So this post is going to piss off the wife on at least two counts. Firstly, she thinks I’m “spending too much time on the computer” nowadays, and not enough with her. Secondly, this post refers to an old crush who my wife thinks I had “blogged too much about” (the implication is that I don’t blog enough about my wife).
Then again, I think I’ve been taking myself too seriously on this blog of late, and so need something to break out of this rut, and this post is something I’ve been intending to write for a long time. So I’m taking a chance here.
The song in question is Diamonds and Rust, originally performed by Joan Baez, and then covered by Judas Priest in their album Sin After Sin.
I was first introduced to this song by the Judas Priest version. It was that time back in college where I had computer, and access to a LAN full of pirated music, and was sampling all the bands that I thought might be cool (it’s another matter that I ended up liking a lot of these “cool” bands, including Judas Priest).
As was my wont then whenever I “discovered” some artist, I would listen to all their works in order, album by album. I do this nowadays as well, when I “rediscover” artists. And so I got introduced to Diamonds and Rust. I remember the song immediately making an impression on me, but not too much (the other song that that made an immediate impact was called “between the hammer and the anvil“, and I’d wondered if it was about the mechanics of the inner ear).
Anyway, in the middle of discovering Judas Priest for the first time, I met this girl. I mean I’d known her for a really long time but this was the first time we were “having a conversation”. We had met at this tiny cafe full of college kids (we were also college kids then) where she had made a big fuss about being a “low calorie person”. Music was playing. Soon a vaguely familiar sounding song played, in a voice that wasn’t familiar at all. Between bits of the conversation, all I caught from the song was that it was “_____ and _____ “. Surprisingly for me, I didn’t try to immediately figure out which song it was upon returning to my room that night.
The years went by. I probably ended up blogging this girl a bit too much for my own good later on. The person who is now my wife read some of those posts and thought she had found a guy who would write loads about her as well. I started off brightly, but in the long term I don’t think I’ve lived up to the expectation.
I don’t recall the circumstances in which I rediscovered Diamonds And Rust. It happened in London, either towards the end of 2017 or the beginning of 2018. I think the rediscovery again happened through Judas Priest – I was working through their albums one by one after a 12 year gap, and chanced upon Diamonds And Rust again. Some chord (not literally) hit. I went down a rabbit hole.
I realised this was possibly the song that had initially registered all those years ago, and that I had heard in the cafe. Googling revealed it was a cover, and the original did sound very familiar (I think this is the story. I’ve sat on this post for so long now I’ve really forgotten). I was convinced. The Joan Baez version did seem very familiar. It all started coming back to me. The next couple of days I was careful around the wife so she wouldn’t realise that I had gotten excited about something vaguely related to an old crush.
In any case, I liked the cover so much that soon I started creating a playlist of “metal covers of non-metal songs”.
I called it “Rust Covers Diamonds” (get the clever pun?). I’m listening to that playlist right now as I write this. It’s a public playlist, so feel free to listen to it. You’ll love a lot of the songs in it! Especially the first “title track”.
Update
There is one thing I don’t like about Diamonds and Rust, and I blame Joan Baez for it (Judas Priest simply copied it without checking it seems). The song is not dimensionally consistent. Check the lyrics:
And here I sit, hand on the telephone
Hearing the voice I’d known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall
Light year is a unit of distance, not time. So “a couple of light years ago” makes absolutely no sense. I really don’t know how the editors let that pass. Then again, you don’t expect most editors to know physics!