[Originally Published: January 26, 2010]

Harvest Moon is the title track from a 1992 Neil Young album. Released a full twenty years after Young’s album Harvest, a number of supporting musicians appear on both albums. Many things can influence my choice of songs for Cover Wars each week and one of them is other music blogs.

Snarky Indie Blog Pitchfork had a post last Thursday where they pointed out that both Kevin Barnes and Ben Gibbard had both contributed covers of Harvest Moon for charity releases. P4K theorized…

Neil Young: Having a moment! One possible explanation for the two simultaneous covers: The recent release of Young’s archival live album Dreamin’ Man, which collects live versions of every song from Young’s Harvest Moon album.

Well if they checked YouTube, they would have realized that both artists performed the song 3+ years ago. Pitchfork, I give you a 3.6 for doing your Internet research.

Cover Wars

The Contestants:

Ben Gibbard (Death Cab For Cutie): As was mentioned in the intro, Gibbard recently contributed a cover of Harvest Moon to GIVE Seattle 2009. Proceeds from this compilation go to Food Banks and Art Corps in Seattle. Gibbard performed this tune frequently on his 2007 solo tour.

READ ON for the rest of this week’s contestants…

Benevento Russo Duo: Contributing our only instrumental rendition this week is Marco Benevento and Joe Russo. Always interesting to listen to older shows from this group and hear just how much their sound has developed. Source: 5-25-2003

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Cassandra Wilson: Here we’ve got another take from the jazz world. Wilson recorded this back in 1995, just three years after the release of Harvest Moon. Source: New Moon Daughter

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Some video with an extended instrumental introduction:

Elliot Smith: Sometimes the best recordings come from the worst audio gear. Maybe I shouldn’t say best, but sometimes recordings done with very inexpensive equipment can still have some serious character. This recording was captured on a Sony handheld cassette recorder, and once the crowd quiets down after the intro, it’s a very clear sound. Source:4-5-1999

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Kevin Barnes (of Montreal): Barnes contributed his charitable track to Paste Magazine’s Songs For Haiti. What I really dig is that in addition to being able stream, or purchase these tracks – they also give out these great little embed code that you see below. Well done Paste Magazine.

Some bonus video where Barnes falsely claims that Neil Young is both from Texas and the father of Avril Lavigne.

Mr. Blotto: The setlist indicates that somebody sits in on broom for this track, which is pretty damn hysterical. At the end of the track, one of the band members says into the mic that this is their annual Neil Young tradition. Any Blotto fans want to clue me in on this? I know you’re reading this because you always show up in large numbers to vote for this band. Source: 9-19-2009

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Pearl Jam with Sleater-Kinney: Pearl Jam and Neil Young have quite the history as they’ve recorded and toured together. And of course, PJ plays a lot of Neil covers on their own. In 2005, they had a few renditions of Harvest Moon with a little help from the ladies of Sleater-Kinney who were opening some shows on the tour. In the video clip below, from a 2006 benefit, Vedder says they’re going to play it because he doesn’t know when they’ll get to do it again. To date, it’s the most recent performance.

Railroad Earth: RRE very tastefully stretches this one past the 9 minute mark with some nice mandolin work. Great recording, if you’re a fan of this band – check out the whole show. Source: 5-19-2007

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St. Vincent & Justin Vernon: Edit! Late addition. I normally don’t do this but Jeff has just pointed out that there was another cover of this done Saturday night from St. Vincent and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver.

And down here we need to do a bit of Cover Wars clean-up as three week’s ago our race was too lose to call, and I forgot to declare a winner from two weeks ago because I was writing Cover Wars last week while whacked out on muscle relaxers from a snow-shoveling-back-pain incident.

Phish won the Time Cover Wars. YARN walked away victorious from the Helpless Cover Wars with Ryan Adams and Gillian Welch coming in a strong second. And the winner of last week’s Ballad Of A Thin Man Cover Wars was The Grateful Dead.

Pearl Jam and Sleater-Kinney took home the Cover Wars title for Harvest Moon based on the voting back in early 2010.

DaveO

David Onigman is a recent transplant from Boston to San Francisco. In addition to behind the scenes work and the occasional post, DaveO contributes the (almost) weekly Cover Wars column, though he's always looking for guest authors for it.

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