Bill Callahan & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy cover Hank Williams Jr w/ Matt Sweeney
Last week Bill Callahan and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy covered Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ “Blackness of the Night,” and now they’re back with another collaborative cover. This time they’ve tackled Hank Williams Jr‘s 1979 song “OD’d in Denver,” with a little help from Chavez’s Matt Sweeney (and his brother, Greg). Together, they take the straight-up country original and put a paranoid, minimal, almost post-punk spin on the song.
“One of the many beautiful things about the original ‘OD’d In Denver’ is the contrast between Hank Williams Junior’s effortless carefree vocal and the song’s bleak desperate words,” says Sweeney. “So I thought I’d ‘chop it up’ and make the song’s music ‘line up’ with its lyrics by having minor key guitars percolate and arpeggiate, and singing an equally paranoid ‘guide melody’. Then Greg Sweeney laced in his drum and percussion elements at his studio in Hoboken. Hank’s version’s narrator thinks he’s gotten over his night in Denver – I wanted this WillBilly track to feel like we’re catching our singer deep in the fear spiral.”
Their version is pretty great. Check that out, along with Bocephus’ original, below.
Matt Sweeney’s old band, Chavez, are reissuing their debut album for its 25th anniversary.
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Must-Hear Folk Albums of 2020 So Far
Bill Callahan – Gold Record
Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher
Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit – Reunions
Arlo Mckinley – Die Midwestern
Bob Dylan – Rough and Rowdy Ways
Neil Young – Homegrown
In a 1975 Rolling Stone interview, Neil called his long-shelved-and-now-finally-released album Homegrown "the darker side to Harvest." With more hindsight, he called it "the missing link between Harvest, Comes a Time, Old Ways and Harvest Moon" in Jimmy McDonough's 2002 Neil Young biography Shakey. Those albums are all on Neil's folkier, more acoustic side, and Homegrown is indeed cut from that cloth. As soon as you hear the opening of "Separate Ways," you're transported right back to the warmth of the Harvest era. It's of the same proto-slowcore variety of that album's opener "Out On the Weekend," but even more haunting and melancholic. Just 30 seconds in, and Homegrown already lives up to the description Neil gave Cameron Crowe of it 45 years ago.
That same mood carries over into second track "Try," which -- like "Separate Ways" -- features The Band's Levon Helm on drums, and Levon really managed to capture the bare-bones, slow-paced drumming style that these types of quietly revolutionary Neil Young songs always demanded. "Try" is also one of two songs on Homegrown with backing vocals by Emmylou Harris (the other being "Star of Bethlehem"), and her soaring voice makes for a truly lovely contrast with Neil's more somber delivery. And as melancholic as those songs are, they've got nothing on the melancholy of the entirely-solo cuts "Mexico" (voice and piano) and "Kansas" (voice, acoustic guitar, and harmonica), or on "White Line," which features Neil, his acoustic, and his harmonica joined only by some lead guitar by The Band's Robbie Robertson. It's on those breathtaking songs where you can really hear why Neil -- coming right off the release of On The Beach -- might have felt like he was digging himself into a hole of dour, depressive music. But all these years later -- now that Neil has cemented his legacy over and over again and proven to be an artist who can evolve and adapt with the times without losing his own uniqueness -- those songs feel like buried treasure, especially for fans who gravitate towards his most hushed material. Full review here.