Take Me Home: A Tribute to John Denver Mark Kozelek and Various Artists Badman, 2000 Buy it online Tracks 1: The Eagle And The Hawk by Donnie Prince Billy 2: Follow Me by The Innocence Mission 3: Poems, Prayers and Promises by Rachel Haden 4: Fly Away by Red House Painters 5: Around and Around by Mark Kozelek and Rachel Goswell 6: Looking for Space by Hannah Marcus 7: Matthew by Granfaloon Bus 8: Annie's Song by Sunshine Club 9: Whispering Jesse by James Hindle 10: Leaving on a Jet Plane by Tarnation and Joe Gore 11: Back Home Again by Low 12: I'm Sorry by Red House Painters   Reviewed by Ian Grey	John Denver was a moderately-talented song-slinger possessed of the savant-like ability to conjure up the occasional kitschily transcendent melody. His lyrics were awful, but not without a certain bumpkin-esque charm. God only knows what the self-effacing singer would make of Red House Painters main man Mark Kozelek's repositioning of the singer's oeuvre as High Art in the truly horrific collection, Take Me Home: A Tribute to John Denver. Kozelek's approach to de-kitsching Denver is to have an assortment of indie artists swathe select tunes in oppressive gloom, slow the tempos to dirge-time and package the mopey results in vaguely portentous artwork a la Kozelek's sometime label, 4AD. Ethereal folk popsters Innocence Mission set the glum tone for most of this onerous opus with their rendition of "Follow Me." The song is gussied up with standard-brand Velvet Underground simplex guitar, early-Dylan Hammond and is played at a pace a snail would find maddening (this is a CD where, covering "Back Home Again," slo-core kingpins Low come off as downright sprightly.) Although vapidly pretty, how this sheds new light on Mr. Denver's work is unclear. But onward. The Red House Painters check in with an interminable My Bloody Valentine take on "Fly Away," which in practice is an even worse idea than in theory. Alt. diva Hannah Marcus sounds alluringly Nico-ish on "Looking for Space," but is hard to take seriously as she chirps "I hope you will think of me when you are happy/when you are smilin'." Meanwhile, the usually interestingly tweaked neo-country ensemble Tarnation (with Joe Gore) denude "Leaving on a Jet Plane" of the turnaround chords that made it a guilty pleasure perennial in the first place. Obviously, these are people who firmly believe it's the singer, not the song. Which is somewhat at odds with the projects entire raison d'être of finding hidden depths and nuance in Denver's cheerfully throwaway junk pop aesthetic. This forces the listener of this odious affair to extremes of cynicism and to wonder just how sincere the involved parties really are about John Denver, who, as far as anyone knows, never hurt anybody. | June 2000 Ian Grey's work has been published in Time Out, Icon, Fangoria and many other periodicals. 1998 saw the publication of his book, Sex, Stupidity and Greed: Inside the American Movie Industry (JunoBooks). He is currently at work on an epic novel dealing with sex, pop music, family and mass murder, based on two lines from a mediocre Depeche Mode song. Mr. Grey likes to think that he will be among the very first to do this.	Kozelek's approach to de-kitsching Denver is to have an assortment of indie artists swath select tunes in oppressive gloom, slow the tempos to dirge-time, and package the mopey results in vaguely portentous artwork a la Kozelek's sometime label, 4AD.