An anomalous note from past gets a new twist

We did some strange albums in our time, Phil Everly said. That one stands out because of the sparseness and the fact that the songs were our heritage.

The tribute by Armstrong and Jones,Foreverly,treats the songs respectfully,filling out the arrangements and usually keeping the Everly Brothers harmonies. While it adds an understated rhythm section,it lets the songs stay haunted.

They make an odd pair: ultra-skinny Armstrong,41,wearing a cropped leather jacket with his black hair in a punkabilly updo of tangled curls,and Jones,34,a dark-eyed,round-faced girl-next-door wearing a casual sweater.

Still,Joness most recent solo album,Little Broken Hearts,has a dulcet murder ballad of its own,Miriam,while Armstrong has prized melody and narrative in Green Days songs. If these two multimillion-selling,Grammy-winning singers were going to intersect,an album of Everly Brothers songs is a plausible spot.

Songs Our Daddy Taught Us could hardly be more sparse or ghostly. Among the songs are folk standards like Roving Gambler,about a man who seduces and abandons a woman and kills a man at a card game; Im Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail,in which a mother bails out her son and then dies; and Down in the Willow Garden,about a wastrel who murders his girlfriend.

But both took the music seriously. Its almost like a meditation, Jones said. Their voices are at times high and childlike in the most beautiful way,but these songs are so dark. Theres an innocence to their recordings,definitely. But that innocence,juxtaposed with the cheating lovers and everything its just creepy when you hear it.

The Everly Brothers had been performing songs like those since they were children,appearing daily on a live family radio show at 6 am. They were more concerned with melody and harmony than what the words meant. I never thought about it too much as a kid when we first learned them, said Phil Everly,74,two years younger than his brother.

Armstrong said he discovered the Everlys album a few years ago and got the idea of rerecording the songs with a woman. But he was hugely prolific with Green Day in 2012. Green Day toured internationally through much of 2013,and is headed to Australia next year. But while blasting Green Day songs,as he has since the 1980s,Armstrong had also been considering the opposite end of the volume spectrum.

Having big guitars and Marshalls for so many years,it kind of leaves your ears ringing, he said. I love the power of playing quiet.

Me too, Jones said with a giggle; playing quietly is what she does.

Armstrongs wife Adrienne was the one who suggested Jones as a partner. Armstrong had met Jones at the 2005 Grammy Awards,where her duet with Ray Charles on his album Genius Loves Company beat out Green Days American Idiot for record of the year and album of the year. (American Idiot was named best rock album.) On the broadcast,they stood side by side with Stevie Wonder,Bono and Alicia Keys in an awkward rendition of the Beatless Across the Universe. But they had not been in contact until Armstrong proposed Foreverly.

Ive been asked to collaborate a lot,but Ive never been asked to do a whole record like this, Jones said.