Welcome...

Welcome to Cover Lay Down, a new music-posting blog devoted to the art of the cover song.

Sure, there are plenty of other cover blogs out there, but I think there's still room in the niche. Specifically, though I must confess some dozen gigabytes of my currently full-to-the-gills pre-video iPod are covers from across the vast genre spectrum, here at CLD we're folkies first and foremost, and -- despite the fact that folk music could be said to have invented the very premise of songsharing and covering -- I've noticed a dearth of both covers of folk songs, and folk covers of non-folks songs, cropping up on the usual coverblog suspects.

Don't get me wrong -- I love those guys. I'm not knocking Copy, Right's fondness for the eighties, or Fong's incredible ability to compile cross-genre coverlists the likes of which I've never seen. And the broader tendency in the blogosphere towards promoting what I like to think of as the indie music mutual admiration society produces great collections -- for example, my wonderful playlist of several dozen covers of Feist's Mushaboom. I love this stuff in any flavor, visit the "other cover blogs" at least once a week, and could not stand here before you today were it not for those giant shoulders muscling their way forward over the past few years.

But I hope to embark herein on a journey that focuses on the acoustic and the stripped down, the singer-songwriter paying tribute to their influences, and the influenced paying tribute to the old folk standard.

There will surely be some duplication -- this would be the place to find Nina Gordon's folk cover of Straight Out of Compton, were it not already out there -- and there will surely be the usual genre-stretching, especially since the folk realm overlaps so much with the rest of the music world these days.

But I think there's a new angle here, and I'm ready to share.

So let’s get on to the music, shall we?