round 1

(10) Sarah McLachlan, “Dear God”
spilled
(7) Metallica, “Whiskey in the Jar”
210-127
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/7/22.

david legault on Metallica’s “Whiskey in the Jar”

I think it's best to start the same way I start all of my essays, with the music video for a 1970s Czechoslovakian novelty song about a Moravian Swamp Monster:

I mean, it’s a perfect song for capturing the off-beat humor of the Central European Communist-era culture, and for whatever reason, this song has stuck around. Maybe at this point the love is more ironic, or because of a nostalgic appreciation, but after living in Prague for five years I can tell you, that even as an outsider, I heard this song often, to the point where my kids knew the words as they danced to it in their preschool classes to learn about rhythm. I’ve shared this video with more people than I can count, have tried to write about Jozin multiple times without being able to capture the true weirdness of it as a cultural phenomenon, other than to say that in a country still bragging about the composer Antonín Dvořák and the debut of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Jozin z Bazin is perhaps the best example of a contemporary musical success. In a country that mostly receives its music from the West, this song is something the country can claim uniquely as its own.
Which is why, when this happened at a 2018 Metallica concert, everybody lost their fucking minds:

My Czech friends were talking about this for weeks, and why shouldn’t they? In a region that has historically been under the oppressive control of other, more powerful states–whose own independence has only existed within our recent living memory–there is a pride in any art and culture that can be called uniquely Czech.  I don’t know what possessed Metallica to take the time to learn and play the song (arguably the song mostly functions as a brief break or intermission for the band, as a new guitar player is brought onto the stage to perform after most of the band clears out), one thing was clear: it was a way of connecting with the audience in a way that other major acts have not, a way of taking the time to learn a little of the language, a way of saying we care through the act of imitation.
Which is another way of saying that a cover of a song can have a value beyond being familiar to an audience, or being an interesting alteration to an old favorite. Metallica understands this better than most.

*

Garage Inc., the Metallica album consisting of covers of the music that influenced the group, was released in the winter of 1998. The album comes right after the release of Load and ReLoad, and more or less represents the band’s transition from thrash metal powerhouse into, well, whatever it is you think about them now. This is the album that ventures away from Metal Up Your Ass and recording Kill ‘Em All in a haunted mansion into the later period version: better known for feuding with Napster and the Some Kind of Monster documentary. The band went from alt-rock into dad-rock, from Master of Puppets to the generic shit you hear on some dude’s Bluetooth speaker when you go to lift weights. Garage Inc. is the first compilation-style album of the band, but it is followed by S&M, a live album of Metallica songs with a classical symphony accompaniment. It is the beginning of a trend away from new work and into the nostalgia for their earlier, objectively better work. While they’ve recorded at least three new studio albums since then, they’ve released at least 11 live-albums in that same period, which doesn’t include the extended re-releases and remastered editions and deluxe repackagings of the earlier albums. Which is to say that while Garage Inc. is an album of covers, it’s not full of particularly exciting or challenging renditions. There is no real reimagining of the songs on this album, rather, it’s more like Metallica playing their favorite songs as they already exist: it is Metallica if they decided to become a really good, high-production bar band.
Maybe a better way of thinking about Garage, Inc. is that it is Metallica’s attempt at establishing metal’s version of the Great American Songbook, creating a canon of songs that everyone knows, that everyone plays as an acknowledgment of what we share. If we think of this album in this light, it’s easier to see that Metallica playing more or less identical versions is not a lack of creativity, but a reinforcement of the value of these earlier works, placing themselves in a tradition and culture instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Even “Whiskey in the Jar,” while traditionally considered a folk song, fits into this tradition due to Thin Lizzy’s reimagining (which, for what it’s worth, is the version Metallica themselves identify as their inspiration). This is further buttressed in the album’s title and the terrifically lame music video: which is to say that these songs can (and should!) be played at every house party, by every set of sweaty dudes set up in a garage with their Flying V’s bought on sale at Guitar Center. Compared to earlier Metallica, the lack of spirit in this album is what makes it accessible to a wider audience, what makes the amateur’s versions possible.

* 

“Whiskey in the Jar” is listed as song 533 in the Roud Folk Song Index, an attempt at collecting recordings of traditional folk songs in English-language folk that includes over 30,000 entries. The song is believed to originate in the mid-17th century, and though it is typically considered an Irish folk-song, known versions of the song appear almost simultaneously in Europe and the United States, meaning it was likely passed around by sailors, quickly spreading across both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It does not have a known creator or origin, and as such, there is no such thing as the “definitive” version: every recording is as legitimate as the next.
There are countless recorded versions of “Whiskey in the Jar:” Spotify cuts off my search after 500 different hits, “Kilgary Mountain” brings up even more, by the time I dig into “Gilgarra Mountain” I have to concede that there’s no way I can listen to all of these. I can limit myself to the known entities: We have the Grateful Dead, The Highwaymen, Peter, Paul & Mary, Bryan Adams, and a “Songs of the Civil War” compilations. The Dubliners, the Pogues, The High Kings, and every Irish or quasi-Irish band ever has played some version of it, often with at least a 12-piece band backing it up with mandolins, tin whistles and other Irish accoutrement that feels like it belongs as part of a St. Patrick’s Day celebration or Lucky Charms commercial more than it does as part of any sort of music people would actually want to listen to.
Every version has slight variations, but certain elements remain consistent: It is always the story of a bandit robbing a military officer in the countryside. The thief always shows his loot to a lover (sometimes Jenny, sometimes Molly, sometimes Mary) before he goes to sleep. When the bandit awakens, he is surrounded by the officer and his men. Most versions have the thief attempt to shoot his gun, only to find his gunpowder wet: the shots do not fire and he is taken to prison. Occasionally (Metallica included) the bandit shoots the officer before he’s taken off to jail. From here, the bandit thinks wistfully about life outside of prison: sometimes he is waiting for his brother to come and bail him out so the two can return to the countryside together, and other times the bandit is resigned to his fate–life in prison or execution.
Hundreds of versions have been performed and recorded, but it’s not until Thin Lizzy’s 1972 recording does something particularly new or interesting happen. While everything before Thin Lizzy (and most of what comes after) adheres to the folk genre, Thin Lizzy’s conversion to rock makes for the first unique version of the song: a redefinition that stands out from the hundreds of more or less identical renditions. While the typical Irish group version plays the song as an upbeat, quickly based jaunt through the story, Thin Lizzy’s is more melancholic: a story of violence and regret emerges in the heavier instruments, the growled out lyrics. Here, the song goes from a foolish misadventure into a tale of failure that haunts the bandit to the end of the days. After several centuries, the stakes are finally raised.

*

I’ve listened to over 100 different renditions of this song, most of which are terrible, in the attempt of answering a single question, one I still don’t feel completely ready to answer: is there such a thing as a song that can’t be covered? If a song does not have a definitive or even a known original version, can a song really be a cover, or is it just a different shadow of an unknown thing? If a cover is a response to an original work, how can we respond to something we have not heard?
I suppose it is still possible to respond to a specific version of a song. For example, you might not be able to cover the Star Spangled Banner, but you could cover the Jimmy Hendrix rendition. Then again, if you’re not copying the Hendrix version verbatim, aren’t you back to putting your own spin on the original concept? Is it even a cover if it is just a different person playing the exact same arrangement? How do we take something ubiquitous and try to claim it as our own?
What I’m trying to say is that Metallica’s rendition of “Whiskey in the Jar” is attempting to cover Thin Lizzy, but in doing so it becomes its own sketch of the original work. It does less to honor Thin Lizzy’s influence, and more to place Metallica within a 17th-century Irish tradition. They follow Thin Lizzy’s blueprint for an amplified, distorted musicality, but they do so with a fuller sound, more mournful. Thin Lizzy excepted, every Irish band plays this song with the Irish tradition in mind, forgetting that the song is more of a sailor’s tune than a truly Irish relic: these bands place the emphasis on roaming the countryside, on matching the mandolin with the fiddle with the tin whistle and a singing style that sounds unnecessarily upbeat. The emphasis ought to be placed on the idea of impermanence: taking what you can when you can get it, not on the mountains themselves but leaving the mountains as soon as you’ve committed your crimes. It’s not a mistake to rob the military man on a lonesome road, but to trust someone else with the information.
For a band of their genre, Metallica’s music is far more narrative than any of their peers, and it is through story that they are best understood. While nearly everything that comes before “Whiskey in the Jar” is played fast and angry, it is in this album that you start to see that this anger is covering a sadness. Even in the music video, all debauchery seems perfunctory: everyone playing the role of what a rowdy party ought to be, while no one seems to be particularly enjoying themselves, the band included. While Thin Lizzy found the song’s proper tone, Metallica gives it back to us with a much fuller sound: it’s tempo a little slower, its guitars a little louder, a warm bath you can sink into.

*

There is no possibility of change for Metallica’s highwayman, no escape from the ball and chain. Only sadness and regret. While the song begins in the Irish countryside, it ends in the limbo of placelessness. Like the sailors who sang this song, this prison could be anywhere: back in the Cork and Kerry mountains, or Kilgary Mountain, or the Appalachains, or the Ozarks; he could be a highway bandit or a pirate or a Moravian man using spreading poison from a crop duster to earn a woman’s love and half of the collective farm; he could be robbing a Captain Ferrel or a Colonel Pepper; he could be Patrick Fleming, a man executed in 1650 for a crime spree so prolific that he likely serves as the song’s true point of origin; a man could be rattling a saber, or a rapier, or a scimitar; he could be pointing a pistol or a rifle, killing or attempting to kill; he could be underage and way too drunk in a shitty off-campus apartment in Allendale, Michigan, where he didn’t drink whiskey, but rather so much vodka that nearly twenty years later he still has an aversion directly related to the night he first heard this fucking song; he could be watching the music video now and be aghast at how perfectly the video captures every association he has with the song and that night–being too young and too dumb and too drunk and too angry and wondering how many of those adjectives he still carries with him; he could vaguely remember wrestling a roommate and someone’s foot kicking through the drywall, creating a massive hole; he could remember finding shit around the apartment–loose change, a Darth Vader action figure, a glass of water and literal garbage–and stuffing it into the hole because why not? Soon he will be gone from this place but that shit will rot in these walls forever: no matter who passes through this space or who may call it home, he will always feel a slight sense of ownership through a single night of drunken destruction that was for some reason scored by an album of Metallica covering their favorite artists. Every version of “Whiskey in the Jar” ends in some combination of pain and regret. Like any standard in the songbook, it is because these feelings belong to every story, even the ones we wish we could forget.

David LeGault is the author of One Million Maniacs, a collection of essays now available from Outpost19. Other recent work appears in The Normal School, Hotel Amerika, and The Rupture, among others. After five years in the Czech Republic, he once again calls Michigan his home.

I Do(n't) Believe In You: emily mills on Growing up and angry with Sarah McLachlan's "Dear God"

Say the name Sarah McLachlan and you’re likely to get one of three reactions: “Oh no it’s the sad puppy lady,” “Isn’t that the Lilith Fair chick?” and/or “I am obsessed with her music and have been for years.” Most people who were alive and aware of the radio in the 1990s at least heard her hit single, “Building A Mystery.” Sarah was, in fact, the founder and consistent headliner of the Lilith Fair festival that ran from ‘96-’99 in cities across North America. And she did record a notoriously sad PSA on behalf of the ASPCA, resulting in numerous parodies and tear-soaked cheeks.
You might also recall her pleading ode, the theme song for many a high school graduation of the era, “I Will Remember You.” Or maybe you chuckle over the fact that her extremely melancholy “Do What You Have to Do” made its way into U.S. history when it was referenced in the Starr Report about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky (true fact).
Real ones know that Sara’s repertoire isn’t limited to wistful ballads or soft adult contemporary, though (no offense to those excellent offerings). Do a little digging and you’ll find the occasional hard edge, thrilling like hearing a soft-spoken grandparent say “fuck!” for the first time. One shining example is Sarah’s cover of XTC’s sacrilegious screed, “Dear God.”

*

I think Sarah’s cover transcends the original.
I don’t mean any disrespect to XTC or songwriter Andy Partridge in particular. He wrote what I think is a great song. I just think Sarah performed it in a way that better reflects the pathos and nuance in the lyrics. Listen to her version: the slowed down, pounding tempo, the uncharacteristic growl of Sarah’s voice during the emotional peak of the bridge, the live room quality of Pierre Marchand’s production work. There’s something altogether more deeply felt and urgent about the cover. It feels appropriate given how the lyrics grapple with some massive but intensely personal topics, something XTC’s almost jaunty original take doesn’t quite capture.
Of course, XTC’s original version helped propel the band back into the spotlight and got far more play than Sarah’s iteration ever did. After the song didn’t make the cut for their 1986 album, Skylarking. “Dear God” was instead released as a B-side and was only later re-added after it turned into a huge hit (thanks in large part to college radio). Predictably, there was serious backlash and even violence in response to the song–most coming from the United States. At least one radio station even received a bomb threat over it. A student forced his high school to play the song over the PA system while holding a teacher at knifepoint. It stirred up some intense feelings, is the point.
Andy also says that part of the reason the song got left off the first release of the record was because he felt like he’d “failed” to really do justice to the topic.
“It's such a vast subject—human belief, the need for humans to believe the stuff they do, and the many strata involved, the many layers of religion and belief and whatnot,” Andy told Todd Bernhardt in 2006. “So I thought I'd failed to address this massive subject for all mankind.”
No one song could do that, of course. But it can still bring an important perspective to the table. More importantly, I think, a song like this can provide a much-needed lifeline to other people struggling with similar questions and feeling otherwise alone on that journey.

*

Picture this: It’s 1997, summer probably, and I’m 15 years old, a preacher’s kid, a gamer, and an awkward tomboy whose fashion choices could best be described as “thrift store raver.” I’m bubbling over with hormones and big emotions. I’m bisexual but I don’t fully grasp it just yet, still convinced that the intense feelings I sometimes have toward my non-male friends are just “fascination crushes.” I’m occasionally bullied by peers and adults alike who are pissed off about not knowing whether I’m a “boy or a girl.” Oh and, through all of it, my mother is slowly dying–but I don’t fully grasp that just yet.
My older sister introduced me to Sarah McLachlan in the early ‘90s. The revelation came via a dubbed copy of her outstanding 1993 album, Fumbling Toward Ecstasy, and my sister’s throaty sing-alongs in the shower before school each morning. That album would go on to become the soundtrack to my teenage years. It helped spawn a slightly obsessive fandom that brought me to an email listserv community (shoutout to the Fumblers), three Lilith Fairs, and as many of her solo concerts as I could manage.
Point is, my opinion on anything Sarah-related is obviously extremely biased. There is simply too much nostalgia and sense memory tied up in my feelings about her music for me to even pretend to be objective. Still, you gotta admit, her version of “Dear God” slaps.
I first heard the song that summer of ‘97, on a compilation record of Sarah’s contributions to movie soundtracks, other people’s albums, and tributes, called Rarities, B-Sides and Other Stuff. It was my introduction to her voice outside of her original music (ex: the killer newbeat track she recorded with Manufacture, “As the End Draws Near,” which yes I do own on vinyl now, thanks for asking). “Dear God” hit my newly agnostic, raised-in-the-church, lost little lamb self like a ton of bricks.
For those unfamiliar, the song is a sort of ironic indictment of religion and belief in a higher power. It calls out the rank hypocrisy of so many “people of faith” who use their dogma to excuse being horrible to others while grasping at a sense of control. It questions the existence of an allegedly all-powerful God who would allow awful things to happen to us. Repeatedly, the singer insists that “I don’t believe in you,” but the whole song is addressed to God. It’s an intentional paradox and a surprisingly nuanced argument, an almost universal human struggle put to music. Not so shabby after all, Andy.

*

While my mom was dying, my father’s church began to question the time he was spending away at the hospital instead of attending to the needs of the congregation. After years of service, he was now driving one hour each way to visit his wife as she underwent multiple surgeries, rehabilitation, and relapse. Shortly before she died, when she had been in the ICU for a month battling a fungal infection in her brain, the church voted to terminate my dad’s position. It meant he needed to begin looking for a new pulpit somewhere. It meant going through the exhaustive application and interview process required by the Presbyterian Church all while tending to my sick mom. It meant upending my life, too–a new school in a new state far away from friends and family, except for a dad who would increasingly disappear from me.
Mom died a little while after the church issued its decision. It was a beautiful, sunny September morning. I had been in math class, daydreaming as usual, staring out the window at the clear blue sky and wishing I was someplace else.
All of that, as you might imagine, made me feel some bitterness toward the church and those pious people who’d kicked us out in our darkest hour.
One evening that autumn, I slipped my headphones over my ears and clicked play on my silver-and-blue Discman. I had Sarah’s version of “Dear God” cued up. As the sun began to sink behind the horizon, I walked from our house through the long parking lot to the church itself. I alternated between sipping from a bottle of pop and singing along, feeling myself get more and more worked up as the song progressed. It had been a long time since I’d let my anger fully manifest itself. The last physical fight I’d been in was in the 6th grade. I’d worked hard to seal tight the lid on the boiling cauldron of my temper, channeling the energy into drumming, punk music, softball, and angstry journal entries. Constructive things.
I skulked around to the back of the building, where the brick wall of the sanctuary bordered a narrow strip of grass and then a sad line of trees that shielded it from the view of the subdivision beyond. Shadows grew long, then all-encompassing. I finished my pop. I felt Sarah’s pleading, angry voice as she hit the pivotal bridge where the music and the lyrics hit their emotional crescendo. Through watery eyes, I stared at the tall, expensive, stained glass sanctuary window, and I listened.

And it's the same the whole world round
The hurt I see helps to compound
The Father, Son, and holy ghost
Is just somebody's unholy hoax
And if you're up there you'll perceive
That my heart's here upon my sleeve
If there's one thing I don't believe in…

I wound up and, with all my righteous fury, hurled that fucking bottle at the window.
And missed.

…It's you,
Dear God.

The glass shattered against the brick wall instead. I sat down in a heap and stared miserably at the shards now strewn in the grass. The sublime peak and quiet release of the song’s end was almost too perfect, too on-the-nose. But I felt it all the same. Deep. I was a teenager, after all.
I also felt some amount of relief. I’m not sure what I would have done if I’d actually broken the window. I don’t think God would have minded, but dad and the church folks probably wouldn’t have been chill about it. I wasn’t looking for ways to make our lives harder. I wasn’t really thinking, either. I was just angry. Grieving. I was trying to make sense of my life as the old world I’d been raised in died and a new one struggled to be born.
I think I’d stopped believing in the things my dad and his church taught many years before. I don’t remember there being a specific moment or incident that caused it, that severing. I just knew that the God I felt in my bones did not match the God of the Presbyterian Church USA. I wasn’t able to articulate it just then, but the God I sensed wasn’t interested in causing joy or pain. After all, humans were plenty good at that on our own. And that, I think, is what really resonates in “Dear God.” All the things the singer complains about? Humans, not God. So really, it’s a letter to all of us, a recognition of the myriad ways we contort ourselves in order to justify our own best and worst instincts and behaviors. To make sense of the insensible.
Sarah is herself a self-professed spiritual agnostic who has noted of the song that “it has an intensity that perhaps I don't possess on my own.” Still, she manages to tap into something profound just in the way she sings it. And here is the beauty of the thing: The self-doubting songwriter who manages to pen great lyrics, the gentle singer who digs in and infuses the words with added power they hadn’t known they possessed, the listener who experiences it all and finds desperately needed connection. Strangers meeting over soundwaves.
Some covers are just covers. Others breathe new life into something that was always great and just waiting for different people, with different lives, to be in conversation with it. Humanity will likely always wrestle with questions of religion, spirituality, systems, relationships. And so we will continue to hurt and heal each other with our seeking and our answers, and so “Dear God” will continue to be relevant–ready and waiting for the next artist to add a chapter to its story.
I will probably still think Sarah’s is the best. Not because it objectively is. She was an artist and it was a song that both found me when I needed them most. And that’s enough.

Emily Mills is a writer, musician, amatuer naturalist, and gadabout who lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her partners and two smol rescue dogs. She will burn in heaven, like we do down here. Find her on Twitter @millbot or online at www.emilymills.org.