Cover: Natalie Maines, "Mother"

Until a few weeks ago I never thought much about Natalie Maines. Then for whatever reason I read an article a while back about how it had been a decade since her infamous "We're ashamed of George W. Bush" comment. Criticizing a Republican sitting President is a pretty ballsy thing to do when you're a country singer. It's one thing for Ted Nugent to talk about wanting to murder Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton, or for Green Day to release American Idiot, but Natalie quite simply bit the hand that feeds. It was a potential career killer, and even though their next album went multi-platinum, nobody seemed to wonder too hard when they went on hiatus. Politics in the United States have become even more radicalized, if that was possible, two of the Chicks became Court Yard Hounds (from what I can tell, far removed from pot-stirring statements like "Not Ready to Make Nice.") And Maines seemed to disappear altogether, only resurfacing now with a workable album of covers with Ben Harper. She has a good ear, picking mostly obscure tunes, including one from the venerable Dan Wilson, and doing a fine, fine job with Jeff Buckley's "Lover, You Should Have Come Over." But it's the title track, the Pink Floyd cover, that will get the attention.

Maines' situation does indeed resemble that of Roger Waters' Pink character from The Wall. Having violated the unspoken contract between the performer and audience, the singer becomes isolated, searching, seeking the comfort of the womb and building the wall. Natalie sings it more beautifully than Waters could (not hard,) warming up the detachment and really hammering the spirit of the song home. This cover, this album, is a great statement of self, a release from the cocoon of former country divadom and into the world of mature adult mainstream rock - the cathartic breaking down of the wall. People should hear it.

Cover: KoRn, "Another Brick in the Wall" & "Word Up"

Far be it from me to defend anything KoRn ever did. It certainly wouldn't be controversial to slam this cover. It goes about as well as you'd expect Korn covering Pink Floyd to. The angsty metal rasp of Jonathan Davis, the phat bass and churning guitars, the... surprisingly effective rhythm, and a faithful, if by-the-book, reproduction of David Gilmour's solo. Hm, maybe my expectations had better be altered. This wasn't going to convert anyone into a KoRn fan, especially if they were a Pink Floyd fan, but after all, it was a bonus track for their Greatest Hits album so if you heard this you already liked them. And surprisingly, what KoRn does bring to the song services it well. They play all three parts together - music geeks know only the middle part was released as a single, so parts 1 and 3 are often forgotten (and separated by the other material that comprised the Wall concept album.) They play pretty well here, fairly cohesive without the conceptual business (ie the famous "If you don't eat your meat" dialogue) without losing the song's meaning of all the anxieties of a singer's upbringing into an isolated rock star (eg: the bricks in the wall.) And the band shows its usually-forgotten skill with funk (they did do the whole "rap metal" thing) as this song was modeled after then-current disco hits.



Surprisingly more effective is their take on the late-80's hip hop number "Word Up." Again, they bring the metal but show great skill with the funk. Davis sounds like he's having more fun with this one, but it retains a sort of ominous flavour. I like songs that are ostensibly "good time" music but with weight and melodrama pumped up. While I could take or leave the Pink Floyd, I genuinely think this song is one of the best things KoRn recorded... which is a fair statement, again, depending what you think of KoRn.

Serious Contenders: Pink Floyd, "Wish You Were Here" & "Comfortably Numb"

In their way, the guys in Pink Floyd did a great job making their personal problems into everybody's problems. My favourite Floyd album is Dark Side of the Moon, because the observations and sorrows of that album feel truly universal... getting older, wasting your life in the pursuit of money and peace of mind, and losing it all. As they progressed, they turned a bit inward, mining their own situation more and more, particularly in the case of Roger Waters' songwriting.

"Wish You Were Here" is one of those great, haunting delicate ballads. It has a dusty, sorrowful guitar picked expertly by David Gilmore, and all the background instruments swell just perfectly to underscore Waters' oblique, well-done, simple-yet-effective lyrics. It sounds like the ultimate lovelorn, break-up, "I need you more now than ever, but we can't be together" type song, particularly at its climactic "Two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl" line.

It's not that. It's very specifically about Syd Barret, the founding leader of Pink Floyd, who vacated the band after one album and a handful of singles due to drug use and psychological... disintegration. Whether Waters was nostalgic, or whether he felt Barrett's presence was a stabilizing one that was long missing and ultimately reflected in the band's turmoil... I'm not sure. But he's definitely singing about Syd.

Things got even more specific, more autobiographical, and yet more obscure, on The Wall, which tells a story of rock star alienation. Now, I've listened to a lot of music about rock star alienation, and even though I am not a rock star and find it somewhat silly to whine about having achieved great success in your chosen field, I often find it makes for some of the best music. No, no kidding. Hey, Greek tragedies were always about nobility, played for the commoners, and they managed to get the point across. In general, I think, the problem of being disappointed by your greatest desire is easy enough to relate to.

I think the distance between the rock star lifestyle and the average listener's helps this. Everything about the rock life seems exaggerated and impossible, including its grief. They got where they did, after all, by taking the feelings, all the little ones we deal with daily, and stretching them out to 3-minute moments, twelve to an album. So by necessity, it must be bigger, or feel bigger. In The Wall, "disliking your audience" is equally tragic to losing your father in the war (all in all, they're both "just bricks in the wall.")

"Comfortably Numb" captures this ambivalence, lyrically and sonically. It's mellow yet tense (the brooding bass, the breathing guitar.) Waters voices the Doctor administering the shot that will allow fictional rock star Pink to complete the show, David Gilmour plays Pink as zoned out and losing connection with reality (...Syd?) Again there is beautiful poetry in the lyrics, particularly Gilmour's parts. The money, however, is in the guitar solos, which manage to reach both a warm beauty that only music can reach, and a cold detachment as signified in the lyrics. The great thing about a song's execution like this is that it forms a bridge between what the song is literally about in its lyrics and context, and what it stirs up in the listener. The song really does a great job not just being about, but living out, that ambivalent, two-sided rock star fever dream.