Back in high school when I was a rebel rollerblader I loved punk music. But my friends were not the well versed music hipsters that you see today. So I didn’t know where to find new music. So I bought all of those Fat Wreck Chords compilations from Hot Topic … [W: Fat Music for Fat People], [W:Survival of the Fattest], [W:Physical Fatness], [W:Life in the Fat Lane], [W:Short Music for Short People]. That was back when Hot Topic was a scary place to go into and was dedicated to music, not to nerdy goth japanese import t-shirts.

Later I really loved the [W:Punk goes] series of CDs where each album would have a genre of music covered by punk bands. As I’ve grown up and my taste in music has evolved I find myself listening to punk and punk covers less often. My teen angst must be getting replaced by late 20’s fattness. A while back I posted a link to cover of “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”, but I didn’t do any research beyond that. Today I found a link on Boing Boing to a folk cover of NWA straight outta compton, but sadly the link was down.

But what I did find in that post was solid gold… Coverlaydown.com. Which is a blog dedicated to Folk covers of songs. It’s fantastic! Maybe these make such good covers to me because, just like the punk covers, they are so different from the original style of the songs. I just can’t say enough how much I love this site and the music. It’s like they took all the pop songs and ran them through some kind or emotion amplifier and they came out the other side even better. A lot of them are so different that you might not even realize what song they were originally. I really like the way the site is run, giving credit to the original poster while providing links to the covering artist for purchase of new music.

Here are a few that I really like.

• Dr. Fox’s Old Timey String Band: Kids (orig. MGMT)
  (from MySpace)
• Sara Watkins, Sean Watkins, and Glen Phillips cover Elliot Smith’s Between the Bars live in some parking lot way back in 2004.
• Butch Ross: Eleanor Rigby (orig. The Beatles)
  (from A Long Way From Shady Grove, 2009)
• Whip: White Wedding (orig. Billy Idol)
  (from Bridging the Distance, 2007; more Whip)
• Ingrid Michaelson: Can’t Help Falling In Love (orig. Elvis Presley)