Flipping through the jazz section on a visit to his local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked every bit the quintessential DIY release. The labels had come off the tape, he says. It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art.
After spending literal years in the studio for his previous records, this time he walked in with finished songs. The cassette tape that he had carried around in his pocket got turned into a classic, five-star record of desolate modern folk songs about the dark side of the American dream. Surely, many fans believed, there had to be other versions of these songs that sounded more like the Springsteen they knew and loved.