I cut myself today, to see if I still feel...

I've been playing with some music sites, like Pandora and Rhapsody. Pandora's got a real interesting deal where it matches similar songs into a personalized radio channel. Rhapsody is kinda like iTunes, except you get 25 free songs per month. Both are neat sites to check out.

One of my favorite musical themes is covers. U2 has the best Helter Skelter, and if you can find it, Indigo Girls do a great Watchtower. I even like Puff Daddy's Kashmir and Madonna's American Pie.

A short while back there was a cover of a Nine Inch Nails song, "Hurt", by a fellow named Johnny Cash. It's a rare 70-year-old who even listens to a heavy metal song, let alone cover it, but Cash had the talent to know talent. Not surprisingly for a song named "Hurt", Trent Reznor wrote a lonely, painful, bitter song. Cash remade it: lonely, painful and bittersweet. He took it acoustic, dropped out the drums, slowed the tempo and softened it. Reznor's lyic "I wear this crown of shit" gentrified into "crown of thorns". It was mostly faithful to the original, but a solid new work in it's own right. Without Reznor's angry energy, the same lyrics are transformed from a angstful rage to a story about the passive deadening and pains of age and loss. It was on the last album Cash put out before he died.

Accordingly, Cash got his props back from the meathead rocker community. Sevendust is one of those bands that headlines the kind of concert where you can surf a mosh pit (story for another day). It turns out, they cover Hurt too. But they don't do the hard-rocking NIN version: they do it the way Cash did. The rockers stop crowdsurfing, and listen to the slow steady tribute. I kind of doubt this link will work, but if you're into this kind of thing try to find Sevendust's "Hurt (dedicated to Johnny Cash)" from their album Southside Double. This 3rd rendition is still a sad song, but now it's a song about the loss of a man who we're still proud to remember.