The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered (Disc 1 : The Covers)

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Total Tracks: 18   Total Length: 72:46

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Douglas Wolk

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Douglas Wolk writes about pop music and comic books for Time, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Wired and elsewhere. He's the author of Reading Comics: How Gra...more »

04.22.11
Various Artists, The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered (Disc 1 : The Covers)
Label: Eternal Yip Eye Music

Johnston is very much still alive, but he's in the odd position of writing such amazing songs and being so messed up that he sometimes can't do his own work justice. But other songwriters gravitate to the cracked beauty of his work, and the likes of Tom Waits and Beck do wonderful things with it here.

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Treasure!

doublehappi

Daniel Johnston was unknown to me before I downloaded this from emusic... what a find. I love listening to this from beginning to end -- it puts me in the Daniel Johnston frame of mind, which is not easy to define, but it's different than normality, you can be sure of that. He is such a great songwriter, and sweet soul.

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Brilliant and beautiful songs

SwellJoe

Daniel Johnston is among the best songwriters in the world. Like, comfortably in the top twenty. But, he's also nuts, and falls apart when given a reasonable studio to work in. His early self-made cassette tapes are where his genius is preserved, and I don't know a lot of people who can look past all of the noise, talking, cheap instruments, and overall horrible sound quality to find the song gems beneath. This record solves all of those problems, by putting the songs into the hands of competent and sane musicians in a studio of reasonable quality. Standout tracks are: "My Life Is Starting Over Again", "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievience", "Living Life" which is such a catchy song that it was accessible even in the original cassette version, "The Sun Shines Down On Me", and "Walking the Cow". The record wouldn't be hurt by the loss of the tracks by Tom Waits, The Rabbit, and Calvin Johnston, as they are uniformly awful.

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great album

erepp13

really a great bunch of covers. I think the standouts are the eels, teenage fanclub, and bright eyes

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genius...pure genius

missjulianna

if you find daniel johnston's sound unapproachable or difficult, take a listen to this album and you'll fall in love. his genius will awaken in you.

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If you like Beck

violistic

Download "True Love . . ." It is an amazing song. I also really like some of the others here--Daniel Johnston is a terrific songwriter. Besides the Beck song, I have downloaded M. Ward, Death Cab, sparklehorse, and bright eyes. The other half of this album (with Johnston performing his own songs) has some great material too (esp. "Some Things Last a Long Time").

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Yup.

fireflypie

Every track on this album is top drawer, and shows a different side of Daniel Johnston's amazing skill as a songwriter (especially "Go," "Blue Cloud," and "Monkey In A Zoo"). One of my favorites.

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Some GREAT tracks (and some bad ones)

DasEnergi

Stand-out tracks include: Eels - Living Life, Bright Eyes - Devil Town, Death Cab For Cutie - Dream Scream, Beck - True Love WIll FInd You In The End, Sparklehorse - Go, and my favorite on this album Mercury Rev - Blue Clouds. I own the actual CD, and the original versions by Daniel Johnston are very similar to the remakes.

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If you don't have this one...

GhettoBlaster

Musical savant Daniel Johnston is immortalized in this amazing tribute album. Much like Loved like a milkshake (the Wesley Willis tribute album) you gain an even greater appreciation for Daniel when you here what accomplished musicians interpretations of his songs are. You could swear that "true love will find you in the end" could have been on sea change or maybe even one foot in the grave. Check out Go,Like A Monkey In The Zoo and The Sun Shines Down On Me. If you have not heard of Daniel Johnston listen to this one first(the covers)I don't think he is dead yet.

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They Say All Media Guide

Daniel Johnston is a cult figure rather than an artist with a mainstream following for two important reasons: while Johnston is a truly gifted songwriter, his lyrics are often so painfully intimate and obsessively personal that much of his best work is difficult to listen to without feeling like a voyeur, and his skills as a performer are rudimentary at best, with Johnston’s quavering, tuneless voice and primitive instrumental accompaniment enough to drive away most listeners unless they’re determined to listen past the inept technique to hear the songs hidden within. In 1994, Kathy McCarty, a friend and admirer of Johnston, stepped forward to address the dilemma of his songs versus his recordings by making the album Dead Dog’s Eyeball, in which she sang 19 of his songs, accompanied by imaginative and beautifully executed arrangements. The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered attempts to do something similar but with a more ambitious agenda — disc one of this set features 18 different artists each covering a favorite Daniel Johnston tune, ranging from Tom Waits and Beck to Bright Eyes and Death Cab for Cutie, while disc two features Johnston’s original recordings of the same songs in the same sequence. Presumably the idea is that new listeners, once they’ve grown to appreciate the songs in relatively sugarcoated form, will then be able to move on to investigate Johnston’s songs in their pure form.
There is a flaw in this thinking — while the covers on disc one range from good to excellent and in the liner notes most of the musicians make brief but coherent arguments in support of their choices, the original versions on disc two don’t make for an especially strong Daniel Johnston’s Greatest Hits album, with a number of key songs missing in action. (Johnston himself has compiled a much stronger overview of his work, Welcome to My World.) But the tribute disc has enough pearly moments to compensate — Tom Waits’ full brio interpretation of “King Kong,” Calvin Johnson’s craggy voice merging with the angst of “Sorry Entertainer,” Sparklehorse and the Flaming Lips joining forces for a grand-scale cover of “Go,” and Jad Fair embracing “My Life Is Starting Over Again” with help from Teenage Fanclub. Disc two also includes song lyrics, samples of Johnston’s artwork, and a video for the song “Rock This Town,” all of which can be accessed via your computer’s CD-ROM drive. As a testimony to the artistry of Daniel Johnston, Discovered Covered isn’t quite up to the standard of Dead Dog’s Eyeball, but as an all-star (or semi-star) celebration of an often marginalized artist, it’s engaging stuff that never loses sight of the beauty and gravity of these songs. – Mark Deming

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