Phil Everly died on Friday. Depending on your age, you may never have heard the hit records he and his older brother Don made in the late 1950s and early 60s, but you’ve certainly heard artists influenced by their sweet, yearning harmonies, among them Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, the Hollies, and on through R.E.M., Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, and Norah Jones and Billie Joe Armstrong, who just last year released a joint Everly Brothers tribute album, Foreverly.
Collections of the duo’s hits—“Wake Up Little Susie,” “Crying in the Rain,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Bird Dog,” and on and on—are easily available in all shapes and sizes, and probably playing right this very second on a Lite FM station near you. We thought it would be fun to put together a playlist drawing on the less celebrated, sometimes uneven, occasionally weird, sporadically transcendent albums they made for Warner Bros. in the 60s: Rock ’N Soul, Beat & Soul, Two Yanks in England. As their LP titles hint, the Everlys were buffeted by the decade's musical trends, nudged away from their comfort zones, but they were still in fine voice. And while they never should have covered “A Whiter Shade of Pale” or “Money (That's What I Want),” give them bonus points for recording one of the daffiest, but kinda wonderful, psych-pop songs ever: “Talking to the Flowers.” (As the lyrics explain, “They’ve so much to say.” They being the flowers.)
We’ve also thrown in some noteworthy covers of Everly Brothers hits, although Carole King’s demo of “Crying in the Rain” doesn't really count as a cover since she wrote it herself, with Howard Greenfield. (I believe that’s King harmonizing Everlys-style with herself on the track.)
From Foreverly, we included "Long Time Gone," but check out the whole album on Spotify. Unfortunately, only some of the Beatles’ tracks are on Spotify; if they all were, we would have included the outtake version of “Two of Us” from Anthology 3, a particularly sweet, Everlys-like run-through of an already Everlys-esque song. On the bazillions of bootlegs from the “Get Back” sessions, you can also hear the group break into “Bye Bye Love.”
Our set concludes with “No Excuses” by Alice in Chains. As my colleague David Kamp explains, “Grunge goes Everlys: the doomy Seattle band surprised listeners who thought of them as heavy rockers with this melodic two-part harmony showcase, with guitarist and song composer Jerry Cantrell handling the high Phil part and vocalist Layne Staley handling the low Don part.”
