Basia Bulat

With all the music and mp3’s swirling around the airwaves and the internet, it’s damn near impossible to hear it all. Even when pared down to the slightly less mindboggling “Can-con only” regime as we do here at Tuesday Tracks, there’s still much too much to give everything a chance. That’s why sometimes you just need to give an artist a pass. Despite rave reviews and recommendations from people you know and trust, sometimes you just need to go ahead and let someone’s career pass you by in order to make room for others. Basia Bulat was one of those artists for me; it had nothing to do with her really, or her music. After all, I’d never heard it. Despite accolades, two incredibly well-received albums and a Juno nomination, she was one of those artists I’d skipped over.

It took an old cover she did of “Someday” by The Strokes on Chromewaves to make me do a bit of a double take. The recording is rough and the arrangement sparse—it’s little more than a playful outtake, really. But that’s also what makes it so great to listen to: it’s less a performance and more just a few friends goofing around. There’s no pretension of it being heard—except these days, there’s so much music swirling around the internet, that pretty much anything can make its way out into circulation. Much of it isn’t really worth listening to—but this one is.