Shovels & Rope – Busted Jukebox Volume 3
Dualtone Music Group – 5 February 2021
Four years on since Vol 2, Shovel & Rope’s Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent return with a third restyled covers collection of collaborations, this time inviting those who were parents with the aim of putting together a children’s album.
As such, it opens with just the duo singing the traditional lullaby Hush Little Baby (aka Mockingbird), recorded some years back as expectant parents in Australia for a commercial but never used, the liltingly lovely arrangement featuring plucked strings, foot taps and, I assume mandolin. It’s only 75 seconds, but it’s a total joy.
It has to be said, few of the songs chosen would obviously fall into the children’s favourites category, but some do have parental resonances for the artists, case in point being a version of The Beach Boys’ In My Room, a song Trent was played to soothe him to sleep as a kid and which they now sing to their daughter. They’re joined by Sharon Van Etten, who apparently does likewise with her son, giving the vocals an echo backed by a pounding drum and clanking percussion evocative of an industrial Phil Spector that seems designed to do anything but send someone to sleep.
Daddy John Paul White steps up for Louis Armstrong evergreen What A Wonderful World, a simple fingerpicked three-part harmony arrangement, at least until the middle section when the duo’s daughter talks dad through playing toy piano notes. Up next is another chestnut, You Are My Sunshine, here featuring The Felice Brothers with the fingerpicked notes punctuated by a buzzing drone and chime, the swayalong chorus refrain backing arriving a minute in like some prairie church congregation with the Brothers’ croaking solo vocals handling the verses.
Originally recorded by Garnett Mimms, but best known via Janis Joplin, Cry Baby gets what Trent calls “a sort of an ELO meets CSNY dry, stacked vocal approach”, although that doesn’t really capture the piano, percussive scuff and slow blues swayalong lurch to which Deer Tick’s Jon McCauley and Dennis Ryan add their voices.
Previously recorded, some 50 years apart, by both Bing Crosby and Slim Whitman (which may explain the yodel feel here), My Little Buckaroo is a cowboy children’s lullaby (“Now it’s time that you were roundin’ up/A dream or two”), featuring M Ward and accompanied by campfire harmonica and ukulele.
REM’s Everybody Hurts, basically a waltz about not succumbing to the burdens of life and ending it all, is perhaps an odd one to send the kiddywinks off to slumberland, but given the gorgeous rendition here on which they’re joined by T. Hardy Morris, formerly of Dead Confederate and himself from Athens, it would be churlish to object. Opening with toy piano notes and either uke or mandolin, it’s back then to an honest to goodness actual children’s ditty in the form of Mother Earth and Father Time as featured in the animated 1973 film Charlotte’s Web, enchantingly rendered here by The Secret Sisters.
By distinct contrast, but also an actual kid’s playground song, the Shrimp Records Family Band weigh in on a rhythmically and vocally fractured, percussive thumping and appropriately itchy The Ants Go Marching (set to the Civil War tune of Marching Through Georgia), the album drawing down the blinds and leaving the night light on with a take on the optimism-bursting Tomorrow from Annie, backed by just minimal plangent piano drone and given a powerful vocal gospel feel by African-American fellow husband and wife duo The War And Treaty as it reaches to the heavens in the anthemic final notes. There’s a grand tradition of folk and Americana artists recording albums for children, from Pete Seeger and Lead Belly to Jerry Garcia, Laura Veirs and Megson, all of which transcend the demographic to appeal to all ages, regardless of whether you have offspring or not. This is a worthy addition to the list.
Busted Jukebox, Volume 3 is available via https://fanlink.to/BustedJukeboxVolume3