Archive for September, 2009
The Human Voice
There’s something special about the power of the human voice. About the power of a vocal performance. There’s something that captures the imagination and puts its stamp on something and makes it real. Maybe this is obvious.
I make the point because the singer is often the least trained and the least talented member of the collective, or at least in a rock band. And it’s interesting because even though the musicians that are playing the instruments are often unbelievable and capable of creating real magic, there is still something so special about the voice that I wonder if it’s annoying for talented musicians to train and learn and ply their craft and then have someone with that special voice come in and all of a sudden they’re the star and they are the front man.
But it’s real. And I guess my point is that the front man should be the singer. Because the voice and the vocal performance are the critical magical component of the tune. Whether it’s Sinead O’Connor’s yodeling in ‘Last Day of Our Acquaintance’ or Janis Joplin or Thom Yorke or anyone. The band is the band but the magic happens when the human voice is added.
I liken it to the film industry. All these people working their butts off. Grips and technicians and engineers and people lugging around crap and scouting locations and doing this and doing that and the actors come in and they’re pampered and given all the attention and I’m sure people are resentful that they work all day to set up a brief 5 minute scene while the actors are in their trailer or doing whatever it is that they do. Yet, the truth is that whatever skill it is or whatever instinct it is that separates a great actor from a lesser actor, the actor and their emotions and their beauty are the thing that bring life to the production and make the words on the script emerge from their entrapment. And as annoying as it can be, it is the actors that are the critical catalyst and probably deserve more attention than other contributors.
Because the reality and the presentness of the human condition, brought to life in music by the human voice or in film by an actor’s performance, that is the thing that makes it magic.
I just think it’s interesting given that so many singers and actors are such insufferable assholes. And yet, indispensable.
Jim Carroll, Catholic Boy
I heard today that Jim Carroll passed away. This news made me very sad. Jim is one of those strange characters in my life with whom I had a very intense couple of days and then never saw or heard from again. And I doubt he’d remember me. But I do remember him and I found him a warm and generous person and someone who could tell great stories seemingly endlessly.
Jim wrote “The Basketball Diaries” and was a pivotal figure in the New York punk and poetry circles in the late 70s and early 80s. He was a contemporary of all the legends – people like Lou Reed, Patti Smith, etc. and knew all of them very well. His ex-wife, Rosemary Carroll, is also one of the most powerful music lawyers in the city and married to Danny Goldberg.
Here is my remembrance of Jim.
There Is No Model
There’s a question I’ve sort of stopped asking myself lately. That question is, “What is the future business model for the music industry?” I’ve stopped asking because a) I don’t think there is a model or at least one that works for artists and b) I’m losing interest as I spend more time thinking about making my own art and less time pontificating abstractly.
In a sense, the only model is talent and I guess my guess is that there will be no standard formula but a million different strategies for people with talent to become known and maybe make some money. Monte was emailing me and telling me that the future of the music business is writing screenplays around album concepts. Maybe. I’m not sure that’s a model, per se. It’s more like a good idea that will work for the person that does it right and won’t work for most everyone else.
There is probably a model for a big company to aggregate music from songwriters if they can get enough market share to own the space. iTunes or Spotify, assuming they can find a way to pay the right royalties to the labels. For that winning business, the future is a monthly subscription for unlimited streams and downloads and no DRM and any song you want at any moment in any format to take wherever you please.
But the bottom line is that the pie for any one musician will be incredibly small and professional musicians will do what they’re doing now: they’ll teach, they’ll perform other people’s material for all kinds of different gigs and some will choose to use their savings and their money to periodically put out songs to their email list, play gigs featuring their own original material, and maybe call something a record. Again, that’s not a model per se.
If we were to say there is a model, the model might be licensing songs, playing live gigs and giving recorded music away for free. But even that is not a big money maker. It’s something to slightly offset the substantial cost that artists will make to create music but not enough to pay their rent.
It’s not a bad thing. It means less art will be constrained by commercial concerns, because there will no commercial concerns to speak of.
But there is no model.
“Aural Bliss”
Reviews continue to stream in. Embo Blake says I sometimes sing off-key but also says that’s a good thing so it’s okay and he’s probably right. But, more importantly, Hybrid Magazine just loved the record. The whole thing is great but here’s a good bit:
Not only are the songs on Pain Is A Reliable Signal well written and emotionally charged (albeit in a rather down-played fashion), but they are very well produced.Robert L. Smith and Paul Brill (a master of gloomy Americana of his own sort) have taken the songs of The Flying Change and created a musical palette that is very evocative and cinematic. The songs carry the mind from a stark desert landscape to the bustle of an urban center, and back to the peace of the country. Jacobs has done a wonderful job of writing songs that are highly personal, but also tell stories in a way that Paul Simon would be proud of, and putting them all together in a wildly delicious package of aural bliss.
Good stuff. Thanks, Embo. And thanks Robert L Smith and Paul Brill. You guys are good and decent gentlemen.
Track #9: Burning a Horse
This is a song taken from a poem by Henry Taylor [here's more on the poem]. It appears in the book, ‘An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards‘. That poem, by the way, is one of my favorites of Taylor’s. Elegantly constructed and made of the stuff that I think about a lot. Which is to say the random patterns of our lives and how they weave together and how we might pass the time with each other.
This song came out very quickly and pretty much all at once. I put the capo on the first fret and started strumming and the first words came to me, “All this death and destruction” and I began to think about snakes and ladders and opposites and how you might pick your way through a battlefield littered with carnage and detritus and cling to something like love or a belief and the firmament and the stars are hovered and chilly in the cold steel sky above, etc.
The song is about falsehoods and truth and artifice and reality and finding, as I’ve been writing about, real human connections with people and, of course, what I mean to say, is that it’s about love. And I believe in the good things and the bad things both.
Relationships
I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships recently. Not romantic relationships, which are complicated and treacherous and different. I just mean friendships. Friendships with people you care about and the notion of kharma and of positivity and of aspiration and how that plays into your life. There is much, it seems, to be gained from focus and concentration on people that you care about, and there is much to be gained from listening earnestly without ulterior motive, and it seems there is much to be gained from being a good person and, again, cultivating friendships without a need for compensation or reimbursement of any sort whatever.
It seems to me that as you work to be a good person, good things will happen to you. Now, of course, that’s a total cliche, and life will get in the way, and you may still get cancer, and I’m not talking about things fair or unfair. But, you know, they say, “Luck is when opportunity meets preparation”. And it’s something like that but perhaps both less and more complicated.
