It’s a common tale: Girl moves to the city to go study law at Columbia, instead becomes an acclaimed country-folk artist, has a child, takes three years off, comes out of hiaturs by recording a New Order tune. OK, not so common. But the last few legs of the story are at least logical; when you have a kid, you have less time to play and more time to listen, which would explain why six of the nine tracks on Laura’s return album are covers, of everyone from Burt Bacharach to Merle Haggard. Her take on the Low-Life opening track “Love Vigilantes” by New Order is the sort of transformation you’d expect — enter the mandolin and the fiddle, etc. — and the refrain’s longing lyric (“I wanna see my family, my wife and child waiting for me/Gotta go home, I’ve been so long you see”) fits Laura’s folk-lilt reading quite nicely.
This is what it sounded and looked like in 1985:
Trains and Boats and Planes is out 4/15 on Diesel Only. Tracklist:
01 “Trains And Boats And Planes” [Burt Bacharach-Hal David]
02 “Train Of Life” [Roger Miller]
03 “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald” [Gordon Lightfoot]
04 “Howard Huges Blues” [John Hartford]
05 “Love Vigilantes” [Gilian Gilbert, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, Bernard Sumner]
06 “Silver Wings” [Merle Haggard]
07 “Roll Truck Roll” [from Hello Recordings EP] *
08 “Big Wheel” [from Not The Tremblin' Kind] *
09 “Yonder Comes A Freight Train” [From When The Roses Bloom Again] *
* – previously released
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wow that cover is a total zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz’er
She “sang” this with Ted Leo at last year’s WFMU Radiothon (in that she kind of sang/spoke background vocals while TL sang). Much more interesting than this cover.
Laura Cantrell in They Might Be GIant’s “The Guitar” video is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.
When is this new album coming out? I can’t find anything about it.
I like it, I’m quite surprised how well it works. Could still do with a couple of Barney’s weird little “ooh”s though.
I really love the cover that Poi Dog Pondering did of this song.