nod if you can hear me

Since I was in high school in the late '70s, of course I became intimately familiar with that champion source of high-school yearbook quotations, Pink Floyd's The Wall. It's true that I listened to that record incessantly for a few years, until I decided it was overwrought, pretentious, and generally all the things non-punk '70s music was deemed to be by the enlightened collegiate mind of the '80s. Fact is, I didn't have to listen to it anymore - I think I'd listened to it frequently enough that its every little sparklingly recorded pindrop was encoded in my DNA.

Still and all, I really haven't picked it up again since. But I may - because a mix CD I received recently featured this cover of "Comfortably Numb" by Dar Williams and Ani DiFranco - and I realized that however lost within a rather overdone, gigantized concept (and that's either ironic, given that one of the record's themes is the way isolation and coddling sycophancy breeds an Olympian, fascist remove - or it's apt, depending on the extent to which Roger Waters was laughing at the audience eating up his increasingly Fitzcarraldian stagings of the work, or the extent to which his ego was being engorged at the same), this is a devastatingly beautiful, sad, and incisive song. Really, you don't need the rest of the album: this song says just about everything it does, without hitting you over the head with marching black-and-red hammers.

This version apparently came about because the medicated complacency of the main character seemed resonant with the current state of the electorate for Dar Williams. I'm also pleased to report that Ani DiFranco calms down enough not to hyperventilate her vocals here.

Hearing that track reminded me that, somewhere (thank you collectorz.com database) I had a cover of another track from The Wall, "Mother," as performed by My Morning Jacket. (Turned out to be from a 2000 compilation on Darla, Little Darla Has a Treat for You.) This version is a pretty straightforward take on the original, except lower-fi - which actually helps, since the distortion that occurs when the singer shouts the higher notes is rather spooky. The heavily reverbed falsetto backing vocal during the solo is nice, too. The song itself is musically (and emotionally) similar to "Comfortably Numb" - so long as you ignore much of the lyric, which appears to unironically participate in one of the album's other main themes: that women are horrifying monsters, alternately stifling and castrating. On the bright side, if anyone ever puts together a musical version of The Manchurian Candidate, this would make a great song for Raymond Shaw to sing.

Dar Williams and Ani DiFranco "Comfortably Numb"
My Morning Jacket "Mother"