Though I’ve got several friends who count The Flaming Lips among their faves, I’ve never been able to get into the band. Thus, today’s Cover Story is more about the cover-er than the cover-ee.

Just yesterday I finally got around to posting about Minipop, a lovely dream-pop band from San Francisco. Since their debut album, A New Hope, had come out in 2007, I’d visited their MySpace blog to see what the foursome had been up to more recently. There they’d linked to a session recorded for Daytrotter.com, a music/entertainment site based in Rock Island, IL (read Daytrotter’s mission statement).

In addition to a live version of A New Hope‘s “Fingerprints,” Minipop recorded three other tunes while visiting Daytrotter headquarters: The previously unreleased “Come On” and “Placebo War,” plus a cover of The Flaming Lips’ “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, Pt. 1.”

Big into the Lips, Minipop’s Tricia Kanne told Daytrotter that “Yoshimi” was the song she’d play while her bandmates set up for practice. “This version slows things down a bit from the original and is more moody/melancholy,” she says. “To me the song is like a child telling a fictional story, but he/she actually believes it’s real.” Hear here:

Minipop’s four-song Daytrotter Session is available for free download at Daytrotter.com, where you’ll find loads of more free music to discover.

Each week, the site features four-song sessions from five different bands who’ve stopped by the studio. Big names, small names, signed and unsigned, it’s a cool site worth digging into, and if you haven’t been turned on to it before, I think you’ll soon count Daytrotter among your faves.

Illustration by Johnnie Cluney, from Daytrotter.com