This year, the attention economy has made short work of ravaging my time and feelings. Often when I drop my phone onto my pillow at night it's in a state of embarrassed freak-out, after realizing that I've been clicking and scrolling for an hour, consuming as a practice rather than as a way of encountering anything either new or old.
Because of this, I've increasingly come to appreciate old things made new. Lucky for me, for all of us, 2019 has been an incredible year for covers (take Lucy Dacus's mind-bogglingly artful cover of "Dancing in the Dark," or Skylar Gudasz's beautiful, string-laden rendition of "Wichita Lineman").
Hearing a song that I used to play over and over, ten years ago, sung by a band that is meaningful to me now creates a kind of pleasant confusion in my broken brain. Old feelings get retrofitted with new ones, and the sweetness of an old artist suddenly has new viscosity. It's like sleeping in clean sheets.
Durham's Mountain Man has had a remarkable year, generally—Alexandra Sauser-Monnig released an album as Daughter of Swords, Molly Sarlé also released a debut album, and Amelia Meath's Sylvan Esso tour took to daring new heights with its warm, expansive super-group collaborations—and, along the way, it has managed to squeeze out a few memorable covers in its "Sings" series: the holiday classic "White Christmas," John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," and, yesterday, the Wilco and Feist duet, "You and I."
It's a song I've listened to a hundred times before and thought I knew and understood, but Mountain Man's harmonies—vulnerable, stripped-down, and eminently patient—add emotional dimension to the familiar story of two people just trying to make it through another day together: "However close we get sometimes / It's like we never met / But you and I / I think we can take it / All the good with the bad."
Is there really nothing new under the sun? Yeah, probably. But when I hear a cover as caring and generous as this, I mind a whole lot less.
Listen to "You and I", out from Nonesuch Records, below.
Mountain Man covers Wilco
sedwards@indyweek.com
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