If folk music’s prime currency is authenticity, Langhorne Slim might well earn some crooked eyebrows. Classically trained at the SUNY-Purchase conservatory, Sean Scolnik donned loafers and floppy hat and named himself after his hometown in the tradition of all those rail-hoppin’ ramblers who used to do that. The blogosphere gobbled up this aesthetic and and have cast Slim in the role of Guthrie-Dylan inheritor he came dressed to play.

Really, Slim doesn’t make music like that at all. His music is much more poptimistic, with an evangelical energy that has led some critics to call his music religious (and not in the way Bob Dylan equated Woody Guthrie’s music with religion). Slim’s lyrics lunge, albeit passionately, with a blade that is shinier than it is sharp. Cat Stevens, with his spiritual conceit, is an apter analog—or the Avett Brothers, with whom Slim has toured.

The irony, of course, is that once Langhorne Slim is amputated from the Guthrie-Dylan continuum the question of authenticity ceases to pose a problem, and we can appreciate Scolnik for what he is: An upbeat kid with a folk-gospel bent who makes dynamic, non-threatening, thoroughly enjoyable pop music.

Langhorne Slim plays tonight at the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hotel with Dawes, left-coast country rock act whom Rolling Stone last week certified as “breaking,” and who occasionally go Steinbeck all over their blog. Doors at 8 p.m.; $12-$14.

To judge by their tightly wound, country-tinged pop songs, Olivia Mancini and the Mates aren’t shorting their craft. But even the most polished band needs its R&R, and this local act—featuring two former members of Washington Social Club—loves to curl up with a good book. That’s the impression, at least, left by “Graphology,” a rollicking gem from the group’s new album in which Mancini lists maybe a dozen book titles. Apparently, her bookshelf (including 50 Years of Fender, 1776, and Bob Dylan’s Chronicles) is pretty heavy on nonfiction, although some Dashiell Hammett sneaks in (noir does not make its way, it only sneaks). Pretty eclectic stuff: too bad, then, that Mancini concludes each verse with “those are not enough to make me smart.” But we’ve all been there.

Olivia Mancini and the Mates perform tomorrow at the Black Cat with Stripmall Ballads. $8. You can download “Graphology” at the group’s Web site. Here’s another song:

More literary pop songs after the jump, including a nonsensical (what else!) Pynchon tribute, a lucrative (?!) Brontë homage, and Dan Bejar being Dan Bejar!

“Gravity’s Rainbow” by Klaxons (2007): This ravey U.K. lad band named a song on its 2007 album, Myths of the Future, after Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 postmodern masterpiece, although the lyrics (something about Tangier deserts and the year 4000) share little with the namesake, save denseness. No clue if Pynchon would approve, but the song is probably a lot better than Laurie Anderson’s proposed (and rejected) Gravity Rainbow opera would have been:

“California Zephyr” by Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar (2009): This rose-tinted cut leads off One Fast Move or I’m Gone, an album inspired by Jack Kerouac’s 1962 novel Big Sur. Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie) and Farrar’s (Son Volt) lyrics draw from Kerouac’s prose, and the two more or less match their vocal styles (earnest and weather-worn, respectively) to the book’s opposing tones (romantic and nightmarish).

“Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush (2008): The first single by the fey, experimental pop singer, which in 1978 made her, at 19 even, the first woman to both record and write a No. 1 single in the U.K. (This after her label wanted to introduce the singer with a safer song, but relented. Go lit!) She penned the song after watching a movie adaptation of Emily Brontë’s tragic novel, which has bedeviled AP Language classes ever since its 1846 publication (OK, it took a few years for it to enter curricula). As weird as it is, the song is pretty restrained for Bush, who continues to make great, challenging music but is utterly to blame for nonsensical ’80s videos like Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

“Your Blood” by Destroyer: Dan Bejar mentions a couple of Albert Camus novels in this cut from his excellent Rubies album. This being Destroyer, though, there is ostensibly no logic as to why.

Thanks in part to Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street, it didn’t take long for the rock-star-toiling-away-in-seclusion narrative to go from the stuff of critical legend to obvious fodder for parody. Nevermind that two years later saw the release and instant canonization of Bob Dylan and the Band’s long-buried The Basement Tapes—the inspiration, in fact, for the DeLillo character Bucky Wunderlick’s “The Mountain Tapes.” And so for listeners, the brilliant, hermetic artist has persisted, both as a reductive, suspect concept and as an undeniably seductive one. Listed here, some examples of the latter.

The D.C./Baltimore psych-folk act Le Loup retreated to a cabin in North Carolina to record much of its latest album, Family (out now on Hardly Art) and the result is druggy, country-fried, and poppy. Take “Grow,” which sports what might be the best pairing of Beach Boys harmonies and the “Be My Baby” beat since, well, the Beach Boys. But the real innovation here is space: Where past Le Loup songs were concise and linear, Family’s breathe and frolic and expand. The band—which performs Saturday at the Black Cat with Pree—recently recorded a session for All Our Noise. Check it out:

More records made in wooded seclusion after the jump: Reluctant backwoods Svengalis, some latter-day Johnny Cash, and brassy mountain ditties!

Dandelion Gum by Black Moth Super Rainbow (2007): The members of this blissed-out post-rock band cloak their identities with costumes, pseudonyms, and video-heavy performances, hoping to emphasize their music by de-emphasizing the personalities making it. As the group has acknowledged, this strategy of willful obscurity hasn’t exactly worked out. No kidding: When you record your breakthrough record in a Western Pennsylvania cabin and sing trippy, hypnotic songs about witches, you’re more or less asking to be typecast as backwoods Svengalis.

American Recordings by Johnny Cash (2004): The cabin that the late Johnny and June Carter Cash built in Hendersonville, Tenn., in the late ’70s is definitely that, rustic patina and all. But in the early ’90s, when Johnny began collaborating with producer Rick Rubin for a tetralogy of morose, mostly acoustic albums, the space became a full-fledged studio, which is now run by Johnny and June’s son, John Carter Cash. You can’t find a knobsman more pro than Rubin, but in this case, he simply captured Johnny singing and strumming in his living room. How the Man in Black then wound up with this terrifying Anton Corbijn video, I can’t quite say:

Cabin in the Woods by Retsin (2001): The name says it all. Tara Jane O’Neil and Cynthia Nelson met in the early ’90s when their bands, Rodan and Ruby Falls, shared a tour, and they soon became romantic partners and musical collaborators. The final Retsin album, made more or less in isolation in upstate New York, is dusty and acoustic, drawing as deeply from the well of American folk music as the ’90s indie-folk milieu. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Retsin contributed to a Jandek tribute compilation around the same time.

Songs from the Black Mountain Music Project by Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn and Ginger Brooks Takahashi (2003): This between-album project found the Olympia, Wash., singer Mirah retreating for a month to the Blue Ridge Mountains with an eight-track and some fellow musicians. There, she recorded some playful ditties—more washboard band than precise, lo-fi folk—and found sounds. And then she laid down this brassy jam, which recounts, doo-wop refrain in tow, the month-long experience:

Image courtesy of the Cash Cabin Studio MySpace page.

Because I wrote about Title Tracks’ versions of songs by The Flamin’ Groovies and The Merseybeats earlier this week, and because Bob Dylan’s truly atrocious new disc of Christmas standards leaked yesterday, I’ve been thinking a lot about covers.

Let’s put aside the illustrious history of ill-advised tributes (read: the entire Me First and the Gimme Gimmes oeuvre). A good cover can both satisfy a simple, dorky impulse—to hear one artist you admire spin another in an interesting way—and prove rather instructional. For example, it can tell you that Title Tracks frontman John Davis is probably a sucker for semi-obscure gems (he is), as well as a student of infectious, pop-classicist hooks. With that in mind, I’ve collected some recent covers by local artists.

My short list, after the jump, is fairly folk- and indie-centric, and by no means complete. Tell me what I missed in the comments.

These United States and Vandaveer—the folky side project of  TUS’s bassist, Mark Heidinger—contributed cuts to Dylan Mania, a French tribute compilation that slipped under the radar when it dropped in May. Vandaveer’s take on “The Man In Me” is fairly straightforward, if not nearly as creepy and self-satisfied as the 1970 original. These United States’ version of “To Ramona,” meanwhile, is more animated and unhinged, benefiting greatly from a galloping rhythm and some thickly applied pedal steel. You can hear both songs on the groups’ respective MySpace pages.

Ugly Purple Sweater has a cover of the Woody Guthrie-penned folk standard “This Land Is Your Land” up on its MySpace page. No surprises here, really—except that the duo has tweaked the title a bit, and decorated the song with a fairly silly falsetto. Which, strangely, is pretty awesome.

Last Tide—whom I wrote about in this week’s One Track Mind—includes a swirling, eerie cover of Talking Heads‘ “Memories Can’t Wait” in its live set. Cover Me—a blog that, yes, covers covers—has an mp3 of the song from the band’s recent appearance on WMUC’s Third Rail Radio program. Also, Last Tide frontman Nate Frey’s other band, Detox Retox, does an, um, interesting cover of Joy Division’s “Transmission”:

The gloomy art-punk outfit Screen Vinyl Image taps one of its sonic forebears in this live cover of an early Slowdive B-side. Bonus! The woozy video quality and seizure-inducing lights are straight out of any shoegaze music vid circa 1989:

Ted Leo doesn’t make music in the District anymore, but I like his tense, crescendoing cover of Robert Pollard’s “The Numbered Head”—from the recent Score! 20 Years Of Merge Records: The Covers! comp—enough to include it here. You can stream the song at the Merge Records online store. It’s got nothing, though, on the all-adrenaline cover of “Suspect Device” that Leo played at Fort Reno a few years ago.

Yo La Tengo hails from Hoboken, N.J, but the group played a pair of (kinda) D.C.-related covers at its 9:30 Club show recently: “Firecracker, Firecracker,” by Half Japanese, and “Nervous Breakdown,” which L.A.’s Black Flag wrote about three years before the District-born Henry Rollins joined the group. Rollins’ provenance was a shaky excuse for Yo La Tengo to play the song, but the crowd was happy to forgive the trio. You can stream the entire set at NPR.

When Levon Helm and The Band hosted a five-hour send-off concert in 1976, it was a musical event of mythic proportions. The Band and its guests—among them Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell—were torchbearers of the American folk revival. And though it might be overly dramatic to say the movement “ended” with The Last Waltz, it was just a few years later that folk, blues, and gospel-soul began yielding pop to the second British invasion, arena rock, grunge, and hip-hop.

It would be likewise overdramatic to equate Sunday’s Route 29 Revue at Merriweather to The Last Waltz—certainly in terms of importance. But those attendees who’ve made a religious custom of watching the eponymous Scorcese film could not deny the aesthetic similarities. Old Crow Medicine Show, Iron and Wine, the Felice Brothers, and Grace Potter and the Nocturnals are very much torchbearers of the second folk revival, the one that began in the mid-’90s and has broadened in the new millenium thanks to the Web revolution and the consequent fragmentation of pop. Presiding over Sunday’s festival was Helm, the godfather.

Local boy (well, Virginian) Justin Jones opened with a set that was more modern country-pop than throwback country-folk, but that gave way to the barn-burning bonhomie of the Felice Brothers, an outfit of Yankee good ol’ boys from upstate New York. The Felice Brothers honed their chops in juke joints and subway stations and recorded their first two albums in a chicken coop, so they seemed out a bit out of place on the Merriweather stage. But it was clear right away that we were to play by their rules. Everybody was out of their seats by the second song, clapping and singing along to “Whiskey in My Whiskey,” “Run Chicken Run,” and Townes Van Zandt’s “Two Hands”—struggling all the while to match the energy of the band, whose members would run in circles, crash into each other, and take turns dancing on top of the kick drum (occasionally whaling on the cymbals with a washboard).

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals assumed a more formal stage presence—with the mic stands adorned with rose bouquets and Potter herself fit for the prom in a pale-gold gown—but their set was no less boisterous. Grace and the Nocs, who intersect with American roots music at the corner of Raitt and Joplin (oft-cited analogs, but undeniable ones), played a mostly uptempo set culminating in the title track(s) from the band’s first major-label (re-)release—a high-energy organ jam bookended by an a cappella intro/outro that would be called gospel if its lyrics didn’t eschew God and the Bible in favor of Water. Call it green gospel. Did I mention the band’s from Vermont?

Poor Sam Beam (aka Iron and Wine) came on next to play what was effectively an intermission between two halves of a hootenanny. Dressed neatly in khakis a white button-down—which, combined with his trademark beard, made him look like Happy Gilmore’s caddy—Beam seemed a little embarrassed to follow Potter’s dam-bursting water anthem with his gossamer lullabies. The result was a lot of grace notes and a chest-voice croon that gave whispery cradlesongs like “Upward Over the Mountain” and “The Trapeze Swinger” a more soulful presence in lieu of a backing band. (Where are the Calexico boys when you need them?)

Levon and his entourage—among them his daughter, Amy, and fellow Dylan collaborator Larry Campbell (who produced Helm’s new album, Electric Dirt)—came on next to remind the audience where all that second-wave folk stuff had come from. In the night’s only real disappointment, Levon declined to sing, per orders from his doctor. But, as City Paper Web editor and fellow concertgoer Ted Scheinman aptly put it, “Thank God for Larry Campbell.” Campbell led the band (which also featured Levon’s Midnight-Ramble horn section and E Street Band/Conan O’Brien multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Vivino) in a set that included four Band classics—“Long Black Veil,” “The Shape I’m In,” “It Makes No Difference,” and “Chest Fever”—the last featuring Campbell in a spine-chilling guitar imitation of Garth Hudson’s diabolical organ intro. With Levon’s vocal chords out of commission, they stayed away from songs such as “The Weight” and “Ophelia,” a wise and respectful choice (to sing “The Weight” without Levon would have been sacrilege, even with his blessing).

Levon kept time on drums and played a bit of mandolin, but his primary function at the Revue was to preside over the celebration of a tradition he and his contemporaries helped shape. In the middle of his set, the 69-year-old icon took a breather while his daughter, Campbell, and Campbell’s wife Teresa Williams sang a three-part harmony to the Grateful Dead ballad “Attics of my Life.” It was, perhaps, the unlikely highlight of the set; reverly turned to reverence as the trio sang, “I have spent my life seeking all that’s still unsung / Bent my ear to hear the tune, and closed my eyes to see / When there was no strings to play, you played to me.” In the shadows offstage, Levon was sitting with his eyes closed, rolling his head in slow circles, smiling.

Old Crow Medicine Show closed the six-hour circus with a typically charismatic hoedown, frontmen Ketch Secor and Willie Watson filling the song breaks by yammering back and forth in a schtick that harks back to the snakeoil salesmen from whom they drew their name. The Felice Brothers, who had been touring with Old Crow all summer, slipped on and off stage intermittently throughout the set, which reached a pitch with heel-stompers “Shack #9” and “Minglewood Blues.”

The restless ticketholders had left the back half of the pavilion empty by the time the concert was approaching its eighth hour, and those who remained pushed in toward the stage. Before the musicians closed with “Wagon Wheel”—very much the missing link of post-WWII folk, co-written by Old Crow and Bob Dylan—the day of solidarity culminated as Ian Felice joined Secor at the mic for the slow-paced ballad “We’re All In This Together.” One sensed they were not just singing to their bandmates.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user PZAO.

• The Footprint in Hip Hop Tour: Method Man & Red Man, Ghostface Killah, Duo Live. 9:30 club. $35. All ages.
• Sophia Bass, Ruthi & the Tracers. Bangkok Blues. Call for price.
• Jimmy Thackery & the Drivers, Lil’ Ed & the Blues Imperials. Birchmere. $25.
• Head Automatica, Cubic Zirconia. Black Cat. $15. All ages.
• Carol Bui Butterflies, Impossible Hair, US. Comet Ping Pong. All ages.
• The Mass Shivers, The Alphabet, Hello Babies, Greenland, Wild Fictions. D.C. Mini Gallery. $5. All ages.
• Abigail Williams, Goatwhore,  Daath, Abysmal Dawn, Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky, Fallen Martyr, Nightmare Ritual. Jaxx. $12/$15. All ages.
• The Winter Sounds, Go Home Robot, Achtung Panda. The Red & The Black. $8. +21.
• Bob Dylan. Ripken Stadium. Call for price.
• Bonjour Ganesh!, Ghost Light, The Mean Ideas. Rock and Roll Hotel. $10. All ages.
• Project Natale (Fri. & Sat. shows). Twins Jazz. $15.
• Sunsets with a Soundtrack: The U.S. Army Ceremonial Band. West Steps U.S. Capitol. Free.
• Girl Loves Distortion, Trophy Wife, Three Lexington Arrows, Fangs Out. Velvet Lounge. $8. +21.
• National Symphony Orchestra: “The Wizard of Oz.” Filene Center at Wolf Trap. $20–$48.

Saturday

• Trouble Funk 30th Anniversary Reunion Tribute to Dyke, w/ The Art of Junk, Da Mixx Band. 9:30 club. $20. All ages.
• Andy Paxon Band, Rose Between Thorns. Bangkok Blues. Call for price.
• Dave Alvin & the Guilty Women. Birchmere. $25.
• Extra Golden, Black & Tan Fantasy Band. Black Cat. $12. All ages.
• Bluebrain, Alfonso Bravo. Comet Ping Pong. All ages.
• Buster Brown & the Get Down. Dogfishhead Alehouse. Call for price.
• 2009 Capital Hip Hop Soul Fest. Marvin Gaye Park. Call for prices.
• Pants Velour, The Escape Artist, Reemstarr, Flex Matthews. The Red & The Black. $8. +21.
• The Mighty Heard, Baad Ingrish, Ndelible. Rock and Roll Hotel. $10. All ages.
• Satisfaction: A Tribute to The Rolling Stones. The State Theatre. $16.
• Nunchucks, 7 Door Sedan, We The They, DJ sets by Kingpin Soundsystem. Velvet Lounge. $8. +21.
• National Symphony Orchestra: “The Music of John Williams.” Filene Center at Wolf Trap. $20–$75.

Sunday

• Eric Weinberg & the Morrison Brothers. Birchmere. $35.
• Crystal Stilts, The Ladybug Transistor, Cotton Candy. Black Cat Backstage. $10. All ages.
• So Many Dynamos, Cast Spells, Detox Retox. DC9. $8. +18.
• Born Empty, Deville. The Red & The Black. $6. +21.
• Black Moth Super Rainbow, Dan Friel. Rock and Roll Hotel. $15. All ages.
• Sugarplums, Microwave Background. Velvet Lounge. $8. +18.
• Gordon Lightfoot. Filene Center at Wolf Trap. $22–$40.

Photo of Michael O’Neill, of The Ladybug Transistor, via MySpace.

I’ve come to be untroubled in my seeking
And I’ve come to say that nothing is for naught
I’ve come to reach out blind, to reach forward and behind
For the more I seek, the more I’m sought

These lyrics, from Joe Pug’s “Hymn 101,” might as well be the tagline for Pug’s current year-long tour, which has taken him from tooling around the local circuit in his hometown, Chicago, to tailing alt.-country legend Steve Earle’s tour bus on a swing down through Texas and back up toward the Great Lakes. From there, he’ll take a brief sojourn to Norway then take up with Josh Ritter for an upper-Midwest tour before heading west for festival season. “I rent a room in Chicago,” he tells me Tuesday after a set in Richmond, “but I’ve probably slept in it about 20 times this year.”

So far, Pug’s seeking has prompted plenty to seek him in turn—not least, Earle himself. “The way I understand it is, Steve’s manager played Steve my album, and Steve said, ‘Yeah, let’s go,’” says Pug. We’re sitting in the green room at The National, in Richmond—I on the slick leather sofa, Joe on the edge of a matching chair adjacent. The furniture looks like it might have been lifted from the set of Scarface, and Pug looks out-of-place in a plaid shirt, faded jeans fraying at the knees, and tan work boots. “It’s cool, a lot of great musicians have come through here,” he says. His tone matches his general comportment: humble, polite—but with supreme confidence lurking just beneath, every so often leaking to the surface like oil from plain earth. He had filled the role of opener that night with consummate deference: playing well, thanking the audience, then helping clear out his gear so the roadies could ready the stage for Earle. I had to wait for him afterward while he hawked his album in the lobby, stuffing a fistful of rumpled bills into his jeans. He’s not a star yet. But when he says plenty of great musicians have come through here, he’s certainly not apologizing for his own presence.

“Bob Dylan is someone I’ve been compared to a lot,” he says when I ask him about his influences, surprising me with his lack of shyness about this fact. (These comparisons are not for nothing: You can hear echoes of Dylan’s sneer, his indulgent harmonica breaks, and his poet-advocate m.o. in Pug’s music. But to liken someone to Dylan implies far more than musical similarities—and musicians, who are generally more sensitive to this fact than their fans, tend to distance themselves from such comparisons.) Pug also counts among his influences John Hiatt, Warren Zeavon, and Beck—“songwriters that don’t really adhere to a genre, they just write songs that connect to people.” But ultimately comparisons will not do, not even flattering ones. “You hear an athlete say they want to get to a point where they’re only competing against themselves,” he says. “As a musician, you want people to compare your music not to other musicians, but to the rest of your catalog.”

Pug’s catalog is currently only seven songs long. He recorded his debut EP, Nation of Heat, for free at a Chicago studio courtesy of a friend who worked there, and put out the album himself last summer. You can’t find it in stores, only on the Internet and at shows. “Your industry and mine are both changing,” Pug says to me, taking a drag in the smoking pen outside the National. That’s for sure. Here’s a guy who recorded seven songs and put them on the Internet, bypassing “the industry” altogether, and now he’s touring with Steve Earle and Josh Ritter. He’s been sought by plenty of labels, but has seen no compelling reason to sign. “I’m making a very good living just doing what I’m doing now,” Pug says, “and I have complete control over what I make.” He says there might come a time in his life where he’ll seek the stability of a label, but he’s in no hurry. “I really want one that’s into what I do,” he says, “not one who wants me to write choruses.”

Yes, it’s a different world: different than the world Dylan and the others played in—different than the world they described, and different than the one that rewarded them with fame. It’s easy to read the lyrics of Pug’s “I Do My Father’s Drugs” to mean that folk’s battle has been fought and won.

When hunger strikes are fashion, and freedom is routine
And all the streets in Cleveland are named for Martin Luther King
You will see me at the protest, but you’ll notice that I drag
I burn my father’s flag

But when I wonder aloud whether a ‘60s-style folk musician can thrive in the 21st century, Pug’s rebuke is polite but firm: “I think it’s sort of a misconception to call it ’60s-style folk,” he says. Pug describes folk not as an era-specific phenomenon but as continuum—one that manifested in Irish troubadours, then southern bluesmen, then the ‘60s discontents. What I take Pug to mean is that the tradition did not end; it still exists wherever there is restlessness and doubt and disillusionment and people who would use music to confront these things rather than to escape them.

In any case, it is far too early in the development of Pug’s music to know how popular it will be. He says he recorded his LP (scheduled for a fall release) with a backing band, meaning the album that will serve as most people’s introduction to Joe Pug might sound much different than Nation of Heat.

Pug’s set in Richmond included two new songs from that album, “Bury Me Far From My Uniform” and “Not So Sure.” You can check them out below, courtesy of Laundromatinee.com:

Thursday June 11th offers a ton of choices for live music fans at night, and a  fascinating lunchtime event as well.  I will start with the latter. John Cohen, a founder of the old-timey string band The New Lost City Ramblers, an early photographer of Bob Dylan and others, and a producer of unique rural American folk and blues singers, will be speaking from noon to 1 at the Mary Pickford Theater on the 3rd Floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building on Independence Avenue SE between 1st and 2nd Streets.  His presentation is billed “The High Lonesome Sound Revisited: Documenting Traditional Culture in America.”   “The High Lonesome Sound” is Cohen’s 1963 documentary film that offers the songs of Appalachian miners, farmers, and churchgoers. The flick also spotlighted banjo picker Roscoe Holcomb. 

Thursday night’s show choices include:

Mika Miko and the Strange Boys (punk rock and garage rock) at Comet Ping Pong, Connecticut Avenue NW

BLK JKS (Johannesburg, South African black rock w/ dub, mbqanqa, prog, and Hendrix influences) at the Black Cat.

Gil-Scott Heron at Blues Alley (through the 14th)

Dave Brubeck at the Warner

The Avett Brothers at Lisner

Sir Richard Bishop and His Freak of Araby Ensemble (Sun City Girls guitarist goes acoustic) at The Talking Head in Baltimore, 407 E. Saratoga St., Baltimore
410-207-8011 all ages $10

Elvis Costello & country-bluegrass band at Wolf Trap

Closing night of Jewish Music Fest with Israeli-born Miri Ben Ari, the hiphop violinist at 8 pm followed by the closing party, all at the Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater,
16th Street JCC

DJ Lee Burridge at the Electric Cabaret at the Muse Lounge

Dillinger Escape Plan at the Rock n Roll Hotel

AA Bondy and Holly Miranda at Iota

Plus sold-out shows with Jenny Lewis at the 930 and Taylor Swift at Merriweather Post.

The film chronicles Dylan’s rise to superstardom, from being booed by Guthrie purists at the Newport Folk Festival to getting mauled by fans in London. Scorcese culls footage from Dylan’s 1961-1966 performances and press conferences, and interviews the ever cryptic icon. What emerges, despite Dylan’s best efforts at obfuscation, is a portrait of the artist broader than D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967), yet more focused than Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There.

NoMa screenings are held Wednesdays, 7 p.m.-midnight, on the large grassy lot on L Street between 2nd and 3rd Streets NE, one block from the New York Avenue Metro station. Series highlights include I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (on July 8) and Dig! (July 29).

Country musician Steve Earle once famously pronounced Townes Van Zandt “the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” So how come the only people who ever give Townes his propers are his contemporaries and the odd independent filmmaker? Maybe because even when started started writing iconic country-folk standards, he stayed holed up in a tin-roofed shack outside Houston, planting flowers and playing to dive crowds. Maybe because his songs usually only became famous after being covered by other, more entrepreneurial country stars. Or maybe because his ambling melodies have been ground to grains beneath the tire treads of the endless Chevy commercial that is modern country music.

Earle has not forgotten Townes, though; and he’s doing his best to make sure the rest of us don’t either. His latest LP, Townes, is a 15-song memorial to his mentor. The album revisits some of Townes’ most characteristic tunes–including “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold,” which was the first Van Zandt song Earle ever played (he did it the night they first officially met, to stop Townes from heckling him), and “To Live is to Fly,” enduring ballad that doubles as the late singer’s epitaph.

The album’s most poignant tribute comes at the beginning, with “Pancho and Lefty.” “Pancho and Lefty” is a heartbreaking song about a pariah who sets out with his faithful sidekick in pursuit of a vagabond dream. Pancho is a mischievous but ultimately good-natured bandito, who “wears his gun outside his pants for all the honest world to feel.” The federales pity him and indulge him his fantasy, until Pancho is finally killed on the high sands of Mexico–”Nobody heard his dying words, that’s just the way it goes”–and Lefty is forced to flee to the unromantic bosom of Ohio. For Van Zandt, the manic-depressive heir to an oil fortune who underwent shock treatment as a young man and sought to escape his demons by becoming a rambler, the song has definite strains of autobiography. The sadness of the song is deeply personal. Ironically, “Pancho and Lefty” became popular only after Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard covered it in the ’80s.

With the exception of “Lungs“–a diabolical little tune he spices up with a voice filter, digital drums, and what sounds like turntable-scratching–Earle declines to stray far from Van Zandt’s original arrangements. The most distinct difference, aside from the clearer sound and the occasional variation on the finger-picking, is Earle’s voice. Where Townes possessed an eminently mild timbre, Earle’s instrument is more nasal, occasionally gravelly, and tends to grip each word with his more-pronounced drawl as if wringing sweat from a handkerchief.

By comparison, this affect might seem indulgent. But it is plainly love, not vanity, that is the driving force behind this album. Earle, 11 years Townes’ junior, idolized the man, even giving his son, Justin, “Townes” for a middle name. Covers are often about reinventing a song–celebrating new styles by bending old forms. Townes, on the other hand, is not so much a seizure of inheritance as a loving genuflection at the headstone of a master. It is Lefty promising Pancho that his last words will be heard, after all.