Late Great Daniel Johnston Discovered Covered ENHANCED by Various Artists

Late Great Daniel Johnston Discovered Covered ENHANCED

Available from Amazon
Usually ships in 24 hours

Late Great Daniel Johnston Discovered Covered ENHANCED

Reader Reviews
Daniel Johnston is one of the greatest musicians and songwriters ever. Ever. That he remains relatively anonymous, celebrated only by a very fortunate niche audience, is a sad testament to the lameness of modern day Clear Channel-owned radio and the closed-mindedness of the majority of today's music fans. In a perfect world, everyone would know and love and recognize these songs for the masterpieces they are. Disc Two of this compilation is a good mix of Daniel Johnston's own work: him alone acapella, alone on a piano, alone on a guitar, alone with an accordion, together with a band, young in 1980, older in the 1990s, happy, grieving, lo-fi, and slick. The songs are all amazing: the rockin' "My Life Is Starting Over Again" with its hopeful hopefulness and its excited joy and its wild crashing drums, the beautiful and accepting "Living Life," the spooky "True Love Will Find You In The End" that seems to almost suggest that True Love is some sort of malicious stalker, and "Go," which should haunt the radio with every other classic anthem of hopeful restlessness. Disc One features all the exact same songs (except one) but covered by modern indie musicians. NONE of the covers are half as good as Daniel's originals. None of them capture as much emotion and love and sadness as Daniel's originals do; none of them evoke half as much feeling. Disc One feels very superfluous, and you're bound to listen to it only a fraction as much as you'll listen to the originals. Beck makes a disappointing appearance, Tom Waits screws up Daniel's gorgeous acapella telling of the story of King Kong, and Guster sucks as bad as Guster ALWAYS sucks. (Someone needs to stop them...in a very violent way. They sounds like the worst of Phil Collins, but with bongo drums.) The Eels do a nice cover of "Living Life" that helps show that beneath Daniel's lo-fi recording techniques his songs really are beautiful and melodic, and a few other songs are all right as well. I view Disc One as a nice token effort of these musicians to spotlight Daniel Johnston's music, but Daniel is just not someone that can be covered and done justice to. He already got his songs perfect! They don't need to be redone. You can only make them worse. But I do recommend these CDs. The mix disc of Daniel Johnston's originals is a great introduction to his work or a good collection of some of his best songs (including a presently unreleased track), and the covers CD is a nice novelty that's way less cool than it could have been. (Daniel Johnston's music influenced Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Yo La Tengo--yet music by these bands or by members of these bands is noticeably absent from this collection. Even the Flaming Lips only back up Sparklehorse on a song: why not cover a whole song by yourselves, you guys? And wouldn't it have been cool to have heard Wilco covering "True Grief," with Jeff Tweedy singing about the unbelievably honest musician that everyone loves, singing, "Everyone's shouting he's so sincere! I can't believe he's here"? Yes, it would have.) But buy this CD anyway. Even if the whole covers CD sucked without any redeeding qualities whatsoever it wouldn't be enough to take this collection down a notch from a five star rating. Daniel Johnston is just that good. Daniel Johnston is as good as music gets.

Back To Top