My wife and I chose the SPARKLEHORSE cover of Daniel Johnston’s “Go” as the processional at our wedding. The air trembled with Mark Linkous’s deep whisper, and the majestic pace of the piano measured our steps perfectly. Johnston and Sparklehorse make an excellent match: the band’s White Album sound suits Johnston’s simple songwriting, which owes a lot to the Beatles’ melodic sensibility. Between the 2001 Sparklehorse album It’s a Wonderful Life and its follow-up, last year’s Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (Capitol), Linkous lent his talents as a producer and writer to Johnston’s Fear Yourself and contributed “Go” to the tribute-album half of the double-CD Johnston set Discovered Covered. There aren’t any Johnston tunes on Dreamt for Light Years, but the troubled Texan’s naive sentimentality is all over it: on “Getting It Wrong,” for instance, Linkous channels his friend’s warbly alto and stately, Lennon-inspired piano. In the spirit of George Martin, the album’s four-star production team–Linkous, Danger Mouse, John Parish, and Dave Fridmann–treats the morose material to voluptuous, glowing arrangements that make the melodies alternately ooze like honey and drift and curl like candle smoke. –J. Niimi
