i realized something last night.
the main catalyst for this album (this whole undertaking, really) was a trip to Texas over the Christmas holidays of 2008. cassie and i visited my younger brother, who had just been released from prison but was already back in the state hospital for a drug relapse (this encounter is described rather completely in "Cocaine Cocaine" so i'm not going to elaborate on it too much here).
you never really know why you do the things you do, but i realized last night that it probably wasn't an accident that in the opening song of the debut album of my band Blueyed Son, i refer not to my own blue eyes, but to my brother's. i didn't have this in mind at the time, but it's becoming clear to me that this band and this album is as much about him as it is about me, and that even the name of the band is a reference to him as much as it is to myself.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
listening to yourself
i've been listening back to that scratch recording of bexar county that i made a few days ago and it's pretty obvious that i need to work on a few things in my performance.
first, i was really using my throat a lot to scream, which i don't normally do -- i used to be pretty disciplined about pushing air up from my diaphragm when i needed more vocal power on higher notes. i don't have a problem singing the healthier way when it's just me and a mic, but when i also have a guitar around my neck i guess i revert back to old bad habits. so that's something i need to be aware of when i'm performing.
i also think my timing could be a lot better. my timing is pretty good with piano, though still not amazing, but the timing on my guitar playing -- which i'm just now re-learning how to play -- is pretty sloppy. i'm not that interested in being a great guitar soloist, but i really do want to play rhythm guitar well, which is much more difficult than one might think. so i'm going to be practicing these songs for as many hours as i can in order to get the fingering clean and the timing right in the pocket.
first, i was really using my throat a lot to scream, which i don't normally do -- i used to be pretty disciplined about pushing air up from my diaphragm when i needed more vocal power on higher notes. i don't have a problem singing the healthier way when it's just me and a mic, but when i also have a guitar around my neck i guess i revert back to old bad habits. so that's something i need to be aware of when i'm performing.
i also think my timing could be a lot better. my timing is pretty good with piano, though still not amazing, but the timing on my guitar playing -- which i'm just now re-learning how to play -- is pretty sloppy. i'm not that interested in being a great guitar soloist, but i really do want to play rhythm guitar well, which is much more difficult than one might think. so i'm going to be practicing these songs for as many hours as i can in order to get the fingering clean and the timing right in the pocket.
Monday, February 23, 2009
this one's ready for mastering
the final version of "long way off". i finally got it right, i think.
[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FINAL (UNMASTERED) VERSION OF "LONG WAY OFF" ]]]]
[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FINAL (UNMASTERED) VERSION OF "LONG WAY OFF" ]]]]
follies
did anyone catch that weird production of Sondheim's Follies on TV last night? hugh jackman was a pretty good ben i suppose, but sofia loren did the creepiest version of "i'm still here" that i've ever seen.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
"bexar county" (live take -- guitar and vox only)
before my little beer opening incident i was promising a new track. well, here's the raw version, just guitar and vocals, both recorded at the same time, all one take.
i wanted to record a "live" version of me playing this song, or as live as i could get, so this is what i did. i also had cassie take some pictures of me doing it - i'll post those when she's done editing them. but, this is pretty live; i didn't do any overdubs (though i did cross-layer my "whoa" shouts in the bridge but only by using existing material from this take, just to make sure i was extra lars von trier about the live-ness).
i really like the sound effect that was created by my vocal mic picking up my guitar strings being played - it created an electric/acoustic sound that i'm going to experiment with more. whenever my vocal gets louder, though, the "acoustic" sound gets drowned out though, so i want to record the guitar and vocal tracks separately at some point for the full band arrangement of this song.
i guess this is the beauty of having your own home recording studio - you have unlimited hours to experiment with the sounds you're able to record.
i know i won't leave long way off alone, but i have a feeling that this electric/acoustic sound is going to show up in long way off as well. it's what i keep trying to achieve with the electric sound with the constant new versions i've been doing.
[[[[CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE LIVE TAKE OF "BEXAR COUNTY" (GUITAR AND VOX ONLY)]]]]
i wanted to record a "live" version of me playing this song, or as live as i could get, so this is what i did. i also had cassie take some pictures of me doing it - i'll post those when she's done editing them. but, this is pretty live; i didn't do any overdubs (though i did cross-layer my "whoa" shouts in the bridge but only by using existing material from this take, just to make sure i was extra lars von trier about the live-ness).
i really like the sound effect that was created by my vocal mic picking up my guitar strings being played - it created an electric/acoustic sound that i'm going to experiment with more. whenever my vocal gets louder, though, the "acoustic" sound gets drowned out though, so i want to record the guitar and vocal tracks separately at some point for the full band arrangement of this song.
i guess this is the beauty of having your own home recording studio - you have unlimited hours to experiment with the sounds you're able to record.
i know i won't leave long way off alone, but i have a feeling that this electric/acoustic sound is going to show up in long way off as well. it's what i keep trying to achieve with the electric sound with the constant new versions i've been doing.
[[[[CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE LIVE TAKE OF "BEXAR COUNTY" (GUITAR AND VOX ONLY)]]]]
Friday, February 20, 2009
all the music is written
i've finished writing all the music for "Broken Homes in Bexar County".
the lyrics are about 2/3 finished, with 6 songs fully complete (out of 10 originals, not including the one cover song i'm doing). i have partial lyrics or sketches for all the other songs, except for the final track on the album, which i'm going to save for last so that i can make sure it serves as an appropriate thematic end to the rest of the album.
i have titles for all the tracks except the last one, though. it's going to be 11 tracks - 10 originals plus "patience".
the lyrics are about 2/3 finished, with 6 songs fully complete (out of 10 originals, not including the one cover song i'm doing). i have partial lyrics or sketches for all the other songs, except for the final track on the album, which i'm going to save for last so that i can make sure it serves as an appropriate thematic end to the rest of the album.
i have titles for all the tracks except the last one, though. it's going to be 11 tracks - 10 originals plus "patience".
Thursday, February 19, 2009
blueyed son on "the deli" open blog
i blogged "cocaine cocaine" on the deli's open blog.
if you're coming from there, welcome! thanks for clicking through.
download more mp3s here.
be friends with me on myspace here.
add my blog to your RSS feed here.
if you're coming from there, welcome! thanks for clicking through.
download more mp3s here.
be friends with me on myspace here.
add my blog to your RSS feed here.
ok, that didn't work
dear "long way off":
i promise not to fuck with you anymore. i am leaving you alone after trying to change you last night. you don't want to be changed. i am ok with that.
yours v. truly,
joe d
i promise not to fuck with you anymore. i am leaving you alone after trying to change you last night. you don't want to be changed. i am ok with that.
yours v. truly,
joe d
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
switching from writer to producer
to add a little more to my post below: one of the most difficult things to do when trying to play this DIY game is to take off your creative writer hat and put on your creative producer hat.
the creative writer in me adores every syllable that comes out of my weird brain. my creative writer side hears each phrase, each melody and harmony, as an expression of some thundering river of emotion, loaded with truth and potency. the creative writer hears nothing but how incredible the song could be, and works hard to fulfill that potential.
but at some point, after you have a draft of a finished product, it's time to stop listening to the potential of the song, and listen to the song itself as others might hear it. in my mind, there is nothing more difficult.
anyone who knows me can tell you that i hate, hate, hate, HATE to hear criticism. i've never been good at it, and i know it's one of my faults. so i've developed a habit of being as aggressively critical as i can of my own work once it's done, trying to listen with the most jaundiced, unwelcoming ear possible; that way, i can anticipate criticism from others, and work beforehand to try and fix any problems or weak spots that might stick out to other people. my fiancee cassie knows this routine well: i listen to something over and over, trying to forget how it sounded when it was a work in progress and trying to view it as a whole composition. then, i turn to her and say, are you sure this doesn't sound too x, y or z? she usually looks at me like i'm nuts, since these self-critical listening sessions most often chase ghost problems that don't exist, but every once in a while i hear something that's real.
thinking like a creative producer means being willing to kill my favorite children, if that's the price i have to pay to make a song better. it means keeping perspective and realizing which songwriting goals are important and which are not. it means hearing my own creative expression in a dispassionate way and figuring out which moments are successful and which are getting in my way. it's my least favorite part, because it flirts right on the edge of self-doubt, which can be the beginning of a crippling death spiral for a writer in the middle of writing something. but, i know that if i want this album to be great -- not just good, but great, like anyone who pops it in and listens can't fail to hear that it's a significant piece of writing executed with a clear, consistent vision and impeccable craftsmanship -- i have to be as self-critical as possible, and not settle for songs or lyrics or melodies that are "pretty good". there are too many great, great artists out there doing the same thing i am, trying to punch through in the same way i'm trying to do. if i want this to be a breakthrough album, i have to earn it. otherwise the gap between ambition and execution will be apparent to every listener.
part of the reason i write this blog is to sort of rev myself up to do the more difficult things, like rewriting a song i already like. the more i type these things out, for all the world to see, the more i commit to doing them. so now i'm all in with this rewrite, and i know it has to be better than the original, but that kind of pressure is usually great for me; it always has been in the past.
so, look for a new song in the future, probably called "wait", that will be a rewritten (and improved) long way off.
the creative writer in me adores every syllable that comes out of my weird brain. my creative writer side hears each phrase, each melody and harmony, as an expression of some thundering river of emotion, loaded with truth and potency. the creative writer hears nothing but how incredible the song could be, and works hard to fulfill that potential.
but at some point, after you have a draft of a finished product, it's time to stop listening to the potential of the song, and listen to the song itself as others might hear it. in my mind, there is nothing more difficult.
anyone who knows me can tell you that i hate, hate, hate, HATE to hear criticism. i've never been good at it, and i know it's one of my faults. so i've developed a habit of being as aggressively critical as i can of my own work once it's done, trying to listen with the most jaundiced, unwelcoming ear possible; that way, i can anticipate criticism from others, and work beforehand to try and fix any problems or weak spots that might stick out to other people. my fiancee cassie knows this routine well: i listen to something over and over, trying to forget how it sounded when it was a work in progress and trying to view it as a whole composition. then, i turn to her and say, are you sure this doesn't sound too x, y or z? she usually looks at me like i'm nuts, since these self-critical listening sessions most often chase ghost problems that don't exist, but every once in a while i hear something that's real.
thinking like a creative producer means being willing to kill my favorite children, if that's the price i have to pay to make a song better. it means keeping perspective and realizing which songwriting goals are important and which are not. it means hearing my own creative expression in a dispassionate way and figuring out which moments are successful and which are getting in my way. it's my least favorite part, because it flirts right on the edge of self-doubt, which can be the beginning of a crippling death spiral for a writer in the middle of writing something. but, i know that if i want this album to be great -- not just good, but great, like anyone who pops it in and listens can't fail to hear that it's a significant piece of writing executed with a clear, consistent vision and impeccable craftsmanship -- i have to be as self-critical as possible, and not settle for songs or lyrics or melodies that are "pretty good". there are too many great, great artists out there doing the same thing i am, trying to punch through in the same way i'm trying to do. if i want this to be a breakthrough album, i have to earn it. otherwise the gap between ambition and execution will be apparent to every listener.
part of the reason i write this blog is to sort of rev myself up to do the more difficult things, like rewriting a song i already like. the more i type these things out, for all the world to see, the more i commit to doing them. so now i'm all in with this rewrite, and i know it has to be better than the original, but that kind of pressure is usually great for me; it always has been in the past.
so, look for a new song in the future, probably called "wait", that will be a rewritten (and improved) long way off.
rewriting "long way off"
the more i listen to it, the more i think the lyric and the melody for "long way off" could be stronger. now that the arrangement is evolving, the lyric and the melody have to go with it, and they're still stuck in an old idea of what the song is. i love how the arrangement is shaping up, but it's so damn big that if the lyric and melody don't match it, the song falls apart.
more problematically, the chorus is especially springsteen-esque. now, i don't mind displaying my influences, but i'm not trying to do parody or pastiche or whatever. i can't write a great bruce springsteen song; only one person can do that. i can write a great joe drymala song, though, and i haven't done it yet.
the strongest part of the song -- the part i'm most likely to retain most or all of -- is the pre-chorus ("i know it hasn't been easy/ you drove all this way just to see me" and "had dreams but they all ran from me/ just look at how the years have done me"). i wait for that part of the song every time, but then the chorus is disappointing in my mind.
the chorus sounds like backup vocals to me. the hook isn't "hook"-y and the lyrics don't grab me. i have in my mind a situation where i keep those vocals, though -- bringing them in for the second half of the second chorus, where they would fit beautifully -- as backup vocals to the main melody that i'm working out right now.
the new song is probably not even going to be called "long way off" -- i'm playing with a new hook. i think the song is going to be called "wait". the theme is going to be pretty much the same, but i'm going to try and dig deeper with the lyrics, and try to make both the lyrics and the melody push the song forward in a way that i feel they don't, yet.
more problematically, the chorus is especially springsteen-esque. now, i don't mind displaying my influences, but i'm not trying to do parody or pastiche or whatever. i can't write a great bruce springsteen song; only one person can do that. i can write a great joe drymala song, though, and i haven't done it yet.
the strongest part of the song -- the part i'm most likely to retain most or all of -- is the pre-chorus ("i know it hasn't been easy/ you drove all this way just to see me" and "had dreams but they all ran from me/ just look at how the years have done me"). i wait for that part of the song every time, but then the chorus is disappointing in my mind.
the chorus sounds like backup vocals to me. the hook isn't "hook"-y and the lyrics don't grab me. i have in my mind a situation where i keep those vocals, though -- bringing them in for the second half of the second chorus, where they would fit beautifully -- as backup vocals to the main melody that i'm working out right now.
the new song is probably not even going to be called "long way off" -- i'm playing with a new hook. i think the song is going to be called "wait". the theme is going to be pretty much the same, but i'm going to try and dig deeper with the lyrics, and try to make both the lyrics and the melody push the song forward in a way that i feel they don't, yet.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
"patience"
i wasn't going to do any covers for my debut LP but i was playing this on guitar last night (no bar chords = playable even with sliced thumb) and goddamn is it a good song. the lyric is so tender and restrained. i decided that i'm gonna cover it and probably put it as the 2nd to last track (everyone's official home for the one cover track they do on their album). it also fits really, really nicely with the album arc that i've been envisioning.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
fucking hell
i sliced my thumb open last night when a beer bottle broke while i was opening it. maybe i've just become freakishly strong, like nadine from twin peaks, but it was probably because i was using a paint can opener to open a bottle of beer.
so i can't play my guitar right now. i was planning on recording my new song and posting a guitar/vox version of it this weekend but that's out. in the meantime i can still twiddle around with knobs like i did last night.
my fiancee got me these from the drugstore and i highly recommend them if you have a decent cut but don't want to go get stitches. it's basically a wax pad (i wrapped it around my thumb) that forms a medicated sealant around your cut and makes the healing process happen way faster. it's like i have a skin around my thumb. so i'm hoping these pads will do their magic and heal my shit in the next couple of days so i can record this song already; i'm chomping at the bit to do it.
so i can't play my guitar right now. i was planning on recording my new song and posting a guitar/vox version of it this weekend but that's out. in the meantime i can still twiddle around with knobs like i did last night.
my fiancee got me these from the drugstore and i highly recommend them if you have a decent cut but don't want to go get stitches. it's basically a wax pad (i wrapped it around my thumb) that forms a medicated sealant around your cut and makes the healing process happen way faster. it's like i have a skin around my thumb. so i'm hoping these pads will do their magic and heal my shit in the next couple of days so i can record this song already; i'm chomping at the bit to do it.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
also in the meantime (new mix of "Long Way Off")
i keep getting closer to my ideal on "long way off" where the guitar keeps drifting toward an 80s metallica sort of sound by the time the chorus kicks in. i ugess that makes sense since 80s heavy metal was the first guitar sound i tried to emulate. it's a little more distant than someone like metallica though.
i was also listening to U2 live at red rocks -- an album i listened to hundreds of time as a teenager but haven't picked up much since. i realized that the drum sounds in long way off are completely inspired by larry mullen's drums on that recording.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE NEW MIX OF "LONG WAY OFF"
i was also listening to U2 live at red rocks -- an album i listened to hundreds of time as a teenager but haven't picked up much since. i realized that the drum sounds in long way off are completely inspired by larry mullen's drums on that recording.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE NEW MIX OF "LONG WAY OFF"
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
new song coming...
...i'm writing a new song that's going to be a real houseburner. i'm going to record it this week or this weekend at the latest.
HOLY JESUS
[UPDATE 2/14/09 -- even better mix of Long Way Off here]
i just figured out something crucial about using distortion. holy fucking shit.
those other songs i posted under these same titles were a fucking joke, and you can hear why when you download these.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMPROVED "COCAINE COCAINE
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMPROVED "LONG WAY OFF"
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMPROVED "HOLD ON TO MY HAND"
i just figured out something crucial about using distortion. holy fucking shit.
those other songs i posted under these same titles were a fucking joke, and you can hear why when you download these.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMPROVED "COCAINE COCAINE
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMPROVED "LONG WAY OFF"
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMPROVED "HOLD ON TO MY HAND"
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Spursblogging
Yglesias:
yep.
Yes, they’re "only" 34-14, but Tony Parker’s missed ten games and Manu Ginobili’s missed thirteen. With them back in the lineup, San Antonio’s been storming forward. And Manu’s only been playing 27 minutes per game, which he can surely step up in the playoffs. Then of course there’s Tim Duncan who’s been totally brilliant. They still look like underdogs, I suppose, but the Spurs always seem to get forgotten just before they start winning again and then everyone forgets how they managed to forget about them in the first place.
yep.
"fuzzed out Springsteen"
i just put that descriptor of my music on my myspace page. i think long way off and hold on to my hand are getting closer to that garage anthem ideal. i want to put a little more mic distortion on cocaine cocaine but it probably won't change all that much.
new "Long Way Off" (Unmastered)
i lied -- i couldn't stop messing with it. i re-recorded the guitar and put a whole lot more distortion on everything, including the vocal. everything is pretty clear sounding though, fuzz notwithstanding. this is much closer to what i always envisioned the song should be. the guitar needed to be more in front and the sound of the vocal needed to be more raw and exciting. to be honest, that original recording of long way off that i did with the cheaper mic made me want to hear more mic distortion on my voice. i think it also reminds me of being 14 years old and hearing my voice through a practice amp for the first time, distorted and loud and awesome.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE NEW "LONG WAY OFF" (UNMASTERED)
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE NEW "LONG WAY OFF" (UNMASTERED)
Monday, February 9, 2009
my "sound"
i'm really happy with the way "hold on to my hand" turned out sound-wise. this is the third song i've recorded, so it makes sense that i would start to zero in on what "sound" i want the album to have right around now.
this is pretty normal for my writing process -- i like to think that i can envision large projects in their totality before i start, but it never works out that way. instead, it usually takes me a fair bit of writing and listening and tweaking and absorbing before the overall tone of something starts to crystallize.
my good friend and sometime sound engineer Mike Nirenberg was telling me the other day not to do any final mixes early on; he said it's very common to mix something in january that sounds nothing like what you mixed last august or whatever. that makes sense to me; i already hear huge differences in my sonic goals between long way off and hold on to my hand.
i'm probably going to revisit long way off; i've tinkered with the mix for hours and hours though in the past two weeks and i'm sort of sick of that song right now. so i'm just going to put it on the back burner for a bit while i work on other things.
i've also been thinking about production. it's really difficult to keep perspective on how something sounds when it's your own material and you're also not entirely sure what the final, final sonic end point is going to be. i've been thinking about eventually working with a co-producer who has an ear for the kinds of sounds i'm trying to experiment with. i have approximately zero dollars to do this, though, so i might just solicit the help of friends whose taste i trust, unless i can find someone to team up with who's willing to work for a percentage rather than a fee.
this is pretty normal for my writing process -- i like to think that i can envision large projects in their totality before i start, but it never works out that way. instead, it usually takes me a fair bit of writing and listening and tweaking and absorbing before the overall tone of something starts to crystallize.
my good friend and sometime sound engineer Mike Nirenberg was telling me the other day not to do any final mixes early on; he said it's very common to mix something in january that sounds nothing like what you mixed last august or whatever. that makes sense to me; i already hear huge differences in my sonic goals between long way off and hold on to my hand.
i'm probably going to revisit long way off; i've tinkered with the mix for hours and hours though in the past two weeks and i'm sort of sick of that song right now. so i'm just going to put it on the back burner for a bit while i work on other things.
i've also been thinking about production. it's really difficult to keep perspective on how something sounds when it's your own material and you're also not entirely sure what the final, final sonic end point is going to be. i've been thinking about eventually working with a co-producer who has an ear for the kinds of sounds i'm trying to experiment with. i have approximately zero dollars to do this, though, so i might just solicit the help of friends whose taste i trust, unless i can find someone to team up with who's willing to work for a percentage rather than a fee.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
"Hold On To My Hand" (Unmastered)
[UPDATE 2/11/09: this is the new and improved mix with a little more noise and a lot more power.
[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMPROVED "HOLD ON TO MY HAND" ]]]]
***********************************
here's the full version of Hold On To My Hand, probably track 3 of broken homes in bexar county.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "HOLD ON TO MY HAND"
[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMPROVED "HOLD ON TO MY HAND" ]]]]
***********************************
here's the full version of Hold On To My Hand, probably track 3 of broken homes in bexar county.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "HOLD ON TO MY HAND"
Saturday, February 7, 2009
2-track of "Hold On To My Hand"
i just wrote this song yesterday and recorded a 2-track version of it today with guitar and vocal only. i'm going to probably add much more to it but this is the skeleton.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "HOLD ON TO MY HAND" (2-TRACK)"
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "HOLD ON TO MY HAND" (2-TRACK)"
Thursday, February 5, 2009
"BROKEN HOMES IN BEXAR COUNTY"
i think i'm going to add to my original title idea of "BEXAR COUNTY" (the word "Bexar" is pronounced "Bear" -- the X is silent for some reason).
the new working title for the Blueyed Son debut is BROKEN HOMES IN BEXAR COUNTY.
the new working title for the Blueyed Son debut is BROKEN HOMES IN BEXAR COUNTY.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
HIPSTER RUNOFF responds
this village voice interview with Carles, the anonymous guy who writes HIPSTER RUNOFF, is pretty fascinating. carles responds to the shit he apparently stirred up with the Animal Collective post, and outs himself as an aspiring musician who is going to put out an EP soon. guns are trained on you, dude.
ryan j davis blogs as well
and he blogged me. you should check out his blog if you haven't already -- he could tell you ALL KINDS of shit about me.
"BEXAR COUNTY"
i've decided i'm going to call the first Blueyed Son album BEXAR COUNTY, which is the county i grew up in. it encompasses san antonio and some of the the surrounding hill country.
Long Way Off (Unmastered, w/ new mic)
here's the second track, Long Way Off. the new mic was really crucial for this one. i also improved the mix and redid the guitar.
[UPDATE 10:47 PM: I've been listening to it and just did a new mix of it that's much less harsh sounding. my monitors have sucky low end so i have to try it out in a few different locations to really see if a mix is working. so i deleted the old link and added a new one to the new mix.]
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD LONG WAY OFF
[UPDATE 10:47 PM: I've been listening to it and just did a new mix of it that's much less harsh sounding. my monitors have sucky low end so i have to try it out in a few different locations to really see if a mix is working. so i deleted the old link and added a new one to the new mix.]
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD LONG WAY OFF
Cocaine Cocaine (Unmastered, w/ new mic)
i just re-recorded the vocals for cocaine cocaine and long way off with my new mic yesterday; here is cocaine cocaine. i think i'm going to make this the first track on the album.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD COCAINE COCAINE
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD COCAINE COCAINE
Monday, February 2, 2009
one more thought on african and irish music
i wrote here about my belief that practically all "american" sounding music can be traced to either irish immigrant music or african slave music.
it occurs to me that there is one genre that is set up as a hybrid of the descendants of these two musical traditions, one that blends african american blues sounds and rhythms with irish-inspired folk and country music chords and melodies. this genre is at its best, i think, when it achieves a balance between these two dominant musical strains of americana.
(i'm talking of course about rock and roll.)
it occurs to me that there is one genre that is set up as a hybrid of the descendants of these two musical traditions, one that blends african american blues sounds and rhythms with irish-inspired folk and country music chords and melodies. this genre is at its best, i think, when it achieves a balance between these two dominant musical strains of americana.
(i'm talking of course about rock and roll.)
my weird journey back into the arms of rock and roll
i was 8 when my parents divorced; my father ended up remarried to a friend of the family. she was a guitarist and a singer who led song worship in Catholic Mass, and her two sons ian and chris were something like 7 and 10 years older than i, which put them in late high school and early college respectively. at age 10, i was convinced that they were just about the coolest guys i could hope to meet. they were aspiring musicians, and they had a massive 70s and 80s rock collection. all cassettes of course -- i remember the homemade cassette holder that chris told me had been salvaged from a neighbor's garbage. the house was small and the neighborhood was rough but i loved going to my dad's house every other weekend for the music.
i remember chris and ian inviting me into chris's room to hear "something scary" -- it was Motley Crue's "Shout At The Devil". "this song will give you nightmares," chris promised. this was back in the days when cassette dubbing was what it was all about. soon i dubbed all the great zeppelin tapes, the great van halen tapes, the great pink floyd tapes, the great ozzy tapes ("I Don't Know" from Blizzard of Ozz was one of the first songs i figured out on guitar, and the "Crazy Train" lick is still one of the greatest guitar licks of all time), and tons more that i can't recall right now. they also had a drum kit in the garage and a few guitars laying around at all times. they were always watching MTV and turning the tv set way too loud. i remember ian pounding out the beat to "Bullet the Blue Sky" on the drums one afternoon. fucking magical. i remember copies of Rolling Stone laying around everywhere.
around this time, my mother remarried, and we moved into my new stepfather's house. he had a son, aaron, close to my age -- a little older, but close enough -- and an older post-college son who was pretty much cut from the same cloth as chris and ian; he was a rad, rad guitar player with a Gibson Explorer (James Hetfield's guitar, y'all!). aaron and i became obsessive rock musicians.
my first instrument, besides piano, was a drum kit. my mother and stepfather bought me a pretty nice Pearl 5-piece and regretted it immediately. aaron was starting to noodle around with an electric guitar, and our first successful jam session featured him playing one riff over and over and over AND OVER, and me keeping terrible time and mutilating the sides of my drumsticks by pounding the cymbals on the sides rather than the tops.
drums, though, felt limited to me; my brain kept coming up with notes and chords and melodies, and i soon switched to guitar as well and began writing rock songs. aaron and i probably wrote hundreds of fragments of songs and dozens of actual songs. we learned hundreds of songs. we bought Guitar World every month and read the tablature to our favorite hits. Eddie Van Halen was our god. we began to get more into prog rock -- i swear to god, there was a time in my life when i considered Queensryche to be the best band ever recorded. aaron hated Guns 'N Roses -- he thought they were rough and anti-intellectual or something -- so i listened to them privately but obsessively. i was also becoming a pretty good singer; my mom had me audition for musicals in community theater productions since i was a kid, and aaron and i soon formed a band with myself as the frontman and him as the lead guitarist. i would practice my chops by belting out every track from The Joshua Tree through my cheap mic and practice amp. (i would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Ms. Guthrie and to the Hillers, our neighbors on either side.)
i had already been bathed in the music of the 60s by this time, but modern rock and roll seemed exciting, and it also seemed very, very serious (the deep conversations aaron and i had about Operation:Mindcrime are too hilarious to recount here, so i'll spare you). so, aaron and i formed a band, and eventually, by the time high school rolled around, we picked up a few more members, including my friend paul on bass. i swear to god, the first band name we came up with was "Whisper". not even kidding. aaron eventually had a better band name idea -- "Failing Nations" -- and we stuck with that for a while. we played around San Antonio in some cheap, terrible dives; someplace called "Showcase" and someplace near my house that i can't remember the name of. we were pretty young for that scene, but we thought we were the greatest band ever.
at some point, aaron and i outgrew the other members of Failing Nations and we wanted to go off on our own, and we formed a new two-person band. our parents had moved us into our own little house off Harry Wurzbach which my stepfather owned as a rental property. we got a terrific funk bass player named mike and became a total Dream Theater-esque math metal band to the absolute extreme. we called ourselves Requiem Eternal. we had huge, 10-minute compositions. aaron had purchased a pretty good Korg keyboard by this time and i played it while i sang. we got a drummer with a huge, 20-piece kit and we practiced and practiced. we also hooked up with Levann.
i don't know where Levann came from, but we'd seen him play for other local bands. he was a huge, 6'5" muscular African American rock guitar player who convinced us that he was a rock guitar god known all the world over for his monster shredding ability (which was totally real -- he could shred at least). he took an interest in aaron and began to "groom" us to tour with his band in Japan. we were suspicious about the fact that he always needed us to pick him up in spite of his boasts about his dozen sports cars in some other city, but his rhetoric and his playing ability made us look the other way on that stuff. Levann started to come to all our rehearsals, motivating us, threatening us, complimenting us, even challenging poor Mike to a fist fight at one point. we got pretty good...but we never played anywhere. Levann kept telling us we weren't ready. and at this point we were pretty afraid of him. we were still in high school.
eventually we realized that Levann was just a talented local guy with a big mouth and too much time on his hands. it wasn't clear what he got out of rehearsing with us day after day and pretending that we were headed for Japanese superstardom; maybe he just wanted to feel important. it took us a while to face facts but when we did, aaron and i were pretty much devastated. we felt like we'd wasted years of our lives, which doesn't make a lot of sense in retrospect but things seem bigger when you're 17. fuck rock music, i thought.
around this time, i'd begun to participate in more community theater, and i got interested in the musical storytelling in some of Sondheim's work. i was in a pretty cool local production of Assassins that got attacked from all sides (San Antonio is pretty conservative -- a mostly military town, really). i began to get disenchanted with rock music. it seemed to be a dead end. the new rock music that was coming out -- the big Seattle explosion of the early 90s -- seemed really cool, but began to recycle itself by the time i started to retreat from rock and roll. i wanted serious music. i began to listen to only classical music, along with the more adventurous musicals of sondheim and leonard bernstein. 88.3 was the only station on in my car. rock and roll seemed like lifestyle music; the chords and the rhythms and the lyrics seemed too simple; my math-oriented brain hungered for more complex patterns.
when i was 18, i submitted a new musical i'd written to a young playwright's festival in los angeles. to my surprise, they picked it and ran with it, taking it beyond the initial festival and giving it a full mainstage production. it felt great.
i ended up at berklee shortly thereafter (aaron was attending, and it seemed cool), but the pace of the classes was pretty slow. i was kind of a bad fit for the school -- it's really set up to accommodate instrumentalists, jazz musicians, studio musicians, professional engineers, those types of people. of course, i was trying to study classical composition. i tried to get money to produce another musical i'd written at the school, and got pretty pissed off and self righteous when the administration wouldn't give it to me, since i thought that if i were a jazz sax player organizing a music showcase i would have gotten help with no questions asked. i left berklee for new york city. i was 20.
flash forward a few years; i'd been exploring fusions between classical music and theater music, getting more and more into John Adams and minimalism in general, and i tried to incorporate his style into a theatrical setting (unsuccessfully, unfortunately) with the next two musicals that i wrote. all dead ends. maybe i hadn't found my calling after all. i grew disenchanted.
in february of 2003, i moved to vermont for a year to see what the world of politics was all about. all i knew was, i wanted to write speeches for a presidential candidate. howard dean caught my attention. i started as a volunteer and ended up as his primary speechwriter (which sounds more exciting than it was; howard dean hated giving prepared speeches, and most of my work was entirely theoretical). it ended up being probably the most significant experience of my life.
i met ryan j. davis on the dean campaign. he was a theater kid from new york as well, and we drove from burlington, vermont to iowa together in a snowstorm. we listened to hedwig and jesus christ superstar and outkast and almost killed ourselves driving through snow. we resolved to hook up again in new york after the campaign.
after the iowa caucus disaster, and the infamous scream, we came back to the city. ryan worked with me on one of my John Adams-esque musicals for a bit, but soon he had a new idea: he wanted to do a bleak satire of pop music and propaganda about a white supremacist teen pop band, based on the real-life preteen group Prussian Blue, sort of recalling the prince/sondheim experiments of the 70s. i immediately was interested. i came up with the title White Noise, and i began to write songs like i hadn't written since i was a teenager: pop songs, rock songs, country songs, three minutes and thirty-three seconds. i was good at it and i felt inspired again.
i'd also recently purchased an MBox, which is an inexpensive version of the professional music studio software Pro Tools. there is no piece of technology aside from the piano that has had such a profound influence on my understanding of music. Pro Tools laid out music like i'd always pictured it -- as a series of shapes and structures that changed over time. i had just broken up with my girlfriend at the time, and i began to experiment with Pro Tools every day.
White Noise ended up being a pretty big hit in the NY Musical Theater Festival, and even got optioned for a Broadway run, though i doubt it will ever end up there for real (the production is still pending, as of this writing). i kept exploring pop music. i heard Late Registration, and it blew my mind. hip hop had never sounded so musical, and pop music had never sounded so full of possibility. i dove into hip hop.
i was abusing my computer on a daily basis with Pro Tools sessions far too large for the poor machine to handle. i got into the Neptunes, Timbaland, Just Blaze, Madlib, and any other hip hop producer that piqued my curiosity. what was thrilling to me about hip hop was the abstraction of the elements of pop music. a snare could be an actual snare drum, but it could also be a popping sound. it could also be a blip. it could also be a burst of white noise. it could be a noise made with one's own mouth. it could be a combination of some or all of these. this blew my mind. the most exciting producers were abstracting the instruments themselves, creating new sounds that suggested old ones but were informed by the modern world. i discovered The Grey Album about 50 years after everyone else. i shocked even myself when i started to write and record r&b and hip hop, since my early queensryche-loving days were so far removed from that vibe, but i figured what the hell and just got to work playing around with new sounds. i began to record the tracks for a new musical, Street Lights, which tells a sort of modern day civil rights story about an inner city high school and the students who are trying to save their music program. i'd always hated the sound of theater music, so it was my intent to make every track sound like it could credibly be played on Hot 97. the first full track i ever produced, "Not Enough," was a Timbaland-inspired pop song that i still am proud of to this day. i felt like i was becoming an honest-to-goodness producer, beginning to form a clear picture of all the elements in a pop song. but i knew nothing about the "indie rock" scene.
i have to confess that scenes have always intimidated me. i've never been good at playing a character, which is part of why i shifted more into writing and composing rather than performing. to become established within "indie rock," whatever that means, seemed an insurmountable task and besides, my rock and roll days were over. but a friend directed me to Pitchfork, which i'd never heard of. my now-fiancee Cassie has pretty incredible taste in music, and she kept feeding me new sounds that were blowing my mind. Franz Ferdinand! White Stripes playing Jolene! Beta Band! TV On The Radio! i got wind of a little band called Arcade Fire. i devoured Pitchfork's free mp3s. here was an entire ecosystem of music, musicians and critical appreciation that i was completely unaware of. it had its own historical touchstones and musical lineage. the music was new, it felt vital, but it wasn't synthetic; it had a seriousness of purpose that i hadn't recognized in rock and roll before. i bought a Les Paul.
at this point i was still producing weird pop-ish tracks with the intent of selling them, or producing a pop artist, or i don't know what. in reality, i was just experimenting, finding my voice, not really caring what happened to the tracks after they were done. i began to produce nearly a full song a day. at some point, i recorded something different. i felt like it should have a rougher, dirtier sound. i bought Speakerphone, which is a completely excellent plug in that i recommend to all producers and bands, especially DIY types like me. i put my piano sound through a guitar amp sound. my world opened up. i realized i was writing a rock song. well, what the hell, it's not like i'd never done that before. i picked up that guitar i'd bought, but had barely played so far. i kept writing. i realized i wanted to not only write these songs, but perform them. i hadn't sung, or played an electric guitar, since i was 18. i thought those days were over, but i guess i was wrong.
and now here we are in the present. rock and roll doesn't seem dead to me anymore, the electric guitar doesn't seem obsolete to me anymore. rock feels as vital, as alive, as the first day i jammed with aaron on my drum kit. (aaron and i no longer speak for reasons that i won't go into here, but he was my first musical collaborator, and whatever else happened between our families, i can't deny his influence on my life.) storytelling in rock music, which once seemed to me to be a relic of the past, started fueling the fire for a new collection of songs that i began writing and recording on my Mbox.
this is going to sound sentimental i guess, but here goes: i believe in rock music. at its best, it pulls from our shared musical and cultural heritage and creates something that tells us who we are, who we were, what we're trying to become, and encourages us to sing along. i used to be embarrassed and self-conscious about the way my favorite rock songs make me feel, but those days are over i think. now i just want to create the kind of music that i love to listen to. that sounds pretty simple i guess, but it's the hardest damn thing to get right. anyway, that's what i'm going for with Blueyed Son. it's weird how i spent a good fifteen years learning how to write songs from other people's perspectives only to find that the most difficult perspective to write from was my own, but that's how these things go i guess. so i'm back where i started, making rock music and trying to capture that lightning in a bottle just like i was when i was 14 years old.
i remember chris and ian inviting me into chris's room to hear "something scary" -- it was Motley Crue's "Shout At The Devil". "this song will give you nightmares," chris promised. this was back in the days when cassette dubbing was what it was all about. soon i dubbed all the great zeppelin tapes, the great van halen tapes, the great pink floyd tapes, the great ozzy tapes ("I Don't Know" from Blizzard of Ozz was one of the first songs i figured out on guitar, and the "Crazy Train" lick is still one of the greatest guitar licks of all time), and tons more that i can't recall right now. they also had a drum kit in the garage and a few guitars laying around at all times. they were always watching MTV and turning the tv set way too loud. i remember ian pounding out the beat to "Bullet the Blue Sky" on the drums one afternoon. fucking magical. i remember copies of Rolling Stone laying around everywhere.
around this time, my mother remarried, and we moved into my new stepfather's house. he had a son, aaron, close to my age -- a little older, but close enough -- and an older post-college son who was pretty much cut from the same cloth as chris and ian; he was a rad, rad guitar player with a Gibson Explorer (James Hetfield's guitar, y'all!). aaron and i became obsessive rock musicians.
my first instrument, besides piano, was a drum kit. my mother and stepfather bought me a pretty nice Pearl 5-piece and regretted it immediately. aaron was starting to noodle around with an electric guitar, and our first successful jam session featured him playing one riff over and over and over AND OVER, and me keeping terrible time and mutilating the sides of my drumsticks by pounding the cymbals on the sides rather than the tops.
drums, though, felt limited to me; my brain kept coming up with notes and chords and melodies, and i soon switched to guitar as well and began writing rock songs. aaron and i probably wrote hundreds of fragments of songs and dozens of actual songs. we learned hundreds of songs. we bought Guitar World every month and read the tablature to our favorite hits. Eddie Van Halen was our god. we began to get more into prog rock -- i swear to god, there was a time in my life when i considered Queensryche to be the best band ever recorded. aaron hated Guns 'N Roses -- he thought they were rough and anti-intellectual or something -- so i listened to them privately but obsessively. i was also becoming a pretty good singer; my mom had me audition for musicals in community theater productions since i was a kid, and aaron and i soon formed a band with myself as the frontman and him as the lead guitarist. i would practice my chops by belting out every track from The Joshua Tree through my cheap mic and practice amp. (i would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Ms. Guthrie and to the Hillers, our neighbors on either side.)
i had already been bathed in the music of the 60s by this time, but modern rock and roll seemed exciting, and it also seemed very, very serious (the deep conversations aaron and i had about Operation:Mindcrime are too hilarious to recount here, so i'll spare you). so, aaron and i formed a band, and eventually, by the time high school rolled around, we picked up a few more members, including my friend paul on bass. i swear to god, the first band name we came up with was "Whisper". not even kidding. aaron eventually had a better band name idea -- "Failing Nations" -- and we stuck with that for a while. we played around San Antonio in some cheap, terrible dives; someplace called "Showcase" and someplace near my house that i can't remember the name of. we were pretty young for that scene, but we thought we were the greatest band ever.
at some point, aaron and i outgrew the other members of Failing Nations and we wanted to go off on our own, and we formed a new two-person band. our parents had moved us into our own little house off Harry Wurzbach which my stepfather owned as a rental property. we got a terrific funk bass player named mike and became a total Dream Theater-esque math metal band to the absolute extreme. we called ourselves Requiem Eternal. we had huge, 10-minute compositions. aaron had purchased a pretty good Korg keyboard by this time and i played it while i sang. we got a drummer with a huge, 20-piece kit and we practiced and practiced. we also hooked up with Levann.
i don't know where Levann came from, but we'd seen him play for other local bands. he was a huge, 6'5" muscular African American rock guitar player who convinced us that he was a rock guitar god known all the world over for his monster shredding ability (which was totally real -- he could shred at least). he took an interest in aaron and began to "groom" us to tour with his band in Japan. we were suspicious about the fact that he always needed us to pick him up in spite of his boasts about his dozen sports cars in some other city, but his rhetoric and his playing ability made us look the other way on that stuff. Levann started to come to all our rehearsals, motivating us, threatening us, complimenting us, even challenging poor Mike to a fist fight at one point. we got pretty good...but we never played anywhere. Levann kept telling us we weren't ready. and at this point we were pretty afraid of him. we were still in high school.
eventually we realized that Levann was just a talented local guy with a big mouth and too much time on his hands. it wasn't clear what he got out of rehearsing with us day after day and pretending that we were headed for Japanese superstardom; maybe he just wanted to feel important. it took us a while to face facts but when we did, aaron and i were pretty much devastated. we felt like we'd wasted years of our lives, which doesn't make a lot of sense in retrospect but things seem bigger when you're 17. fuck rock music, i thought.
around this time, i'd begun to participate in more community theater, and i got interested in the musical storytelling in some of Sondheim's work. i was in a pretty cool local production of Assassins that got attacked from all sides (San Antonio is pretty conservative -- a mostly military town, really). i began to get disenchanted with rock music. it seemed to be a dead end. the new rock music that was coming out -- the big Seattle explosion of the early 90s -- seemed really cool, but began to recycle itself by the time i started to retreat from rock and roll. i wanted serious music. i began to listen to only classical music, along with the more adventurous musicals of sondheim and leonard bernstein. 88.3 was the only station on in my car. rock and roll seemed like lifestyle music; the chords and the rhythms and the lyrics seemed too simple; my math-oriented brain hungered for more complex patterns.
when i was 18, i submitted a new musical i'd written to a young playwright's festival in los angeles. to my surprise, they picked it and ran with it, taking it beyond the initial festival and giving it a full mainstage production. it felt great.
i ended up at berklee shortly thereafter (aaron was attending, and it seemed cool), but the pace of the classes was pretty slow. i was kind of a bad fit for the school -- it's really set up to accommodate instrumentalists, jazz musicians, studio musicians, professional engineers, those types of people. of course, i was trying to study classical composition. i tried to get money to produce another musical i'd written at the school, and got pretty pissed off and self righteous when the administration wouldn't give it to me, since i thought that if i were a jazz sax player organizing a music showcase i would have gotten help with no questions asked. i left berklee for new york city. i was 20.
flash forward a few years; i'd been exploring fusions between classical music and theater music, getting more and more into John Adams and minimalism in general, and i tried to incorporate his style into a theatrical setting (unsuccessfully, unfortunately) with the next two musicals that i wrote. all dead ends. maybe i hadn't found my calling after all. i grew disenchanted.
in february of 2003, i moved to vermont for a year to see what the world of politics was all about. all i knew was, i wanted to write speeches for a presidential candidate. howard dean caught my attention. i started as a volunteer and ended up as his primary speechwriter (which sounds more exciting than it was; howard dean hated giving prepared speeches, and most of my work was entirely theoretical). it ended up being probably the most significant experience of my life.
i met ryan j. davis on the dean campaign. he was a theater kid from new york as well, and we drove from burlington, vermont to iowa together in a snowstorm. we listened to hedwig and jesus christ superstar and outkast and almost killed ourselves driving through snow. we resolved to hook up again in new york after the campaign.
after the iowa caucus disaster, and the infamous scream, we came back to the city. ryan worked with me on one of my John Adams-esque musicals for a bit, but soon he had a new idea: he wanted to do a bleak satire of pop music and propaganda about a white supremacist teen pop band, based on the real-life preteen group Prussian Blue, sort of recalling the prince/sondheim experiments of the 70s. i immediately was interested. i came up with the title White Noise, and i began to write songs like i hadn't written since i was a teenager: pop songs, rock songs, country songs, three minutes and thirty-three seconds. i was good at it and i felt inspired again.
i'd also recently purchased an MBox, which is an inexpensive version of the professional music studio software Pro Tools. there is no piece of technology aside from the piano that has had such a profound influence on my understanding of music. Pro Tools laid out music like i'd always pictured it -- as a series of shapes and structures that changed over time. i had just broken up with my girlfriend at the time, and i began to experiment with Pro Tools every day.
White Noise ended up being a pretty big hit in the NY Musical Theater Festival, and even got optioned for a Broadway run, though i doubt it will ever end up there for real (the production is still pending, as of this writing). i kept exploring pop music. i heard Late Registration, and it blew my mind. hip hop had never sounded so musical, and pop music had never sounded so full of possibility. i dove into hip hop.
i was abusing my computer on a daily basis with Pro Tools sessions far too large for the poor machine to handle. i got into the Neptunes, Timbaland, Just Blaze, Madlib, and any other hip hop producer that piqued my curiosity. what was thrilling to me about hip hop was the abstraction of the elements of pop music. a snare could be an actual snare drum, but it could also be a popping sound. it could also be a blip. it could also be a burst of white noise. it could be a noise made with one's own mouth. it could be a combination of some or all of these. this blew my mind. the most exciting producers were abstracting the instruments themselves, creating new sounds that suggested old ones but were informed by the modern world. i discovered The Grey Album about 50 years after everyone else. i shocked even myself when i started to write and record r&b and hip hop, since my early queensryche-loving days were so far removed from that vibe, but i figured what the hell and just got to work playing around with new sounds. i began to record the tracks for a new musical, Street Lights, which tells a sort of modern day civil rights story about an inner city high school and the students who are trying to save their music program. i'd always hated the sound of theater music, so it was my intent to make every track sound like it could credibly be played on Hot 97. the first full track i ever produced, "Not Enough," was a Timbaland-inspired pop song that i still am proud of to this day. i felt like i was becoming an honest-to-goodness producer, beginning to form a clear picture of all the elements in a pop song. but i knew nothing about the "indie rock" scene.
i have to confess that scenes have always intimidated me. i've never been good at playing a character, which is part of why i shifted more into writing and composing rather than performing. to become established within "indie rock," whatever that means, seemed an insurmountable task and besides, my rock and roll days were over. but a friend directed me to Pitchfork, which i'd never heard of. my now-fiancee Cassie has pretty incredible taste in music, and she kept feeding me new sounds that were blowing my mind. Franz Ferdinand! White Stripes playing Jolene! Beta Band! TV On The Radio! i got wind of a little band called Arcade Fire. i devoured Pitchfork's free mp3s. here was an entire ecosystem of music, musicians and critical appreciation that i was completely unaware of. it had its own historical touchstones and musical lineage. the music was new, it felt vital, but it wasn't synthetic; it had a seriousness of purpose that i hadn't recognized in rock and roll before. i bought a Les Paul.
at this point i was still producing weird pop-ish tracks with the intent of selling them, or producing a pop artist, or i don't know what. in reality, i was just experimenting, finding my voice, not really caring what happened to the tracks after they were done. i began to produce nearly a full song a day. at some point, i recorded something different. i felt like it should have a rougher, dirtier sound. i bought Speakerphone, which is a completely excellent plug in that i recommend to all producers and bands, especially DIY types like me. i put my piano sound through a guitar amp sound. my world opened up. i realized i was writing a rock song. well, what the hell, it's not like i'd never done that before. i picked up that guitar i'd bought, but had barely played so far. i kept writing. i realized i wanted to not only write these songs, but perform them. i hadn't sung, or played an electric guitar, since i was 18. i thought those days were over, but i guess i was wrong.
and now here we are in the present. rock and roll doesn't seem dead to me anymore, the electric guitar doesn't seem obsolete to me anymore. rock feels as vital, as alive, as the first day i jammed with aaron on my drum kit. (aaron and i no longer speak for reasons that i won't go into here, but he was my first musical collaborator, and whatever else happened between our families, i can't deny his influence on my life.) storytelling in rock music, which once seemed to me to be a relic of the past, started fueling the fire for a new collection of songs that i began writing and recording on my Mbox.
this is going to sound sentimental i guess, but here goes: i believe in rock music. at its best, it pulls from our shared musical and cultural heritage and creates something that tells us who we are, who we were, what we're trying to become, and encourages us to sing along. i used to be embarrassed and self-conscious about the way my favorite rock songs make me feel, but those days are over i think. now i just want to create the kind of music that i love to listen to. that sounds pretty simple i guess, but it's the hardest damn thing to get right. anyway, that's what i'm going for with Blueyed Son. it's weird how i spent a good fifteen years learning how to write songs from other people's perspectives only to find that the most difficult perspective to write from was my own, but that's how these things go i guess. so i'm back where i started, making rock music and trying to capture that lightning in a bottle just like i was when i was 14 years old.
worth a read
village voice writer and former pitchfork critic Nick Sylvester talks about hipster runoff's mockery of Animal Collective here. i enjoy hipster runoff; it helps deflate the sense of self-importance surrounding the indie music scene and "alt" culture in general. but...Sylvester is right on the money with his takedown of HRO's post and the site's jaundiced worldview.
i admit that Sylvester is not exactly the perfect messenger for a defense of authenticity, but this post shouldn't be overlooked: it's something of a cri de coeur in defense of musicians who work for years and years to capture something other than a major label record deal:
Sylvester then goes after HRO itself:
then, sylvester tears carles apart:
i've probably already excerpted too much; if you've been following all the heat surrounding Merriweather Post Pavilion, you should check out the rest of Sylvester's piece. Animal Collective is exploring a very different sound than i tend to gravitate toward, but the album is undeniably a piece of rich, mature sonic exploration put together by serious artists trying to forge new musical paths without a care for radio accessibility. their work is clearly resonating with listeners; they were goddamn number 13 on the Billboard 200 last week, which is crazy for an album full of compositions that don't fit any conventional definition of the word "song". anyway, it's always thrilling to read passionate musicblogging, and for that reason alone, you should check out the Sylvester article.
i admit that Sylvester is not exactly the perfect messenger for a defense of authenticity, but this post shouldn't be overlooked: it's something of a cri de coeur in defense of musicians who work for years and years to capture something other than a major label record deal:
But I was really inspired by Merriweather Post Pavilion. These guys are only a few years older than I am, and the urgency of striking it big when you’re young is super intense, especially in New York. Yet they were patient. They knew they were onto something, but... They knew they would only get to this point if they worked hard. I echo every fawning praise for this album, which aims to re-imagine popular music, and the way it can sound, and the structures it might take, and the games it might play.
Step into the music, the lyrics, and you realize this album is about three thirty year-olds trying to figure out how not to become grups. They are fundamentally different from the parents, living totally different lives--and yet they love their parents, probably respect the jobs they did on them, want the same for their own. The clash between knowing how screwy life is, being relatively set in your ways, and yet still wanting to remain wide-eyed--open to new possibilities the way you were at age 9, 19, 29—this is what I hear in MPP. A big vulnerable theme, and I admire them not for their answers so much as their bravery to just fucking go for it like this.
Sylvester then goes after HRO itself:
The comedic engine of HRO is this, then: Nobody really likes something on its own terms. Tastes aren't one-way, they're reflexive--or rather, the things we like are reflective, mirror-like, ciphers in themselves. Most people out there aren't interested in the things themselves, or incapable, so much as what it means for them to like these things. Carles doesn't exclude himself from this predicament--he's just the only one telling it like it is. There is a lot of bullshit out there and yet people like it. Most people are (ta-da) hipster runoff.
then, sylvester tears carles apart:
There is nothing more annoying than people liking music for the wrong reasons? Not to pull a Chuck Eddy, but are there wrong reasons for listening to music? If blasting DMX out your Wrangler as you're pulling into some high school girl's driveway makes you feel awesome, makes you feel like a fucking bad-ass, is that wrong? If listening to metal makes you feel tougher, less insecure, is it my job to tell you that you are an idiot? You know when some people say "music is like a drug for me", this is what they're talking about: the simple act of listening to music makes them feel good. Imagine someone saying "You're enjoying heroin for all the wrong reasons." Are there right reasons? Is ‘empirical knowledge as to the effects heroin has on my body’ the right reason? I don't think so! Regardless of the myriad horrible reasons that might lead them to it, people probably do heroin because it makes them feel good.
I have this relationship with music. There is this cold and dizzy feeling that overtakes me sometimes, when a song or a passage of a song happens to gun it to my heart. And I am addicted to this feeling--I seek it out, sludging through days upon days of music, much of it very objectively "good", for those moments capable of the cold and dizzy. There are all sorts of biochemical and culturally normative/dictated reasons for what comprises these particular moments for me--but their deconstruction doesn't take away from the fact that they still happen. Their deconstruction doesn't cheapen them, at least not for me.
So you can understand my frustration with a blog that posits everything as "just" a pose, "just" a biochemical and culturally dictated" reaction. One of us is happy, the other is angry because happiness is just a construct, there is no happiness, there is no spoon, etc. But like I don't know this already! Like I'm the lesser man for seeing what you've torn apart, but putting everything back together again.
i've probably already excerpted too much; if you've been following all the heat surrounding Merriweather Post Pavilion, you should check out the rest of Sylvester's piece. Animal Collective is exploring a very different sound than i tend to gravitate toward, but the album is undeniably a piece of rich, mature sonic exploration put together by serious artists trying to forge new musical paths without a care for radio accessibility. their work is clearly resonating with listeners; they were goddamn number 13 on the Billboard 200 last week, which is crazy for an album full of compositions that don't fit any conventional definition of the word "song". anyway, it's always thrilling to read passionate musicblogging, and for that reason alone, you should check out the Sylvester article.
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