Neo-folkie Bryan Estepa’s cover of the Daniel Wylie favorite sees him unshowy, unaffected, unperturbed by his loyalty to the emotional truth of the original.
I dig good covers as much as the next guy.
I like artists who take a stab at technical reframing – anything but coffee-shop bossa, thank you very much – but mostly, I feel the ones that resonate best are those who treat the strange new shoe as theirs and theirs alone.
That’s what neo-folkie Bryan Estepa has done with his reading of Daniel Wylie’s “That Was the Day,” an earnest love-letter of a tune which finds the Cosmic Rough Riders musician treading indie, folk, and ‘60s pop territories in one fell swoop.
Estepa, however, approaches the song with a dirge-like reverence. And I don’t just mean that metaphorically; he actually slows it down to an unsettlingly snail-like cadence which pronounces – but also relishes – the melancholy tucked in its bars.
“It’s a departure in the sense that it’s the first cover I’ll officially release as a single. But it’s an easy choice [because] I believe it’s one of the great indie love songs of the past 20 years, and [it’s] well within my songwriting sensibilities,” the Fil-Australian songwriter says.
And he’s not lying. The best songs from his oeuvre do sway like this tree – which, in turn, also sway like Macca and Ron Sexsmith trees – and any one of them can serve as a balm for the weary soul. Estepa, after all, has an acoustic guitar-toting Everyman charm: his phrasing measured, his wailing plaintive, his musical gestures unshowy and unaffected.
At the producer’s chair, meanwhile, top Aussie record man Michael Carpenter reprises his able stewardship of Estepa’s recorded output. Estepa, in fact, credits Carpenter’s involvement in his debut ‘Bells and Whistles’ as “an important factor in where I am today as an artist.”
“That Was the Day,” ultimately, is a gesture of humility. Surely Estepa can weave his own threads – an abundance of evidence is at our disposal, peaking, in my opinion, with the wonderful six-song EP ‘Back to the Middle’ – but in this new cover (his first, as previously mentioned, to be officially released as a standalone single) he is no magician or shaman.
This time around, he is simply a keen churchgoer: nameless, faceless, just happy to be there.