Archive for May, 2009
Challenging Conventions
Seth Godin was writing about four basic rules of challenging conventions and one of the important rules is that you’re supposed to call it out when you’re challenging conventions.
Talk about it. Often, a new convention leads to conversations. People need to teach other about the ideas in your product or service, or complain about it or debate it. Again, no point changing the convention unless what you want is people to talk about your new convention.
I think about that when I think about this website. Because a few people have commented to me that when they arrive here it’s not absolutely clear that it’s a website for a musician or a songwriter or whatever it is that you want to call it.
And that’s true. I intentionally designed it so that it wasn’t like a traditional band website The focus is on the things that change and the things that change are the writing either through the blog or through Twitter.
Paid Cannibalizing Free
I was lying in bed last night and I had this vision of my website. And the vision was that the first thing you saw when you arrived, the splash page, was a little login window where you had to enter your username and password (or maybe even just your username or your email or something) and, unless you did that, you couldn’t enter the site. And then once you got into the site, you could have whatever you wanted. You could download any song or entire album for free, you could read the blog, you could watch any video. And then. Well.
You see where this is going?
Jay Walter Bennett
Jeff sent me the press release last night that was put out today, I believe. Here it is. Rest In Peace, Jay.
Our good friend Jay Walter Bennett left us this weekend. As news hits the wires so instantaneously these days, we thought it was important to share some thoughts about our friend and brother before any rumors got out of hand.
First, let it be known that Jay was in a really good place these past few years. He had returned to the area he loved–the “Twin Cities,” Champaign-Urbana–and resurrected his studio, Pieholden Suite Sound, with the assistance of many dear friends and allies. Jay had been busy making music. He recently had released an intimate record entitled “Whatever Happened I Apologize,” and he was looking forward to wrapping up his new work, “Kicking at the Perfumed Air.” Proud of finishing a trilogy of records, including “Bigger Than Blue,” “The Beloved Enemy,” and “The Magnificent Defeat,” Jay loved the balanced yet ironic album titles. He was also looking forward to engineering and releasing Titanic Love Affair’s previously unreleased record, as well as starting work on “The Palace at 4 a.m. Part II,” the follow-up to his post-Wilco debut with Edward Burch. “Jay the Academic” had also reemerged, pursuing his umpteenth degree at the University of Illinois, and he was thrilled to be t aking graduate classes again.
As many of you may be aware, Jay had finally found the courage to put his Wilco issues out into the public forum. After a long, four-year process (and therefore very much unrelated to his impending hip surgery), formal filings against Wilco were finally initiated. This task was very emotional for Jay. He was a “lover,” and this confrontation was not easy for him. With the exception of his final period in Wilco, Jay looked back on his time in the band with great fondness and pride. While he was dismayed that some people may have formed a narrow perception of him via the “documentary,” all who truly knew him understood that with most entertainment media, editing is usually constructed for dramatic effect and presents only a small part of a larger, more complex reality.
So, please spend some time this week engaging in Jay’s favorite passions: listen to a Nick Lowe album, watch some Mythbusters on Discovery, play Warren Zevon’s “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” rent Pay It Forward (one of his favorite movies), write a song with the TV on and the sound off, and focus on how Jay always concluded his communications:
“Love, Jay.”
Veckatimest
Pfork drops the review. 9.0. That’s cool. Better than the 10.0 I was expecting. Here’s my question in all of this. When you get different reviewers across the spectrum of a band’s catalog, you get conceits and suppositions about said catalog that in no way match up to what that same publication had previously written about the band.
I’m cool with it in this case but this guy Paul Thompson seems more up my alley from a taste perspective and has indeed called out Friend and Yellow House for being boring. In fact, the whole review is a touch defensive which is very strange for a band that just got one of the highest scores of the year. This tells me that my secret feelings about ol Grizzly Bear are not exclusive to me. Honestly, in anticipation of this release, I’ve been going back and listening to Yellow House a lot and it’s had a really hard time sticking with me. I do think elements of it are kinda boring.
The funny thing though is that no previous writer for Pitchfork has acknowledged that issue in any way. The only thing I remember reading about Friend was excessive adulation. Ditto for Yellow House. And then in the articles leading up to the record, critics had become even less discerning. The whole thing has felt like a fait accompli for this record.
So when the reviewer makes mention of that very fact, it gains credibility in my eyes. Plus, the tunes I’ve heard are very good (“Two Weeks” and “While You Wait For The Others”).
Of course, I’m going to pick up the album. People like me, like us, gentle reader, that’s what we do. We spend money on recorded music. We’re old. We’re mocked by Bob Lefsetz. But that’s who we are. So we’ll check it out and I expect much of it will be very good. Given the nature of the review, I doubt it will stand up to the revelation that Merriweather Post Pavilion will be, but I’m up for giving it that shot.
R.I.P. Jay Bennett
I just found out that Jay Bennett passed away. This is very strange and very tragic and very sad. He was a part of my life more than most semi-famous people.
And, honestly, I have been thinking about him the past few days and now I find this out and it’s so strange. I spent a good part of yesterday listening to his free record, “Whatever Happened I Apologize” and I was listening to “Being There” and I woke up this morning and kept thinking that Jeff Tweedy may not want to admit it but that things weren’t the same since Jay left the band. Things were somehow too clean, too precise. Honestly, yesterday. Yesterday I was listening to the two free songs they have on the record label/website that put out the free record and I was thinking I needed to get back to my home computer to download everything. And I saw that the label was putting together a fundraising thing to put that record out on vinyl and they’d only raised a bit of money as of yesterday although I’m sure it will go up now
I’d emailed with Jay a bunch over the last year and sometimes with some thoughts that we might work together but nothing really serious. But I’d followed the development of the new studio and I was on the website yesterday and thinking I’d check in with him one more time to see if he got the record I had sent. The last time we emailed he seemed to bristle when I called “The Magnificent Defeat” “chaotic”. Then we got to talking about how production changes songs and how simple folk songs lie at the heart of popular music and he was talking about this documentary he’d seen about John Mellencamp and a drinking game where every time Mellencamp distilled some tune to a “simple little folk song” you’d have to take a shot.
I’ve been following Jay for a long time and had long attributed much of the success to my favorite period of Wilco (Being There -> Yankee Hotel) to him. I remember picking up random little tidbits about him with relish. His vintage keyboard collection. His influence felt on songs like “Far Far Away” and all over “Summerteeth”. I wrote a review of ‘Being There’ in 2000 and even then mentioned Jay:
All of this would be so much bullshit, however, if the music and the abilities of the band didn’t match up to their artistic conception. For this, Tweedy and Wilco owe a huge debt to the addition of Jay Bennet, Wilco’s musical everyman who had the musical and studio experience to augment Tweedy’s chords into full-fledged songs, rich with texture and harmony. And it is in the production of the album that Being There moves beyond an interesting exercise into the realm of beauty.
I remember dreaming about having him produce some of my music and when we were emailing back and forth about it it seemed very surreal and I was thinking about what it would be like to actually be in the studio with him and whether it would work or not. It wasn’t something that was right around the corner or anything of the sort but it was just a little fragment. It was a real fragment of my life. He wasn’t my best friend and we didn’t know each other well but we had conversed and I knew of him and I know that people in Chicago are going to be much more affected than I am and my heart goes out to his familiy and all of the incredible musicians he’s worked with.
I’m sorry, Jay. I hope it was peaceful at the end. You will be missed.
Bruce Oatway: Strange Tales of the Internet
There has been something strange going on in the comments of this blog and I thought I’d share it with you. It’s kind of spooky and kind of weird and just kind of representative of this thing we call the Internet where little eddies swirl around, little pockets of human interest and who knows what any of it means or if it means anything at all.
So awhile ago I wrote a post called ‘The Future‘ and it was about how, if you want to get happiness from your art, you need find happiness in the creation of it, rather than the expectation that at an external event, like recognition, will justify its existence or give you pleasure. A quasi-obvious thing to say but, as with many things quasi-obvious, perhaps bearing of repeating.
Not the point.
