Monday, October 9, 2017

The perfect Hedwig soundtrack

I have to admit, I have become a bit obsessed with the songs from Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  This will eventually pass.  At one point, I was totally obsessed with the soundtrack to Zero Patience (a fairly obscure AIDS-related movie from 1993) and more recently with The Book of Mormon cast recording.  At any rate, I can't believe I nearly missed out on the chance to see Hedwig at Hart House.

While it is possible that the movie version really does reverse the order of the Wicked Little Town songs (starting with the Tommy Gnosis version and ending with the Hedwig version), this doesn't make a lot of sense dramatically.  So I would have resequenced the film soundtrack anyway, but then I got to thinking that Neal Patrick Harris sounds a bit more convincing as Tommy than John Cameron Mitchell, so I decided I would pull together songs from the official soundtrack plus the recent Broadway revival.  And then I went and found that most of the songs from a benefit CD called Wig in a Box are on Youtube (a good thing, since the original CD goes for over $200 on Amazon.ca, though a bit closer to $25 on Amazon.com).  While not all of the covers on Wig in a Box work, I did like Cyndi Lauper doing "Midnight Radio" and They Might Be Giants doing "The Long Grift," plus a couple of original songs were interesting.

Anyway, trying to reorder all the various songs into something closer to the Broadway version, I arrived at this sequence (drawing on the film soundtrack unless otherwise specified):
  1. "Random Number Generation" Lena Hall with Tits of Clay (live)
  2. "America the Beautiful" NPH in 2014 revival
  3. "Tear Me Down"
  4. "The Origin of Love"
  5. "Deutschlandlied" NPH
  6. "Sugar Daddy" NPH
  7. "When Love Explodes (Love Theme from The Hurt Locker)" NPH
  8. "City of Women" Robyn Hitchcock from Wig in a Box
  9. "Angry Inch"
  10. "Nailed" 
  11. "Wig in a Box"
  12. "In Your Arms Tonight"
  13. "Wicked Little Town (Hedwig version)"
  14. "The Long Grift" They Might Be Giants from Wig in a Box
  15. "Hedwig's Lament"
  16. "Freaks"
  17. "Exquisite Corpse"
  18. "Wicked Little Town (Reprise - Tommy Gnosis version)" NPH
  19. "Milford Lake" Stephen Trask from Wig in a Box
  20. "Midnight Radio" NPH*

* Really both the original and the 2014 revival version are very good, but I gave the nod to the revival, partly because I preferred NPH in the male voice and Lena Hall's backing vocals are pretty incredible.  I also liked the Cyndi Lauper version, but not quite enough to put in on my ideal mix.  I also think Alan Cumming does a solid version of Wig in a Box where he interspersed parts of Wicked Little Town, but that was just too much of a good thing.  I'm actually a bit surprised that no one has done much remixing of these songs.  It appears there is a EP with club and dub remixes of "Angry Inch" and also a remix of "Wig in a Box," but that's it as far as I can tell.  Maybe I should have ended with one of these remixes (the way Zero Patience does), but I came across them too late.

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