To celebrate the album’s birthday, it has been reissued on limited edition double LP, and Mason is also hitting the road. One of the support acts on the tour is our friend Jake Bellissimo, songwriter and head of Drunk With Love Records. To further celebrate Mason’s influence, Jake has organised a compilation of covers on Drunk With Love that will be sold in benefit of an LGBTQ refugee shelter in Berlin.

Titled Comfort in the Question Mark: Songs of Jordaan Mason, the compilation brings together nine artists with their own takes on some of Mason’s best songs. It plays like both a celebration of and an homage to an important figure in the DIY music and queer communities. “Their music was important for me coming to terms with my gender identity,” Bellissimo explains, “a feeling I’ve noticed that’s shared among many other queer people.”

Although the release comprises of covers of just one artist, there is still considerable diversity across its nine tracks. It begins with a piano cover of ‘wild dogs: divorce’ (from divorce lawyers i shaved my head) by Providence, RI songwriter visibilities, taking the hectic emotion of the original and smoothing its edges without losing any of the feeling.

Bluffs replace the accordion of ‘Pink’ with shimmering curtains of synths, while Zurich’s Debutante initially maintains the hushed intimacy of ‘Static’, just lonely guitar and subtle effects that crawl at the edges like anxious thoughts. But soon the track thuds into life with drum machine and grainy distortion. There’s plenty of lo-fi fuzz too on Kowareta‘s ‘Avalanche’, juxtaposing nicely with the aching clarity of ‘It Does Not Get Better’ by Lady Queen Paradise.

The final track belongs to Bellissimo, a beautifully simple take on ‘Why Fit?’, quiet guitar and stirring strings buoying the expressive vocals which deliver lines that sum up the ethos of the compilation and Jordaan Mason’s music in general.

So why do we still want to fit
when the world
just just just just
rejects us?

Comfort in the Question Mark: Songs of Jordaan Mason is out now and you can get it on a name-your-price basis from the Drunk With Love Records Bandcamp page.

Cover art by Ammy

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