KEEP WRITING no 194

May  2025

Your Favorite Cover Song

A collaboration with Amber Wolf

Letterpress printed at my studio in Linton, on the Willamette River. 

Amber Wolf is a champion of mail. Of course I wanted to collaborate with her. When she posed her question—an idea for a cover song and a story attached to it— I had immediately shared one story. Then another. And another.

I couldn’t choose one so I am telling a few.

Cap’n Jazz: Take on me

I was never very cool about music but I had friends who worked in record stores and were willing to take me to shows. Left alone, I like drippy sentimental pop. I like a song with big emotions, that isn’t too tricky to understand.  This version of the 80’s hit Take On Me, was a sloppy, raucous mess. But the breakdown, with the heavy drums emphasizing I’ll…BE ….GONE… was so infections I thought it was owed to interpretation. It exists in the original but again, I am no one to untangle subtleties and Cap’n Jazz’s screamy mess was a contrast to the breakdowns. 

Screaming Females: Shake it Off

I first saw Screaming Females in a living room in Baton Rouge, and like many, was charmed by Marissa Paternoster’s lead guitar and low voice.  I do not remember the first time I heard a Taylor Swift song, largely missing that boat. 

One summer I was in Tennessee, visiting my Dad and cleaning out boxes from my sisters basement, the last of my childhood relics.  I was feeling sentimental when the call arrived that my good friend Travis had died, a suicide spawned by alcoholism.  My dad’s stifling suburban house felt extra smothering, but my sister was willing to drive me to the greenway for daily walks for the rest of my visit. She even let me play this song, over and over, the only thing I wanted to hear. The thing is, I couldn’t shake it off. I was crushed, and even now, eleven years later, I still sometimes see something and want to share it with him via postcard. I agree this is a weird choice for grieving and also who am I to argue with what works.

Johnny Cash: Hurt

My first weeks in New Orleans in 2002, I slept on the floor of an unfinished closet in a friends apartment. We went to gay bars to dance, and spent the weekends on Bourbon Street people watching. He would encourage me to talk to bouncers and tourists, daring me to engage with fleeting crushes. It was always messy. At the end of the night, we might stop at the Clover Grill for grits and shoestring fries. The pink tiled and greasy walled dinner nicknamed The Clever Girl. Madonna blared over the blown out speakers. One late night, on the tv in the corner, a barely audible Johnny Cash, covering Nine Inch Nails.  It was incongruous, a reminder of mortality, in a bubbly pink place, where I would later see the Mayor on Christmas eve.

Superchunk: 100,000 fireflies

In the summer before my senior year of  high school, I got my license. Immediately, I began attending weekly poetry readings at a coffee shop two towns away.  I met another writer who would become a roommate and friend, eventually reading together in Seattle, going to shows in Atlanta, and getting drunk on gin in Nashville. That summer, he made me two mix tapes I kept for twenty five years, with unusual song snippets that I still hum to myself sometimes.  One of the tapes included three versions of the Magnetic Fields song, 100,000 fireflies, the original and best. I had a friend who played mandolin and we made our own version though if you need to thrash it out, the super chunk song gets to it quick: IM AFRAID OF THE DARK WITHOUT YOU CLOSE TO ME.

The Mountain Goats: The Sign

Before the podcast “I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats,” I only listened to the Mountain Goats. Travis even sent me a sticker declaring it so, a year or two before he died. I listened to the Mountain Goats so often that a friend, organizing a cover band show, asked if I could play a set of songs with only three weeks to practice. Obviously I could. That summer,  friends had a birthday party for me in their yard. When it was time to sing we declared a new tradition:  instead of Happy Birthday, they would sing my favorite song. And so a room of my friends who hated pop music, sang the #1 hit from my high school years, as covered by the Mountains Goats, because in a live version I sometimes track down, John Darnielle’s voice cracks with conviction, and it is that passion I also strive for (he also makes joke about shooting the crow, before the times of daily mass shootings, which seems in poor taste, I know.)

The Break Up: This World is Not My Home

It is hard to find the original of this song, and I think the recording I had went the way of all the tapes I lost in the mail when I moved to Portland (including the aforementioned two mixtapes from the writer). 

In the winter of 2005,  a few months after Hurricane Katrina, a friend organized a show and asked me and Misha to play. We were all heartbroken all the time, achy and angry and sad. 

 We played this song in a house that felt like it might disintegrate at any point, in a room that was humid an cold, a singalong asking the whole room to join us I CAN’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE. 

Against Me!: Money Changes Everything

Cyndi Lauper forever but also Against Me! Is a sort of comfort indulgence.  One summer in New Orleans, I was working at a fancy summer camp in the suburbs. Every morning I woke earlier than I wanted to and drove a few miles, blasting a mix of music meant to wake me up. I say Against me! A bunch of times after their first full length was released, and I was hanging in Gainesville FL for a few weeks. Later, Travis would make me copies of newer albums that he owned, even if he didnt think they were very good. One tape was played endlessly in my studio, two albums over and over. Another cassette lost to the same postal service accident. In the letters accompanying  the tape, Travis lamented the misdirection of his former friends (none of this is a secret, Laura Jane Grace wrote about the drug and alcohol abuse used to smother the body dysmorphia and the pitfalls of fame) .  I still like this song. I mean, I love a pop punk cover of a classic.

Prince: Nothing Compares 2U

I know he wrote the original. But I heard Sinead O’Connor first.  I remember the video as it made it to the top 10, the appearance on SNL.  I didn’t hear this version until years later. The first time I heard it I couldn’t get past the grandiosity of the opening lines.  Later, I heard that Prince released it first, an attempt to undermine O’Connor. It is a disappointing and petty story about two queer icons, talented, and passionate, underdogs for similar reasons, considered outsiders. 

Crooked Fingers: When You Were Mine

Again, my loyalties are with Cyndi Lauper, and second to Prince, but this cover included banjo and you can hate it for that but this is the version I played with friends in New Orleans, I loved it for the eerie harmonies I murmured over my musical saw. 

There’s more. The first show I ever played we covered the Lemonheads Allisons Starting to Happen, and I was off key the whole time. Or in high school how I had the lyrics to Everybody Knows taped to my wall, from the soundtrack to Pump Up The Volume, crediting Concrete Blonde before someone embarrassingly corrected me with the original writer of the song, Lenard Cohen. And speaking of Lenard Cohen, I wrote about Hallelujah once and you can read it here. 

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