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Dana Gavanski
Wind Songs EP
Flemish Eye - 2020
Michael Panontin
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Whether you discovered it recently or whether you first heard it back in the day, Robert Wyatt's 'At Last I Am Free' has to be one of the greatest covers ever. His 1980 rendering of the Chic slowburner was for me a jaw-dropping entrance into a magical post-psychedelic world, made all the more bewitching given its release in November 1980, just as all that angular, humourless post-punk was taking hold on the alt charts.
For Dana Gavanski, it was much of the same. "I only discovered this brilliant song within the last year," she writes. "Robert Wyatt does a superb cover of it that just blows my mind with his bizarre but amazing vocals and arrangement: that soft and gentle mellotron flute that pushes the song along coupled with his shrill wizardly voice." If nothing else, I suppose, Wyatt's version most perfectly captures the little-known admission by Nick Lowe, who once said, "When I find a cover song that I like, I'll work away at it until I kind of believe that I wrote it."
Gavanski's recording of it is partly a product of 'these unprecedented times', to flog an overused cliche. Her debut LP Yesterday Is Gone dropped in March, just in time for the COVID lockdown. And so with shows and festivals on both sides of the Atlantic put on hold, she opted to form deeper connections with some of the artists who inspired her, putting some of their songs to tape and issuing them on this five-song EP.
Wyatt's classic is admittedly an impossibly high bar to clear, but Gavanski certainly gives it a good shot, capturing the song's minimal textures admirably but falling a tad short of Wyatt's inimitable voice. Elsewhere on Wind Songs, her fluteless treatment of King Crimson's 'I Talk to the Wind' is interesting, though taken out of its original context immediately following '21st Century Schizoid Man', its languid comedown quality is somewhat lost. Judee Sill's 'The Kiss' definitely gets the most radical treatment here, with that ethereal love song rendered almost otherworldly by those vertiginous, almost carnival-like electronics.
But the record's high point is without a doubt Gavanski's take on Tim Hardin's 'Never Too Far', which the "songwriter's songwriter" included on his first album way back in 1966. Though it's not Hardin's best-known song, it has been covered a few times over the years, from Gandalf's late-sixties psych-rock rendition to Dutch singer Wally Tax's more rustic reworking of it in 2002. But nothing comes close to Gavanski's vision of it. She takes what seems a fairly standard arrangement and adorns it with some cleverly treated guitar and a vocal that is so achingly beautiful it almost feels as though she wrote the song herself. Nick Lowe would definitely approve.
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Flemish Eye
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