from:
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/wearetheworld/singles/i/ironandwine-waitinforasupe\
rman.shtml

Iron & Wine: "Waitin' for a Superman"

One of the arcane pleasures of file-sharing is
record collecting in reverse: rather than
spending endless hours combing eBay and record
stores for that limited-edition seven-inch that
was only available for five minutes from this one
guy who used to do sound for Superchunk, you're
often confronted with a download that, though
fantastic, you never knew existed-- or where to
find a legit copy. Such was the case with Iron &
Wine's cover of The Flaming Lips' "Waitin' for a
Superman", a haunting home-recorded production of
the Soft Bulletin centerpiece. Turns out the
track comes from a CD/zine called Yeti which was
released earlier this spring by editor Mike
McGonigal (and it's one of two covers from Iron &
Wine on the disc-- he also tackles Stereolab's
"Peng!").
As on his cover of The Postal Service single
"Such Great Heights" (who themselves covered a
Soft Bulletin cut recently), Iron & Wine's Sam
Beam finds textures and hidden subtexts in the
song that the dense bells, strings and horns of
the original never portended. Beam reinvents the
architecture of the song from the ground up,
building on a Travis-picked arpeggio of his own
invention and dubbing three-part CSN harmonies
over the choruses. Another guitar chimes in on
the second verse for color; the faders rise and
gently push the quiet guitars and three-Beam
choir into a gentle orbit just below the
stratosphere. Just when it seems the effect can't
get any more surreal, the slide-guitar solo kicks
in.

The lyric "Is it overwhelming to use a crane to
crush a fly?" takes on new significance here, as
Beam achieves a similar, but somehow profoundly
different, effect with Wayne Coyne's words and
melody-- but without Dave Fridmann's gonzo wall
of sound. Given Cat Stevens' legal action against
the Lips for nicking the melody to "Fight Test",
Iron & Wine's cover almost comes off like some
1960s prototype Wayne Coyne and his brother might
have heard while rolling joints on the jacket of
Piper at the Gates of Dawn. --Will Bryant