Sweet Jane

I fell in love with Cowboy Junkies' Sweet Jane back in college many moons ago (how many moons is none of your business). I think a friend made a mix tape for me with that song on it and I immediately went out and bought The Trinity Sessions. Come to find out that that album was recorded in a delapidated old church with a single microphone. It has such a raw and live sound and at the same time it is so dark. Enough about the album... I was disappointed to discover that Sweet Jane is a cover of a Lou Reed and Velvet Underground song. Not because I think Lou Reed sucks or anything. I guess I just romanticized the whole Sweet Jane/Trinity Sessions thing. It's sorta like finding out the girl you love has been sleeping around. She isn't so special to you anymore. I went on a quest to hear Lou Reed's version of the song and after chasing it down on itunes I found I enjoy it as much as the Cowboy Junkies'. Life is like that, isn't it? Humans idealize just about everything. We do it with technology, politics, religion, relationships, and just about every other facet of life. Every political ideology is, at the outset, unadulterated. And then it enters the machine of humanity. We hash, rehash, spin, revise, edit, and otherwise mutilate these ideals which, on paper, are almost romantic. So it is with Sweet Jane. My ideal has been deconstructed. She has been reduced to an adulterated and defrocked saint. But I love her just the same. Sometimes a little tarnish is just the thing we need to make us realize how much we love something.

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