Dirt Buyer cover the Shira Small song My Life's All Right for Bayonet

Dirt Buyer have covered My Life's All Right, a song Shira Small recorded in 1974. The Brooklyn band, led by the singer-songwriter Joe Sutkowski, are the fourth act to take part in a Bayonet Records series in which the label's roster picks favourites from the Numero Group catalogue, and the cover is out now on Bayonet.

The original is the interesting half of the story. My Life's All Right comes from The Line of Time and the Plane of Now, a psych-folk record Small first made as a high school music project with her teacher Lars Clutterham. It stayed obscure for close to fifty years until Numero Group reissued it in 2023, which is how a generation of indie musicians heard it at all.

Sutkowski's account of finding it is the reason the cover exists. "I am just so in love with the Shira Small album," he said, describing discovering it a few years back and learning its history. What struck him was the gap between the circumstances and the writing: Small was seventeen when she recorded these songs, and the lyrics across the record are, in his word, adult. He says he is not sure he has heard anything like it, and that it exists on its own.

The two outlets covering the release do not agree on what kind of record it is. The Line of Best Fit calls Small's album a rare psych-folk collection; Stereogum files the same song as a 1974 jazz gem and describes Dirt Buyer's version as putting an emo spin on it. Both descriptions are defensible for a teenage recording that sits outside every genre that existed to receive it, and the disagreement is a fair summary of why the reissue landed.

The series itself is a neat piece of label logic. Bayonet's roster covering the Numero Group vaults puts two independent catalogues to work for each other, giving modern acts a song with history behind it and giving archival reissues a route to listeners who would never go looking in a reissue label's back catalogue. Numero has been pushing further into that territory with its own anniversary reissues.

What neither outlet reports is whether the four covers become a compilation, or how many more are coming. There is no release date, no tracklist and no album attached to the series beyond the individual songs as they appear.

Dirt Buyer sit in the same indie corner of the Bayonet roster as Grumpy, who announced a debut album for the label this autumn. Release dates are tracked on the release calendar.