AMG Review of In Living Cover

Andrew Leahey
All Music Guide

Jay Brannan dives into his iPod collection with In Living Cover, a collection of cover songs and original material. The two original tunes featured here -- "Beautifully" and "Drowning" -- take their cues from the ~Lilith Fair school of songwriting, mixing bookish lyrics with bursts of acoustic guitar. The effect is reinforced by Brannan's voice, a somewhat androgynous tenor whose range and tone serve him well on the covers, too. Joni Mitchell, Ani DiFranco, and the Cranberries all serve as source material for Brannan's six cover songs, and he pays tribute to those artists with soft, acoustic renditions of their hits. When he ditches the acoustic guitar and performs DiFranco's "Both Hands" with an a cappella arrangement, the result is striking, due in no small part to his imaginative reinterpretation of the original.