Madeleine Peyroux
What does a singer do with a deceased man's song? ... Elliott Smith died in October 2003 ... Less than a year later Madeleine Peyroux put this one, from his 1997 record, on an album otherwise made of Dylan, Hank Williams, Leonard Cohen — the old masters — and set the boy from Portland among them as if he had always belonged there ...
She had learned to sing on the streets of Paris as a teenager, busking with the old jazz tunes, and her voice arrived already sounding like a record from the 1930s ... Careless Love, September 2004, was only her second album, eight years after the first, and it made her famous ... a platinum record in England, a gold one at home, built almost entirely from other people's songs ...
Between the Bars is Smith alone with a guitar, fingerpicking, the words half whispered ... Peyroux and her producer, Larry Klein, moved it into a jazz room ... brushed drums, an upright bass, a clean guitar figure where the fingerpicking had been, and her voice sitting low and a little behind the beat, the way she always sits ... Nothing is pushed ... The song was already about the drinks that keep a person quiet, and she sings it as quietly and authentically as the drinks would want ...
The measure of it is also the background players ... Dean Parks on guitar, David Piltch on bass, Jay Bellerose on drums with brushes, Larry Goldings at the keys, recorded in Los Angeles in two studios a few miles apart ... Session men of the highest kind, who know that the loudest entity should be the singer ...