You may have special songs that can emotionally transport you to another place, making you happy, sad, cheerful, angry, lonely, or even a bit strange. One song that gets a lot of people emotional is Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence.” How about a version of it made by the heavy metal band “Disturbed”? It’s not as disturbing as you might think!
It was “The Sound of Silence” that gave Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, two kids from Queens, New York, their big breakthrough in 1965. In the years ahead, the folk-rock duo earned an astonishing 13 Grammy awards. Behind the scenes, Simon and Garfunkel’s artistic temperaments often clashed. While this tension was often a source of creativity, they did end up going their separate ways in 1970.
Flash forward a quarter century to the mid-1990s, and you have the heavy metal band “Disturbed” forming. Their albums certainly have suitably aggressive names, “The Sickness,” “Ten Thousand Fists,” “Asylum,” and “Music as a Weapon.” And yet for hardcore fans of heavy metal, Disturbed isn’t heavy enough. The band’s vocalist David Draiman confesses: “We probably have too much melody going on or we’re not quite as turbulent or caustic. While I really love that type of music, it’s not what we try to do. If we have to place things in context, we’re more hard rock than heavy metal these days.”
Check out the video below and you’ll see Disturbed performing their interpretation of “The Sound of Silence” on Conan O’Brien’s late night show. It’s definitely not what you’d expect from a heavy metal band, although Draiman’s voice is strong and powerful. He gradually builds up from a soft beginning to a crescendo of emotion.
Paul Simon himself gave his seal of approval to Disturbed’s cover of this 1965 classic. Do you? Let’s hear from you in the comments section below and be sure to like and share!
