My next-door neighbor has become my enemy.

My first thoughts upon hearing those lines were, "How DARE they change the original?"

Let me explain.

I grew up on a wide variety of music. While my first concert was James Taylor (love his music, to this day!), a lot of the music I remember hearing as a kid was contemporary folk stuff. Acoustical, Americana, folk-rock, alternative, whatever you choose to call it. Contemporary artists (mostly guitarists, but sometimes there was a bassist thrown in) like Nanci Griffith, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shawn Colvin, Laura Love, and Lucy Kaplansky were all on the mix tapes my dad made when driving me to school. I liked all of them just fine, but currently, the type of music associated with me is rock stuff. Which is fine, I certainly don't mind it, but it's important to remember my roots in my early audiophilia. Well, I was just recently reminded of those early days of musical development when I was listening to a podcast from NPR. A band called Domestic Science Club was playing on NPR. It's three girls who play and sing just about every kind of music. One of the songs they did was a cover of Nanci Griffith's "Time of Inconvenience." If you ever have the opportunity to hear it, I suggest taking it. It's so apropo for now, and it details the cruelty and ambivalence found in daily life. But I noticed they changed a phrase in it, and I was immediately reminded of those early days. I will post the changed stanza here, but you can find the full lyrics at http://www.actionext.com/names_n/nanci_griffith_lyrics/time_of_inconvenience.html.

Here is the original stanza, with the changed part in bold.

We're living in the age of communication
Where the only voices heard have money in their hands
Where greed has become a sophistication
And if you ain't got money
You ain't got nothin' in this land
And here I am one lonely woman
On these mean streets
Where the right to life man has become my enemy
Cuz I'm living in his time of inconvenience at an inconvenient time

Because the singer of Domestic Science Club is pro-life, she changed that line to:

Where my next-door neighbor has become my enemy.

These, of course, carry two different connotations but are equally scathing. Both totally fit with the message of the song, though I am a tyrannical purist who prefers the original. The whole song is most excellent, and it really reminded me of the early days. Of course, when you're a little kid in grade school, you probably don't know how deep the lyrics really are until you're older and can understand what their connotations are. Even though I went to a Catholic school, I didn't get the bolded line about the right to life man until I was in fourth grade or so. So this got me to thinking about all of those acoustical songs played during my grade school days. Now that I can appreciate them, I think I'll be getting the CDs or the MP3s. They still sound just as good as before.