Record Store Day approaches. Mike Sniper and the good folks at Captured Tracks planned several exclusive releases this holiday, one of which is the second installment in a cover series dedicated to The Wake. Entitled Gruesome Flowers 2: A Tribute To The Wake, the 7″ series features a split of covers by Blouse and Craft Spells. We asked Charlie Hilton of Blouse how her band came to be a part of the honoring committee and what The Wake has meant to them.
The 7″ is available exclusively in record stores on Saturday (4/21). Blouse's cover of “Pale Spectre” is streaming in our player below.
When did you first discover The Wake? What has The Wake's music meant to you?
We're fans of Factory records, but we'd never listened to The Wake until Captured Tracks told us they were doing a re-issue and asked us to do a cover. We thought their songs were brilliant so it was an honor for us.
How did you decide on “Pale Spectre” as your The Wake cover? Did you know from the jump it was going to be something from Here Comes Everybody?
Mike Sniper suggested it. Maybe he intuited that we'd do something kind of stoney? I fell in love with the melody the first time I heard it, so there wasn't really a question of recording a different song.
In covering “Pale Spectre” you've played it much slower. What did you aim to bring to your take on the song?
The lyrics are really fascinating to me, so slowing the song down seemed like a good way to bring them out. We also wrote some new instrumental parts so that it wasn't just a straight cover slowed down. I've never covered a song before, so it was a pretty new experience; for some reason we felt it was important to embed something new into it.
If you met someone who'd never heard of The Wake, what song would you play for them? Why?
“Pale Spectre”. I'm attached.
