A Dylan Cover a Day: Farewell Angelina

Uncategorized

By Tony Attwood

I’ve been working my way through Dylan songs in alphabetical order, but have come into territory where either we have songs with no covers, or nothing that I think is worthy of a mention, or we’ve already been through all the covers before (Every Grain of Sand for example), and there’s not much to add.

But moving on at full speed I eventually got to Farewell Angelina and here I have found a couple of things I would really like to draw to draw your attention to…  starting with Adjö, Angelina by Mikael Wiehe and Ebba Forsberg in Swedish.

As I have commented before on versions in a language one doesn’t speak, more than anything it forces one to contemplate what the musical arranger has done and how the performers are responding.   I do hope you have the time to listen.

Back to English and this by an unknown artist.   We’ve had it on the site before, and it is superb in my view.  Exquisitely rendered guitar accompaniment and a voice that works so well with the accompaniment.

Perhaps one of the oddest things I have seen since I last went on the internet is the discussion that follows has people getting rather angry denouncing this recording because it is not Bob Dylan performing, and calling others idiots for thinking it is.   Perhaps by way of extension of that we ought to be blaming Bob for writing the song and thus generating the arguments in the first place.  Perhaps everytime I make a mistake in something I write I should blame Nikola Tesla.

But I must throw this in too.  For me this recording, and indeed the others I am choosing to highlight in this little piece is absolutely a reassertion of the fact that there are people out there with a real sense of adventure and creativity.

So moving on, whoever would have thought of changing the beat, the melody and the chord structure and still got something out of it that is such absolute fun.

Well I suppose someone called Daisy Mayhem.  And when the occasional vocal harmonies come in as well, oh, what can I say?   This next piece is such fun, so uplifting, so utterly enjoyable, it just brings a big smile to my face, and an uplift in my heart.  I do hope you can find the time to play this all the way through.

I want to play in this band!

Actually, apart from the fact I don’t think they are recruiting old men at the moment, they are a New England band and if you want to know more about them, here is their web site.  Normally at moments like this everyone says, “Oh I’ve known about them of years,” and “You mean you’ve only just discovered them – where have you been living Tony?” to which I reply truthfully, “Northamptonshire”, and since even more people in England don’t know where that is (confusing it with Northumberland as like as not) we tend to leave it at that.

Daisy Mayhem is a cartoon character (well, you probably knew that, but I had to look it up – obviously I come from the wrong cultural background).

The point here is that with a lot of Dylan’s music, someone with a really good musical ability and instinct will be able to play in every sense of the word.  I beg you to play that version above and just sit back and enjoy it.

And because they have given me such pleasure today, I am going to offer a couple of other tracks from them.

I hope you got something out of that!

3 Comments

  2. Really nice post today, from pure sensitivity to sensitive fun. BTW, do you know what kind of mic(s) Rani Arbo & daisy mayhem female singer is using? I like not having to eat the mic to get a clear sound….

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *