someone watches you / you won’t leave the rails
I fell for this Bill Fay song the first time I heard it in the Wilco movie I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. But where Jeff Tweedy’s version is a humble benediction that casts out fear (and which I’ve used on a dozen mixtapes), this version from Damien Jurado and Richard Swift rises up all spectral and echoey, like a lost gospel choir in some knockaround vacant Southern church. Affecting and fabulous.
Be Not So Fearful – Damien Jurado and Richard Swift
Be Not So Fearful (live at the Vic, 1/6/03) – Jeff Tweedy
This is the first track on the collaboration album Other People’s Songs that Secretly Canadian labelmates Jurado and Swift recorded late this summer and released for free. Yup, free.
Go get it here, and read more about the song selection and recording process over here. Swift produced Jurado’s Saint Bartlett album this year, and I once saw Swift open for Wilco — a neat perfect circle of music.
Name: Heather Browne
I’ve scoured the whole owl&bear archive for a definitive version of Tweedy’s “Be Not So Fearful” and I came up with…the exact same one you did. He introduced the song once as “one of my favorite songs in the whole wide world”, I love the idea of an artist I rever being in the same position, a joint admiration for an older musician closes the gap of distance a little ways between appreciator and modern performer. Only yesterday I used this in a mix as the second to last track, the perfect place for it. If this doesn’t render you silent, what will? I still don’t really “get” this new Jurado take on it though, maybe it’s better listened to in the dead of night, right in between Buckley’s Corpus Christi Carol and Bright Eyes’ No One Would Riot For Less.
Christof — December 19, 2010 @ 9:16 am
It is beautiful.
Merry Christmas, Heather.
spookycat — December 25, 2010 @ 8:27 am