music
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Zadie Smith On Joni Mitchell’s Blue
In her recent essay in the New Yorker, novelist Zadie Smith recounts her listening history with the music of Joni Mitchell–specifically, Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue. Here is the title song from the record: Smith describes encountering Mitchell’s idiosyncratic and alternate tuning jazzy-folk music for the first time while in college and hating it. But years… Continue reading
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On Sounding A Bigger Energy: Mumford And Sons
When I first saw Mumford and Sons on Saturday Night Live recently I wasn’t sure what to make of them–which is my fault not theirs. They seem like a throwback to an acoustic bluegrass-folk-rock sound. No synthesizers, sequencers or drum machines, just acoustic guitar and bass, piano/organ, banjo and dobro, a horn section, sing-song group… Continue reading
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On Voice, Authenticity, And Not Being Fake
In a recent online interview excerpted in The Guardian, musician and Portishead member Geoff Barrow discusses the idea of singing with a “fake” voice. Leading the pack in Barrow’s view is the late Amy Winehouse, a white singer who sang, some people say disparagingly, like a black jazz or soul singer from an earlier era–or… Continue reading
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On Small Things And Big Pleasures: David Guetta’s “Titanium”
I get excited by small things. The other day I bought a mechanical pencil to highlight books with as I read. While holding the pencil that evening and underlining, I was struck by the pleasure this $2.19 purchase had brought. It’s precise, light, and helps do a job, with the added grace of having an… Continue reading
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On Four Tet’s Good Taste
“It’s very rare for me to use instruments or synths or anything like that.” – Kieran Hebden I have long felt that the electronic musician Four Tet (aka Kieran Hebden) has good taste. He makes what critics once labelled “folktronica” music, a term that probably came about in an effort to describe how Hebden deftly… Continue reading
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On Capturing Thoughts In Formation: Notes On Listening
It would be a blog post about listening. *** It would be about the relationship between what we listen to and what we create as musicians. About the tension between wanting to listen to many (new) musics briefly and listening to one (older, familiar) music repeatedly. Is one approach “better” than the other? Or–as it’s… Continue reading
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Content, Form, And Versioning A Song Everybody Knows: Gotye’s “Somebody I Used To Know”
Sometime not overly long ago, Gotye’s song “Somebody I Used To Know” went very viral–becoming a song meme that was (and still is) hard to escape, whose video on YouTube has been viewed an astonishing 259 million times (or by some 518 million ears!). At least two or three of those views were mine, the… Continue reading
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On The Beastie Boys And The Hip Hop Enculturation Of 1980s Suburbia
With the news last week that Beastie Boy member Adam Yauch (aka MCA) had died, I thought about the seismic impact hip hop had when it first burst the bubble of kids living in suburbia all over North America and beyond during the 1980s. As the producer Rick Rubin noted in a recent interview, “The… Continue reading
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On Pop Music Production Geneologies: Ester Dean’s Compositional Process
In his recent New Yorker article “The Song Machine”, John Seabrook explores the songwriting process behind contemporary pop music. Today’s Top Forty hit, says Seabrook, “is almost always machine made: lush sonic landscapes of beats, loops, and synths in which all the sounds have square edges and shiny surfaces, the voices are Auto-tuned for pitch,… Continue reading
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