Jeff Tweedy is a fantastic cover artist, whether he’s taking on a Neil Young song or the Ted Lasso theme. Now he’s at it again, as Wilco have taken on a pair of Beatles songs from the Let It Be era: “Don’t Let Me Down” (released as a B-side to “Get Back”) and “Dig A Pony” (which appears on the album).
With the renditions (which are exclusive to Amazon Music), the band leans into the country elements of the former song and convey the bluesy rock balladry of the latter. The covers arrive as part of Amazon Music’s month-long [RE]DISCOVER campaign, which this month is focused on The Beatles during their Let It Be era.
In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, Tweedy spoke about his admiration of The White Album, saying, “My father had a record of old steam locomotive sounds and I still think about that all the time: the idea that you can sit and listen to anything and have a stimulating experience, just sitting and being bombarded by sound. I could make an equally forceful argument for The Beatles’ White Album. For me, as a child, that was the ideal situation: this collective of people who were not being held in the confines of a genre — a word I didn’t know at the time. It was really obvious that there was something much broader than the Monkees there (at that point I didn’t have those records where the Monkees were trying to be the later Beatles).”
Listen to Wilco’s covers of “Don’t Let Me Down” and “Dig A Pony” above.
