Oh Michael...2012's best covers album

I wrote about the Michael Chapman tribute once before, shortly after I received it, but it's a grower, and I like it, oh, maybe three or four times as much now that I've listened to it a few times.

My review is up at Blurt today.

Various Artists

Oh Michael, Look What You’ve Done: Friends Play Michael Chapman

(Tompkins Square)

Not long ago, Michael Chapman was a lot of people's favorite overlooked folk singer, the gruff voiced, lyrically-fingered veteran of the 1970s folk revival that never seemed to have gotten his due. Well received reissues of Fully Qualified Survivor and Rainmaker, as well as tours with younger pickers like Jack Rose (now sadly gone), have righted the balance.

Oh Michael, Look What You've Done goes one step further, gathering contemporaries, admirers and bill sharers to reinterpret Chapman's songs. It is a lovely tribute, one which allows the beauty of the songs to shine through multiple lenses and illuminate various facets of Chapman's appeal. There is a floor-stomping, string-band-style romp from Rose's former band, the Black Twig Pickers, Takoma-style reinvocations of the man's guitar skills from William Tyler and Nick Jonah Davis, and a heart-wrecked and luminous cover of "That Time of Night" from Lucinda Williams (with Doug Pettibone evoking Chapman's eerie, haunted guitar work). Chapman's own generation of folk revivalists kick in some of the album's most gorgeous moments, with Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span finding a shape-note spirituality in Chapman's song "The Prospector" and Bridget St. John quietly, understatedly killing on "Rabbit Hills."

More

Hiss Golden Messenger - "Fennario" (Michael Chapman)

William Tyler

Still catching up on stuff that ran last week, like this review of the solo mostly acoustic guitar album by Lambchop alum William Tyler. It ran in Dusted maybe Wednesday, before the whole Turkey frenzy took hold, and it's too good to be buried there. (The album, not the review, which is so so and repeats the word "luminous" at least once too often.)

Anyway, here's a bit:

Though he’s only about 30 now, William Tyler has played with most of Nashville’s alt.Americana A-list over the last decade. He started right out of high school with Lambchop, but has also worked with Silver Jews and Bonnie “Prince” Billy. He sometimes collaborates with Paul Nieuhaus of Calexico. Around the middle of the aughts, he played with David and Hamish Kilgour. Last year, working in the shadow of late John Fahey, he released an album of finger-picked guitar and electronic experiment under the name Paper Hats. His “Between Radnor and Sunrise” on the fourth volume of the Imaginational Anthem series was one of the disc’s highlights, grounded in American primitivism and played with precision and rigor, yet glazed over somehow with an aura of almost mystic wonder. It’s not an accident that he cites Peter Walker along with Fahey as an influence. Like both of them, Tyler uses the guitar as a pathway to the spiritual.


And more

This is him doing his Paper Hat thing.



I also finished Virgil Thompson's The State of Music last night, and have to write about it at some point...what a cranky, crabby, funny diatribe on the problem of making a living in classical music, circa 1940. (And updated, a little bit, for a second edition in 1961.)