Brigid Mae Power’s ‘Songs for You’ is a timeless record filled with brilliant moments that will melt the heart of even the most cynically covers-album-averse listener.
By Thomas Blake
Recording a cover of any reasonably well-known song is always a balancing act. How do you make something new enough for it to be worth the effort without shattering the appeal of the original? A cover, as opposed to an interpretation of a traditional song, carries with it an implicit debt to someone else’s creativity, and a corresponding duty to honour that creativity. It’s tough to get right – the deluge of frankly appalling tribute acts that have flooded the live music scene in recent years is proof enough of that – but on the rare occasions it does work, it can seem like a kind of alchemy.
On Songs for You, Brigid Mae Power has mastered that alchemy. She served notice of her ability to make other people’s material her own with a wonderful version of Tim Buckley’s I Must Have Been Blind on her 2023 album Dream from the Deep Well, and a year later, she has gone all the way with an album of nine covers. All of them are songs loved by her late father, or those she listened to while caring for him, and it is that sense of care, perhaps, that permeates these songs, and gives them an appeal far more enduring than your average cover version.
Most of them are reasonably well-known songs from the country, folk, and folk-rock neck of the woods. The main exceptions are Television’s See No Evil, which loses its New York snarl and circular riff but gains in return a newly-framed melody and a quiet kind of positive energy, and closer You Don’t Know Me, a sweet soul-pop classic made famous by Ray Charles. Power stays true to the song’s melancholy sweetness and plays subtly on its country-soul leanings. It makes for a truly timeless performance.
And that timelessness is all over the album. Power’s take on Bert Jansch’s Fresh as a Sweet Sunday Morning unfolds with an easy languor that becomes spine-tinglingly beautiful, indeed almost uncanny, with repeated listens. She has a knack for taking songs that could easily become cloying in the wrong hands and making out of them something feather-light but emotionally rich. Country yodeler Slim Whitman’s Rose Marie is stripped back to its essentials and becomes a kind of brief, elemental lament. Missing You, a quite brilliant modern ballad of the Irish diaspora written by Jimmy MacCarthy but made famous by Christy Moore, floats with an ethereal beauty that makes the hardships it describes all the more poignant.
The nuanced, minimal instrumental backing is a crucial part of the album’s appeal. Angel Blood (a Cass McCombs song) is backed by Power’s hazy organ; the newest song on the album, its nostalgic shimmer helps it fit right in. Walk On Out of My Mind, taken from the Waylon Jennings version, has an easy percussive clop. Roy Orbison’s In Dreams is almost impossibly laid-back, before Power’s voice rises lark-clear over the gentle strum of acoustic guitar.
Neil Young’s Mellow My Mind might be the best of all. Here, Power has achieved the trick of making me think again about a song I thought I knew inside-out: I always saw Mellow My Mind as a largely innocuous track on Tonight’s The Night, an album which has never quite got to me in the way it gets to most Young fans. Hearing Power’s version, though, has made me think again. Her voice has a unique way of highlighting a melody, and here it grapples with Young’s downbeat, burned-out original and comes up with something jewel-like and light-dappled. It’s one of many brilliant moments on a record that will melt the heart of even the most cynically covers-album-averse listener.
Songs for You (20th December 2024) Self Released
Pre-Order the Digital and Vinyl: https://brigidmaepower.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-you
Source: Brigid Mae Power – Songs for You (Album Review) – KLOF Mag
