecking Ball was on her 2003 album Soul Journey, and that it is the purchase link I have provided, But the version heard here comes from the following year, from a live performance at radio station WXPN’s World Café program, and the backing band was Old Crow Medicine Show. Wow! It sounds as good as you would expect if you know both artists. This version is somewhat less produced than the album version; in either case, the strength of the song shines through.

The Night Sky: Black Star

Gillian Welch: Black Star (Radiohead cover)

[live & unavailable]

Blame it on the black star
Blame it on the falling sky
Blame it on the satellite
That beams me home...

In Radiohead's universe, it seems perfectly natural for a couple's growing distance to be projected into the night sky. After all, Thom Yorke is well known for his tendency towards pensive and disconnected first-person narrators struggling with ways to make sense of a topsy-turvy world, their alienation couched in skewed, cryptic lyrics.

But where the sonic build of spit and static crashes through the original recording [purchase], thickening it with angst, bass and drumbash, in Gillian Welch's universe, intimacy brings the sky close. Gentle guitar lines stream out like cosmic rays of acoustic goodness. Voices shimmer and soar as they intertwine. The world is right. The combination is exquisite. It is, without question, one of my top ten favorite covers, ever.

Summertime: Summer Evening

Gillian Welch: Summer Evening

[purchase]

Have we really fallen into an all-covers subtheme this week? Then far be it for the resident coverfolk blogger to miss his opportunity to share this delightfully languid take on Greg Brown's gentle love song to the season as performed by one of my absolute favorite folksingers, who I recently featured over at Cover Lay Down.

Summer Evening comes from one of my favorite tribute albums, the all-female voiced Going Driftless. Brown's rural, deeply confessional songsmithing never sounded sweeter.

Mothers: I Had A Good Mother And Father

Washington Phillips: I Had A Good Mother And Father (circa 1928)

[purchase]

Kate Wolf: I Had A Good Mother and Father (1979)

[purchase]

Palace Brothers: I Had A Good Father And Mother (1993)

[purchase]

Gillian Welch: I Had A Real Good Mother & Father (2003)

[purchase]

Newcomers to the folkworld may believe this song is a Gillian Welch original, and it's true that Welch and her partner David Rawlings have a powerful tendency to make the songs they perform their own. But older folkies like myself know it as an old gospel spiritual, first recorded and possibly penned by Washington Phillips in the midst of the Great Depression, which flows down to us through the folkways in many hands and voices, and with variation in the title.

Kate Wolf, for example, takes Phillips' own listing and makes it her own through gentle, loving acoustic treatment in her inimitably beautiful voice. Meanwhile, the Palace Brothers reverse the titular parents and twang it up a bit, adding old timey banjo and slide over guitar strum patterns more akin to that of Phillips' original handmade chord-zither. Alongside these, Welch's slow-picked dustbowl rendition aches with yearning for the promise of Heaven's reunion.

Duets: I Want To Sing That Rock and Roll

Gillian Welch: I Want To Sing That Rock And Roll

[purchase]

The David Rawlings Machine: Elvis Presley Blues

[live bootleg]

Glen Phillips: Revelator

[purchase]

Co-writer, producer, and constant companion David Rawlings may be willing to let Gillian Welch have the billing, but those in the know understand that the act known as "Gillian Welch" has been a true partnership since its inception in the early nineties. As such, most Gillian Welch songs are duets by definition.

As proof, we need only note that pretty much every cover of a Gillian Welch song I have ever collected retains Rawlings' subtle, unbilled but everpresent harmonies and intertwined second guitar part as if they were inherent in the tune itself. For example, though Glen Phillips is billed solo, the duet harmony leading into the chorus on his cover of Revelator is neither a surprise nor a fluke; similarly, you'll hear the exact same harmonies on Chris Pureka's cover of Everything is Free that you will on the Welch/Rawlings original. I also note that the two perform together on occasion as The David Rawlings Machine: when they do, though their material tends towards coversong, the guitar interplay and harmonies remain static; the only difference is that Rawlings is more prone to sing the verses, as he does in the bootlegged "Gillian Welch cover" above.

Here's a typical set, with originals under each name and a cover to split the difference; for more on the partnership, check out this longer treatise on Gillian Welch I wrote back in January '08.

Little Black Book: Annabelle

Gillian Welch: Annebelle

[purchase]

I don't know much about Gillian Welch, except that she rose to fame as a result of the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. I only own one album.  Each of the songs on it have a sweet country feel and old fashioned pastoral lyrics. Several of the tracks are really quite beautiful.

The featured track is excruciatingly sad.  A mother with an apparently failing farm mourns the death of her daughter, Annabelle, who was the apple of her eye.

And we can not have all things to please us
No matter how we try
Until we've all gone to Jesus
We can only wonder why