Unless you’re familiar with Bruce Cockburn‘s 1970 eponymous debut, which was also the first album to be released on the Canadian record label True North, a cover of 13th Mountain may sound like an unlikely choice for Buck Curran & Adele H whose paths naturally entwine the experimental.
Listening to Cockburn’s sparse debut today reveals quite the opposite. The song is bathed in a pastoral psychedelic light, reflected in the music, the artwork and lyrics:
Sable sky anoints the earth
With crystal ‘neath my foot Wide-eyed,
white-plumed owl plays
Upon his magic flute
Buck Curran has featured regularly on Folk Radio, from his early days as one-half of Arborea to his more recent solo work, such as No Love is Sorrow, a “bewitching album that pulls the listener in many directions and exposes them to many emotions.” Adele H, the alias of Adele Pappalardo, an experimental pop singer and musician from the city of Bergamo in northern Italy, also Buck’s partner, recently released Impermanence, a Featured Album of the Month – reviewed here by Thomas Blake
…the album transcends its varied influences and becomes a wonderful and, at times, cathartic work of art, brimming with confidence and bursting with important questions about womanhood, metaphysics and music.
Thomas Blake on Adele H’s ‘Impermanence’
I was curious as to how Buck and Adele had come to cover the album. Buck told us:
It was James Toth (Wooden Wand) who thought of me for a compilation dedicated to Bruce Cockburn that he was curating for a label. I have always appreciated Toth’s work, so I was happy to collaborate with him on this project, and so I immediately went about looking through Cockburn’s vast catalogue of albums.
I thought I might have the best luck with finding an appropriate song among his earliest albums…and sure enough, I landed almost immediately on Thoughts On a Rainy Afternoon and 13th Mountain from his 1970 Self-titled debut album. Even before I chose those songs, I had already made my mind up that I would have Adele sing on the track because of her great range and the dynamics of her vocals.
I ended up choosing 13th Mountain because I thought the droning guitar figure would provide the perfect foundation for writing additional counterpoint melodies and adding some psychedelic colours with the slide, etc.
The original recording has so much beautiful space in it…which is so important to me. I just felt it was going to be the perfect song to cover.
However, it took a while to wrap my head around how to approach covering the song. I had to meditate on it for a while. Anyway, the arrangement finally arrived out of nowhere one day…all the parts kind of just fell together perfectly, and it was recorded soon after.
After we finished the recording, I really fell in love with the work Adele and I had done together, so I was very excited to send it to James, who also really loved it. Anyway, I guess due to time constraints from some of the other bands who were asked before us, the label chose to drop our track. At first, we were quite sad that our recording wasn’t going to be included…but I felt the track was worth releasing, so I contacted Cockburn’s manager and publisher, Bernie Finkelstein, to get permission to release it. Bernie thought our recording was lovely, so Adele and I were really excited to get permission, and so we just self-released it through our label Obsolete Recordings.
13th Mountain is also our Song of the Day. You can order it via Bandcamp (it also features an alternative take).
The track also features in our latest Folk Show (Episode 141):