Archive for August, 2008
Now that was fun
We had our first rehearsal last night as a ‘band’. It was a pretty special experience. In the world of New York singer/songwriters, the concept of a band is a malleable thing. Everyone at rehearsal last night had other projects and other gigs that were ongoing. Pete’s main project just got signed to Verve.
So when you have a bunch of people in a room that have other interests and other projects you never know how it’s going to turn out. On the one hand, everything can feel mechanical, impersonal, rote, leaden. People going through the motions, wishing they were someplace else. But on this specific hand something different happened. Everything just clicked.
Tags: cover songs, playing live, songwriting
Is a feature a business?
It’s not clear to me that a lot of the companies that have received venture funding in the music space (or really the entire technology space) are truly businesses in the way that I understand them to be. Here’s what I understand about business: somehow or some way, a service is provided that somebody somewhere explicitly pays for. It doesn’t have to be the end user, as Google has shown. It can be the long tail of the marketing ecosystem, small businesses and big businesses that will pay for a specific action like the clicking of a link to increase the likelihood that their goods are sold.
But at some point, there has to be an actual and monetizable exchange of value. Looking out across the spectrum of new technology companies that people are kind of using (I say kind of because even for the big ones it’s still mostly a small circle of technology geeks that are the power users of the product) I’m having trouble finding concrete examples where companies are actually effective at monetizing their user base.
Tags: internet, music and the web
Putting the pieces together
I remember my friend John told me that writing songs is like putting legos together. I agree. In that sense, it’s a lot more like building than writing. It’s never felt much like writing to me at all actually. It’s always been assembly.
You need two things for a song. You need a foundation or structure. And you need melody. You can start with either but I tend to start with the first part. The structure. Depends what you “write” on. I write three ways. First way is by playing chords on a guitar and thinking of ways to arrange them that inspire some kind of melodic overlay. Second way is on a computer building up from a beat and using the beat to inspire the melody. Third way is the melody presents itself to me at some random point in my day. I extract it using sophisticated scientific techniques and deconstruct the chord changes I like from there.
It’s not terribly complicated and, for me, not incredibly difficult. But, you see, what you’ve just done isn’t actually a song. Well, not yet at least. Because what you now have, if you have that little thing that you like, that little fragment of melody, that set of 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 chords that proceed nicely with each other. Well, that’s just one thing. And, you see, to have a song you probably need three things or four things or five things if you’re going to be annoying.
Each thing is a building block, like a Lego. And to get a standard little song in place you most often need about 3 or 4 Legos. You need the Verse Lego. You need the Chorus Lego. Sometimes you need the Bridge lego. And sometimes you might want a Pre-Chorus Lego or you might want an Outro Lego. The Legos don’t actually come with those proper names. They’re just parts. Parts you can arrange in different ways. Ways that interest you. Ways that you can tap your feet to.
Tags: songwriting
A bridge too far
Art is about choices. I wrote this song called ‘Don’t Look Away’. I took the chords from ‘Honey Eyes’ and started strumming them in a different way and starting singing along and there it was. Like in the Bible, when you push aside the flowers and the reeds. Hello, little baby!
And I had another kind of part which is either a pre-chorus or a chorus depending on your point-of-view. And that was a nice thing as well. And then I started thinking about whether I needed the different part.
The different part is the Bridge.
You kind of get to the point in a song when you’re working your way through it and you think to yourself, “Maybe something different here?”. If you so choose, that different part is what people call the Bridge and what John and Paul (and I think the music community generally) called ‘the middle eight’.
It’s the thing that creates the space and the tension that makes you miss the original thing. Makes you want to find your way back, wander through all the minor chords to get to your sweet release, the major. The 1. Back at home. Snug as a bug in a rug. When you first start writing songs that’s the piece that, you think, tells you that you’re a songwriter. That you’ve just made something. You had this one hummable flowing little ripple of a melody and you added on an ‘other’ and the other was good and fit like a puzzle piece but was still different and strange, like a middle child, and then you came back to the original and it tasted even better. Huzzah.
Tags: songwriting
Lou Reed, David Bowie, Mick Ronson
In the car in Detroit we were listening to Transformer. It’s part of music, part of the experience that sometimes an album or a song catches you off-guard. Something you’ve heard before but never really heard. Or maybe it’s just been awhile.
I have the expanded edition CD that has early demos of Lou playing ‘Hangin Round’ and ‘Perfect Day’ on his acoustic. You can hear the foundation of what would later become more embodied songs with flesh, hair and makeup strapped across the chord changes’ rib cage and beating heart.
This is one of Bowie’s first producing efforts (for someone other than himself at least) and he partners with his longtime collaborator, prodigal genius and arranger Mick Ronson to create a musical space at once utterly familiar and totally unique. Something about the era (and Lou himself) allows a musical palette that might seem cloying or kitsch on another artist. It’s a beautiful costume, at times feminine. But always retaining Lou’s own masculinity strong and sly. Through the vocal delivery and romantic lyrics, the seedy underbelly of 1970’s downtown is captured lovingly, and with a hint of nostalgia.
It’s almost jazz.
Tags: classic rock, lou reed, music review
All my friends and the art of the cover
I think we’re going to cover ‘All my friends’ by LCD Soundsystem // James Murphy. The trouble with this cover is that there have been a number of bands that have already done it. So I’m scratching my head wondering if it’s a wise decision. Franz Ferdinand covered the tune as did John Cale. Then there’s this Boston band, The Main Drag, that did a passable cover. I found out all of these things through Hype Machine. The internet is the great humbler. You think you have a great idea and realize four other people have already done it.
Tags: cover songs, performance, songwriting
