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RUN FOR COVER: ST. VINCENT VS. JACKSON BROWNE: “THESE DAYS”

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St. Vincent and Jackson Browne

Run For Cover is a weekly music column comparing cover songs to the original version. Prepare for a major bending of rules as we hear musicians throw around genres, tempos, style, and intent. Whether they’re picking up another’s song out of respect or boredom, the results have impressed us.

With the first descending chords of “These Days” comes several unforgettable images:

a sports sweatband and an unnecessarily large fur coat (thanks, Wes Anderson), the Andy Warhol banana on The Velvet Underground’s debut album, or, of course, wherever you were when you first heard the song. Jackson Browne wrote the renowned hit when he was still cooped up in California at age sixteen, a few years before it appeared in a demo format for the first time in 1967.

The best part about the song, after the lyrics, is that great plucking of the strings.

In the most sad reveal ever, though, that wasn’t Browne’s move.

When Nico recorded her version—which often gets confused as the “original” song because it was the first version to be released officially (Chelsea Girl came out at the end of 1967)—she added a new style of guitar playing to the track which opened up with fingerpicking (due to Andy Warhol’s suggestion). This style has become so associated with “These Days” that Browne himself now plays the guitar part in Nico’s style, possibly to please crowds.

Now, 46 years later, the song has seen too many covers to keep track of.

There’s the popular Take Away Show episode of The Tallest Man on Earth wandering through Music Inn World Instruments in New York singing a careless yet beautiful tribute, Gregg Allman’s version, which Rolling Stone critic Tony Glover praised despite Allman’s change in lyrics, and the ghostly electronic version released in 1993 by The Golden Palominos, which used a drum-machine.

New Grass Revival, Elliott Smith, Mates of State, Memoryhouse, Band of Horses’ Tyler Ramsey, and Fountains of Wayne are all a part of the covers club, too.

Amidst all of these, after endless takes at the track have been dished out, one of them is just as touching and tragic as the original each time you hear it. Annie Clark, who performs under the stage name St. Vincent, released her cover of “These Days” as the third and final track on her 2006 EP, Paris Is Burning. She makes the quiet song more emotional with each verse;

Maybe that’s from her time as a part of Sufjan Stevens’ touring band.

There’s some subtle orchestral work, muted reverb, and the squeak of her guitar strings as her fingers just barely miss the sweet spot between frets.

Like a child-sized wooden sailboat, her version carries the listener so effortlessly forward and into nostalgia, good or bad. Go ahead and put it on repeat. I find myself doing so every time.

 


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