Archive for July, 2009
American Pastoral
There are a big big pile of books sitting by my bedside and, in this respect, I’m like anyone else. Of course I also have my Kindle by my bedside and there are certain people that are understandably amused by the fact that they bought me the Kindle at my behest and I read one book on it (The Glorious Cause) and then downloaded a biography about Alexander Hamilton and then haven’t picked it up again. But I will, I promise.
Anyway, I’ve read some Roth before. Portnoy’s Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus. And the images in Goodbye, Columbus present themselves to me on occasion. I read it right around the time I read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and both of those books are about summer and about coming of age and, you know, I’m Jewish, so I identify will all that exisential Jewish angst. But all that being said, and even though I knew it was supposed to be good, I was still blown away by this book.
An Unknowable Master
I wrote that thing yesterday about Hype Machine and versioning and my friend, Stan Harrison, sent me the following email. My sense is that Stan got to a truth that is closer than my inarticulate rambling and I really loved what he had to say. First, that pop music, through the Internet and Hype Machine, is experiencing something akin to what’s been real in jazz for a long time. Second, that all of these versions of songs refer to a kind of platonic notion – they are all shadows projected onto the cave walls and only allude to a godlike truth but never specifically articulate it.
In the jazz world, alternate takes abound and every performance is yet another iteration. It’s Plato’s Cave once again. Maybe all performances are shadows of an unknowable master take.
That felt like what I was trying to say and kind of what I referenced when I wrote that songs need rust. Stan said it better than me though. Read the whole email after the jump. If you don’t know, Stan plays a million different instruments (mostly horns though right?), has played with the all-time greats (Bowie, Radiohead, and many many others) and is also just a really nice person with a beautiful family. And he ’s playing with The Flying Change at The Living Room on September 3rd. One more great reason to make it to the show Okay okay. Here’s the email:
Hype Machine and Versioning
It would be easy to say that Hype Machine, the brilliant blog-skimming site started by Anthony Volodkin, is something like the future of music and/or something like the future of songs. And it’s no doubt directional in some sense. And yet it’s both more and less than that at the same time and that’s kind of what’s interesting about it. In a way, it opens the door to a new dialogue about the nature of one specific song and what a song means and how different versions relate back to the original author.
Because, on Hype Machine, there are a multiplicity of versions of any one song. And then you have the blog that posted the song. You see, the same song on two different blogs is really almost two separate instances. This point is underscored by the Twitter charts which don’t chart a specific song, per se, but a specific instance of a song as posted on a specific blog. I think this is very much a good thing. It lends uniqueness, in its own bizarre digital way, to that instance as posted on the blog and creates a kind of digital scarcity.
Track #8: Don’t Look Away
This is an old song and it sparked all these thoughts about chord changes. That’s kind of what songs are, you see. They are just packages of changes. Shifts. There’s something in our cells that enjoys this shift, makes it feel and sound so good. When you start playing your instrument, especially your guitar, and you start making some shifts, you have the root and the seed of the songwriting thing going. So this is just D to G. And it’s, obviously, not uncommon, and, equally, it doesn’t really matter. Because it sounds good.
Enjoy Your Foie Gras
I love Bourdain but why’s he hating on Cinnabon. That shit is good! (Hat tip to P7 for the vid)
More “Achingly Beautiful”
A nice review came in from Ink19 down in Florida last night. Short and sweet but very complimentary. The best part is the opener:
The Flying Change … has taken pain, heartbreak and hope and made an achingly beautiful album.
We’ll add it to the rest of the pile of people that have been brought to their knees by the beauty of this record. And we’ll thank them. And we’ll see if any of these new songs and ideas will hold up to the beauty that was created with this record. And we’ll think maybe so maybe so.
The song I am enjoying right now is called “You” and will perhaps be, in the vein of Valentine’s Day, a further step on the road that joins the dance and beat-oriented tradition with the throaty folk troubadours like Cohen, Dylan, etc. Yes, I’m being pretentious but I’m also being half serious. How do we get a dance orientation (repetition, propulsion, momentum) and couple it with organic instruments, sly baroque arrangements, a minor key and a lower register. I guess we’ll find out. I have capo-ed the 1st fret and I play an F to an Am and then shift to a C for the chorus. Simple. But it’s very sad and wistful.
