The New Weird America
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Tributes, like pyramid schemes, always trickle up: Artists usually fete their betters. Unless of course the subject of the tribute is Daniel Johnston, outsider music’s most intriguing talent.
Johnston has always been a slightly guilty pleasure. His audience is drawn to his very real mental illness as much as his guileless pop craft. Ever since his crude home recordings began circulating through the music underground in the early 1980s, he has been a cause celebre. Sonic Youth sung his praises, the Butthole Surfers produced his records, Kurt Cobain wore his T-shirts.
None of these compare to the newly released tribute album “The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered” (don’t worry: he’s very much alive). A two-disc set, it includes 19 Johnston originals and 18 covers by some of the most respected names in rock: Tom Waits, Beck, The Flaming Lips, Bright Eyes, Death Cab for Cutie, Gordon Gano, TV on the Radio.
Johnston is the rare tribute subject whose songs are sharpened and bolstered by others, and this project demonstrates that his talents as a songwriter can be separated from his eccentricities. Johnston’s songs center on a few obsessive, very personal themes – his devout Christian faith; his disturbingly persistent love for a former girlfriend named Laurie; his love of pop music and culture – but sung by others, they have broader appeal.
The way to appreciate this double album is to listen first to Johnston’s version of a song and then to the cover. While the originals are notable for their rawness and energy, Johnston often tramples his own songs, obscuring the quality of the melodies and the depth of feeling in the lyrics. The effects are as different as chugging a wine and tasting it.
Occasionally some of the artists on the compilation stay a bit to close the originals. Johnston’s version of “My Life Is Starting Over Again” has a naifgarage sound like a Modern Lovers tune; Teenage Fanclub smoothes out the rough edges of his playing on their version, but the vocals by fellow-rock-primitivist Jad Fair are indistinguishable from Johnston’s own. Apart from dropping the vocals an octave or so, Calvin Johnson (of Beat Happening fame) does little with a thin song called “Sorry Entertainer.”
The best covers, however, transform the material. Johnston’s version of “Living Life” sounds like it was played on an out-of-tune piano and recorded on a thrift-store boom box in the next room. The tempo shifts queasily as he surges forward on the piano one moment, then slows to cram in all the notes the next.
The manner of the performance is so intriguing that you don’t realize what a brilliant, sorrowful song it is. That is, until you hear the Eels do it. Set against a simple guitar melody, the lyrics seem heartbreaking: “Hold me like a mother would / Like I’ve always known somebody should, yeah / Although tomorrow, it don’t look that good.” It’s among the best songs the Eels have ever recorded.
The quality throughout the album is high enough to appeal to those who know (or care) nothing of Johnston, but admire his admirers. Bright Eyes fleshes a minute-long a capella sketch out into a charming, multilayered song called “Devil Town.” Sparklehorse and the Flaming Lips turn “Go” – originally just strummed chords on a lone guitar – into a lush, Lennon-esque dreamscape of piano, chirping birds, and echoing robot voices. Johnston lyrics like “So here we are on this planet / Just taking everything for granted / If you think you’ve caught on to something / Don’t let it go” sound like the sort of upbeat sci-fi mysticism Wayne Coyne writes for himself.
“Recovered Covered” is a major endorsement of a still-underappreciated pop talent. For Johnston, it is also sweet vindication. In the song “Story of an Artist,” included in this set, he sings: “Everyone and friends and family saying hey get a job / Why do you only do that only? / Why are you so odd? / We don’t really like what you do / We don’t think anyone ever will.” That’s become a pretty hard case to make.
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In 1966, the year after his rejection of the folk community at Newport and the year before embarking on the Basement Tapes, Bob Dylan described folk music this way: “Folk music is a bunch of fat people,” he said. “I have to think of all this as traditional music. Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death… All those songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels – they’re not going to die.”
This is the spirit of folk that infused the old songs of Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music,” what Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America.” It’s also the spirit of the new folk of Devendra Banhart, a singer/songwriter still in his early 20s.
“Nino Rojo,” Banhart’s third album, released today, furthers his idiosyncratic vision. This material is drawn from the same recording session as his last album, “Rejoicing in the Hands,” but rather than leftovers, this is a full second helping. There are a few more sonic elements here – Spanish horns early on, bluesy muted horns at the end – but mostly it is just Devendra and his guitar.
The album opens with “Wake Up, Little Sparrow,” a tale of nature and warning written by children’s singer Ella Jenkins, but in Devendra’s hands it sounds like an Indian folk legend. Also in the “vegetables and death” category are songs like “Ay Mama,” which finds him warbling like a sheeted specter in a haunted house, and “Horsehead Fleshwizard,” which sounds like lines out of a Miguel Angel Asturius novel put to music: “I put the ovaries in my mouth / And all the dogs were dying / The devil will call the cats home / And he looks up to the sky.”
But Banhart is capable of poppy songs that will connect with modern listeners. “At the Hop” finds him pleading with a girlfriend not to leave: “Put me in your suitcase, let me help you pack / Because you’re never coming back / Cook me in your breakfast, and put me on your plate / Because you know I taste great.” Welcome to the new, weird America.