Dipping my toe into the shallow end of Country

I have been too busy today to think any deep thoughts about music. I finished off the other program I was developing, just a simple mix. I listened to ACRES, Screaming Trees, The Hint, and Shostakovich's String Quartet #8 again (still brutal).

I did do some shallow thinking about music. Both of the people who commissioned the programs (through the auction I posted about) specified "No metal and no country". What is it about country music that makes people twitch so? I am starting to think it is like eating horse meat—we don't do it because we don't do it. "Country" is so diverse that I can't imagine someone who listens with an open mind not finding anything at all to like. I always struggle with labels, but anyone should be able to tell that Brad Paisley and Keith Urban are doing different kinds of stuff. Now my mind is starting to spin off toward deep stuff about tropes and subculture markers and all, so it's time to set it aside to marinate for a while. First I have to think about what "Country" is.

That does remind me to point you all to something good. A friend of mine suggested I get some Keith Urban albums, so I did and I have been enjoying them a lot. If you like rock and the sound of a steel guitar doesn't give you hives, you should listen to some of his songs with an open mind. There is one song on the most recent album that just tore me up because it hit so many notes from my own life. I mean, gut-ripping fall down shattered me. I hope none of you have cause for that strong a reaction. It's brilliant though:



The songwriter, Sarah Buxton, has a version on her MySpace that is okay, but it seems a little sweetened up. I found a much rawer and better live performance on YouTube.

And in unrelated news: my next-door neighbors have moved out and the apartment is still empty, so I can play my accordion whenever I want to! That crosses one thing off the list of excuses, anyway. Summer is hard, because it's not like you can take an accordion to the beach or pool or skating. Or you could, but it would be hard on the accordion because the wax holding the reeds would soften, plus the reeds don't like moisture. And my cat ate my sheet music. Against all good sense (considering the kinds of music I like best), I love to play my squeezebox, though.

And so, off to play some exercises. Kids, see—adults don't just tell you to practice to make you suffer. We do it, too, so we can play better.

Superhero Crisis

I have been developing a commissioned playlist that has been giving me fits. It is a writing soundtrack for someone who is working on a story about a superhero struggling with being a superhero.

A writing soundtrack is different from a TV or film soundtrack. It is designed for the writer to listen to in pieces while working on the corresponding parts of a story. That means the pieces don't have to flow together, but it also means that you can't have the pieces commenting on or reinforcing each other much.

I was determined to track the inner life of the protagonist rather than the external action and I was also determined to not just recycle Big Metal Guitars battles. I settled on using acoustic strings to signal when the protag is in a good emotional state and electric when she is very agitated, with lyrics only on pieces that touch her love life. I also wanted the various strands of the story (love life, relationship with the Heroic Superhero Team, battles, etc.) to have connecting threads.

This became a problem when I realized that had lost access to the ex-partner's classical and jazz collection in the Big Breakup. I listen to classical music online, but I never remember the names of the composers or the pieces. I was searching online, but I wasn't getting anywhere and it was giving me a bit of stress.

But yesterday, Eureka! I ended up working a BBQ grill with a conservatory-trained musician who remembers everything. He pointed me at Shostakovich's String Quartet 8, which is "brutal". Bing! It was a winner and made everything else click right into place.

My last problem was the first piece, to show what the hero was like before she got her powers. What does an ordinary USAn schoolgirl with a happy attitude listen to these days? Beats me. That is way outside my range. I figured it had to be cute guys in their 20s, as is traditional, but other than that ... blank. Then I had another Eureka! That annoying earworm "Hey There Delilah" just fit the spot. Of course, now I have the earworm again, but it's worth it.

I'm going to let it sit a few days to make sure, but I really feel this is it. Of course, the client will probably insist on the Big Metal Guitars battles, but this is the director's cut and you know which one history will get behind.

I so totally rock my awesome super self that my hat hardly fits any more.

DIY Music

This afternoon, I had an unexpected opportunity to hear a conservatory-trained musician messing around on a piano, playing Bach, Chopin, and his own compositions. It made my day. What touched me the most is that he makes his living doing something else entirely. He plays and composes for himself, because he likes to. What a simple reason.

When I watched the Collective Soul concert with the Altanta Youth Symphony Orchestra, I wondered how many of those kids would keep playing their instruments after they aged out of the orchestra, or after they graduated from college. When was the last time someone pulled out an oboe or violin to mess around with at a cookout? Is the guitar the instrument that has eaten all the others? Has home-made music been replaced by professional musicians and iPods?

Far from it. I've been poking around on YouTube lately and keep running into videos of people playing just about anything you can think of that makes noise, sometimes well and sometimes badly, but just for fun. We live in a world that lets us peer into someone's room and share this moment:

(for better or worse, judge for yourself)

This is nice, and I particularly like the encouraging comments on the site:

And this is what I got for "punk autoharp":

It also appears there is a great upsurge of ukulele:

This all encourages me to keep enjoying my recorders and accordion, just for me, just to enjoy the process. (Do not, however, expect to see or hear me on YouTube anytime soon.)

The Future of the Musical is Horrible

You know I love musicals. Not so much the ironic ones that turn to the audience and say "we are doing music to lampoon musicals, aren't we clever", but wholehearted ones. Joss Whedon gets this, which is odd because he is all about irony and in-jokes for the audience and all. So you really all simply must click over to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, complete in three episodes. You will recognize some of the performers. 'Scuse me now. I am going to go watch it again.

Plug of the Week: Free Music

I don't have a lot of money, but I listen to a lot of music. I pull the budget end of the rope toward the music end of the rope, but I can never quite get them to touch. I fill the gap with free music. Free is good. I like free.

Free is not the same as stolen. I believe in paying people for their work, because it is right and because it encourages them to keep doing it. I am not peer-to-peer pure anymore--I finally tried BitTorrent to see how it works and get something that is out of print--but it is just not comfortable for me. There is a lot of music that is offered for free, though.

The first stops are artist sites and their pages on MySpace and Purevolume (and probably others I haven't gotten to yet). Most everyone has a widget that lets you play some of their tracks. If you have the patience and a tether to a web connection, you can play those over and over. I'm not sure whether the artists mostly put these up to bring traffic to the pages or to directly increase sales with free samples; either way, it has become expected. (I think a lot of newer indie bands put them up just so people will hear them.)

You can also listen to music on web radio of various flavors (including Last.fm, Pandora and Batanga), but mostly that is tethered, too.

If you aren't happy being tethered like that, you can get utilities that will let you grab whatever is being sent to Line Out (the speakers) on your computer. I use Audacity (free program!) for that and can recommend it for this. (I don't know how well the more advanced features work.

I have mixed feelings about grabbing these, but I have come down on the side of taking them as free samples. MySpace and Purevolume both let the artists choose to enable direct downloading and mostly they don't, so I am not sure how much they object. I balance that against the way I use them. I do playlists for people and that means I have to listen to a lot of stuff to choose what to program. So far, that is turning into track sales, so I am hoping that my Karma balance comes out right.

PayPlay.fm understands Karma. They have a system of Karma points that you can use to download tracks that the artists have identified as Karma tracks, for free. You get points for signing up. logging in, buying tracks, and writing album reviews. This really is an excellent way to explore indies and to get free stuff. In theory, your downloads are limited by how many Karma tracks you accumulate, but I buy enough there that I have never come close to bottoming out.

Last.fm has a different approach. They also have tracks that artists have made available for free download, but there is no limit to how many of them you can get. They have pages with top downloads listed and also pages with downloads they recommend based on your listening history. You can even subscribe to a feed that will ship you one of your recommended tracks every day. They have more stuff from label-based, big-name type acts, too. It looks like Soundflavor.com has a similar setup, but I haven't had a chance to play around with that yet.

There are other approaches out there. TrueAnthem.com has sponsored tracks. You can download whole albums, but the tracks have the artists speaking little "sponsored by" blurbs at the beginning. This is not a problem for the work part of my listening, but it is a little irksome for pleasure listening. Radiohead released its most recent album as shareware. You could download it and pay whatever seemed right to you. That would have let you get the album for a penny-equivalent. I don't know of any other bands that have done this, but I'd be surprised not to see it again soon.

There is another outlet for free music that I haven't explored yet at all, but which looks like a big playground with cool toys: Creative Commons Audio.

"Creative Commons" defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a “some rights reserved” copyright.

Their page points out to a variety of CC applications, including artists who make material for remixing available, a service that matches you up with music licensed for P2P distribution, a try-before-you-buy music label, and a service that helps artists take advantage of CC licensing to make money off their music. I think I am going to have some serious fun with Creative Commons.

Musicians that other musicians listen to

I have always been interested in musicians who are overlooked by the public at large but who influence other musicians. I always feel richer when I find such a hidden treasure. Today I realized that I had been listening to four of these this week. Since I am too sick to think of anything else, I will share. When you're done, turn out the lights and let yourself out, k'thx.

Robin Sylar

(Interesting side note: the bassist in the band is Mike Judge, as in Beavis & Butthead, King of the Hill, and Office Space. I think that pretty much this whole show is up on YouTube in assorted clips and it is awesome.)

Elliott Smith

Big Star

Townes Van Zandt

Bonus clip: Elliott Smith covers Big Star

Not acting my age

I was telling someone at work about some of the new British bands I have been listening to lately and he made a comment that got me thinking. "That's kids music, isn't it?"

Is it? If it is, does that mean I'm not supposed to like it? Or admit I like it? Or what? Life is full of memos that I never got, it seems.

I mentioned this to someone else at work and he told me that most people listen to music that was popular when they were seniors in high school (17 or 18 for the non-USAn readers). I dug out the charts for my year and looked it over. I remembered everything on it and most of it is okay, some of it better, some worse.

That got me thinking about what I did listen to in high school besides that stuff in the air. Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. Peter, Paul, and Mary. Gershwin—the clarinet at the beginning of "Rhapsody In Blue" is sublime. The Beach Boys. Squaredancing and roundancing records produced by my grandfather ("A corner swing in Indiana, circle right and walk the lady home. The moon is shining bright, left allemand tonight, ... "). ELO and George Harrison. The Monkees. I love the Monkees and I am not ashamed to admit it. My father practicing the cornet, banjo, accordion, and whatever else he was teaching himself that month.

As I let my mind wander back through my musical history, I was suddenly transported back to one of the most perfect musical moments in my life. When I was a senior in high school, as it happened.

I can close my eyes and be there again. I was at some party, kids and parents. The father of the house was a good two kilometers past "audiophile"—he had a room in which nothing was to be moved so the acoustics wouldn't change. For some reason he took pity on me, allergic to the sun, being stuck at a pool party. He set me up in his listening chair, with his special headphones and a stack of vinyl. He had good stuff and I occupied myself well. Everyone else was off somewhere doing whatever social people who get all the memos do.

I was sitting in a dim room, headphones on, leaning back in the perfect listening chair. I was relaxed and probably doing some interesting brain wave stuff (from the music, of course. No substances were involved. Of course not. And stay in school, too.) And then I hit the opening of Steve Miller's "Fly Like an Eagle" and could feel my brain being altered. It felt like the music was inside me, making my mind bigger (and buzzed). That song somehow made a chord I was part of.

I had always listened to music, but that changed the way I listened. After that, I understood what music could be and started paying attention to what made it work like that. And that led to paying more attention in general. That moment with that song was a turning point. And still, whenever I hear that song it takes me back to that perfect moment. I've got that album and just listened to it again a couple of days ago and lost myself in it again.

I started this somewhere. Right, "kid's music". Fuck that shit. If you think that, I bite my thumb at you. If I like it, I listen to it—no matter who made it or when. And if there's a memo that says this is not properly acting my age, you can take that memo and file it.

Here is what I listened to. These two are really one piece, so listen to them back to back. I have no idea why it was cut into two tracks.

Here is a nice recent version from Seal.

Here is a very interesting early version of the song I found while looking for something to embed. It's a live performance of the song around 3 years before the studio version was released. It is more bluesy, the lyrics are more explicit (in the literal sense, not "dirty"), and he plays the spacy bit at the beginning on his guitar. That may be a ho-hum for guitar experts, but to me that is made of awesome. It is interesting that he had not yet hit on the rhythm that made it really work. (Geek? Me?)

The whole Fly Like an Eagle album is worthing listening to, by the way.