Messin With The Music Part 24 – ‘Head Like A Hole’

Time for another tune in the ‘Messin With The Music’ series. This time we’re presenting ‘Head Like A Hole’ by Nine Inch Nails. It always interesting to take a song that is very computer driven (at least in the original recorded version) and change it in to a recording that is mostly acoustic. We did add one part that has a more electronic sound – one of the bass tracks uses an envelope filter guitar pedal to give it a little more character. The song was originally released on their debut album ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ which came out in 1989. NIN was one of the bands that brought a dark and heavy style of electronic music in to the mainstream. I’ve always loved this tune. It has the feel and power of a ‘protest’ song. The protest in this song is against the power of wealth and money and the destructive force it can become. It’s easy to see this corruption if you just look a little below the surface of how the human world functions. It certainly seems that nothing has changed for the better since this was released in 1989. It’s the kind of song that begs to be played at high volume with a fist in the air. We based our version on the bass riff that is a driving force throughout the song. We added a couple of six string acoustic guitars to each side of the stereo field. We then added some chords and arpeggios played on a twelve string guitar and mandolin. There is a cajon and shaker for some percussion in the background. If the original song was a scream of protest against what the world has become we consider our version a reflection of that scream bouncing back from a distant mountain top.