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Here’s Alex Lahey’s ‘I Love You Like A Brother’ album covered on ukulele

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Studio 52 is a community artist space located in the heart of Allston, and is proud to support the Boston music scene and local artist community.


Anyone who reads this site knows that we’re pretty obsessed with Alex Lahey. The Australian musician released one of the best records of 2017 — and really of the past decade — in last October’s I Love You Like A Brother, and we still can’t get it off our playlists and out of our heads. Lahey’s November show in Allston was straight magic, and her magnetic, wildly-anthemic-yet-wholly-personal songs translated well from the record onto the stage.

A few days ago, I Love You Like A Brother was translated once again, in full, by Boston musician Chelsea Spear. Doing business here as Travels With Brindle, Spear has covered all of Lahey’s enchanting LP on ukulele, allowing her own talent to shine through while still maintaining the core of what makes Lahey such a brilliant songwriter.

And of course, Spear’s effort is titled — wait for it — I Love You Like A Cover. We endorse all of this.

“I’ve been working on a year-long project that started last May where I write a song a week,” says Spear, who took up ukulele in 2014 and has since busked in all 56 MBTA stations around the city. “After six months of writing songs, I hit a block due to personal issues and because I had taken a pretty structured approach to songwriting and all my songs started to sound the same. My boyfriend had gotten me a copy of I Love You Like a Brother last year after he saw Alex on Seth Meyers, and I fell in love with the album because she made me laugh and made me feel less alone.”

Spear adds: “I taught myself to play ‘I Want U’ for my busking set, and I was struck by some picky songwriting things in her work. A few of the chord progressions don’t resolve, and she uses a lot of simple AAAA rhymes that sounded effortless. I had planned to record an album of original music in February, but I didn’t love the songs I’d written for that project. Since I wasn’t entirely confident in my ability to produce music, and since I could hear things in I Love You Like a Brother that I could learn from, I decided to cover that album as a way to make something without the pressure of recording an album of original music.”

And it turns out you can still dance to the ukulele version of “Every Day’s The Weekend.” But don’t stop there — listen to Travels With Brindle’s entire collection of stripped-down Lahey tracks below, and hit the Soundcloud link for the full list of credits, which includes excellent individual track artwork by Daniel Butler, Kat Thorne, and Sara Mikula.

Featured image via Travels With Brindle’s Facebook.