Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

What speaks to our minds, also makes the soul dance and long constantly for the memory of that sound, to play it repeatedly, to change it, to alter it maybe, but in all just to honour it through your own personal way of love and respect.

The song or track which are covered by another artist can be seen in two ways, one as a marketing tool installed by the studio and intended to be a lead single for the masses to be divided over, or as act of selfless purity, of honouring what made us believe in the first place and turned us on to the gift of art in which we practise.

For an artist such as Liverpool’s John Jenkins, to cover a song, any wild beauty from the past, would be certainly recorded out of honour, but it is with deep principled respect that he has taken the sublime Townes Van Zandt gem, Kathleen, and breathed his own particular salutation and insight into the incredible mystery of the track, and alongside the engaging musical belief of Amy Chalmer, has produced something magical, a spirit of its own making.

The genius of Townes Van Zandt is not for debate, but there is also the sadness of his own life, the self-destructive shadow that followed him, that perhaps arguably guided him, and it is with melancholic beauty that his song, his words, have been arranged in such a way that make them resonate in such a way that it would not be hard to imagine the gap between the original and the adaption is a lot less than 50 years, indeed what Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Chalmers have achieved is spectacular, riveting, heartbreakingly cool and decisively elegant.

Kathleen loves, and Kathleen lives on, for this adaption of a classic is not one of simply redressing an old flame for a modern audience, it is one that has been revealed as a true depiction of an outstanding beauty to which the original master would idolise.

John Jenkins’ version of Kathleen is out today via Fretstore Records.

Ian D. Hall