Lil Nas X‘s “Old Town Road” was so ubiquitous for so long that you might’ve been happy to imagine you’d heard the last of it. But a cover version has just been released that’s pretty much guaranteed to make you pleased that road has turned out to be a roundabout. Steve Martin and Alison Brown have turned it into a vintage-sounding bluegrass tune and recorded it with an all-star cast of singers and players from that genre, including two of the great living bluegrass vocalists, Del McCoury and Dan Tyminski. Chances are you won’t mind the song becoming an earworm again, now that it’s a multiple-banjo earworm, combining a high, lonesome sound from deep in the holler with (surprise) some of Martin’s contemporary comic flourishes.
\n\nOn the eve of the song’s Thursday release, Variety talked via Zoom with Martin, who was taking a break from looping, and Brown, who was taking a break from banjo camp. Before recording this one-off, the duo was last heard from with last year’s collaborative album, “Safe, Sensible and Sane,” which included guests such as Jackson Browne. With “Old Town Road,” they really went all-in on an all-star roots ensemble, recruiting not just McCoury and…
Original source: https://variety.com/