My companion today has been a CD that I can't stop listening to. I listened to it at work while I tried to breatk through the prison of paperwork on my desk. I listened to it tonight while making marshmallows. It's laugh-out loud funny. It's surprisingly sweet. It's the bluegrass version of Pink Floyd's The Wall by Luther Wright and the Wrongs.
I've always had mixed feelings about The Wall. I like the music, but it has emotional connotations for me that are hard to overcome. When my husband and I were dating, his mother started up a conversation with me about that horrid, anti-mother video his younger brother was watching - the movie version of The Wall. I remember her vehemently going on about its awful portrayal of mothers. Silly me. I wasn't as experienced in the nuances of family dynamics as I am now, and I just shrugged and said, "Well, some mothers are like walls." I never was able to regain that lost ground.
After that, I never could hear the music from The Wall without a twinge of regret. But I can listen to the banjo, fiddle, and barnyard version with a clear conscience. A lot of it is just funny, jokey, stuff - like replacing the spoken parts with hillbilly phrases - "HowDeeHowDo?" for "Hello?" or replacing all the "queer" and race bashing in "In the Flesh" with deer and racoon hunting. But the gospel a capella version of "Goodbye Cruel World" is just simply beautiful. And "Young Lust" works surprisingly well as a hard-rocking country and western tune.
In fact, I think I'm beginning to like it better than the original.
(You can read more about this here.)
Article comments
1 - Mark Saleski
this is a fantastic record. as jokey as it might seem i think that they do indeed love The Wall...they certainly spent enough time with all of its nuances.