Disney, Rock, and Strange Moods

When I occasionally go on YouTube crawls, clicking from video to video, it isn't to watch dogs and cats befriending turtles and canaries. Usually it's when I get sucked into music. I'll start maybe listening to that one concert where Lacey Sturm performed with Skillet. Click here and click there and before I know it, I'm listening to rock covers of Disney songs. 

That is, people can have a very loose idea of what makes something a "rock" cover. Or "metal." I have found some of these quite disappointing. But Peyton Parrish, though. Apparently like the rest of the Internet given the high number of views his videos have, I think he does an excellent job with the Disney covers. I stumbled first across "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from Mulan. Then later he came out with "Go the Distance" from Hercules. The former was a wonderful display of the concept of masculine strength. And the latter took that a step further into transcendent space. 

When Hercules sings that song, he's just a young man setting out on an adventure looking for excitement and belonging. He's imagining the glory of it all. Yet this cover takes that and gives it a subtle nudge. Instead of "going the distance" for glory, here the speaker wants to go the distance to hold on, stay the course, run the race, do what's right. The line "to look beyond the glory is the hardest part" stands out more as an explanation of his motives. This song now is not about seeking fame. It's about enduring with strength for an ultimate reward. Instead of the "hero's waiting arms" being Zeus, the father Hercules has been separated from and whom he hopes to please, the line suddenly sounds quite bolder than a Disney lyric. It suddenly sounds like we're talking about God's love--and I see your Lion of Judah tattoo, Peyton, so I doubt I'm making this angle up simply as the viewer. Ah, gotta love when we find deep meaning in Disney songs (I've gone on such tangents about Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and the symbolism I find there). 

And then once I ended up on Blackbriar and Ulli Perhonen's "Snow White and Rose Red." I couldn't quite tell if this was my missed Goth calling music, or if this was just too far off the deep end for me. After attempting to delve in more, I'm going to go with the latter. Sometimes clicking and clicking in strange moods can lead to interesting discoveries; sometimes, though, it leads to discoveries that you only find intriguing when in such aforementioned strange moods. Ah, the endless possibilities of music and song.