What's This Music For?

I’m a person who is generally indifferent to trends; in fact, I usually avoid trendy things like the plague.  Despite that, I was always aware of and vaguely interested in what was happening in music until 10 or so years ago, when I stopped caring.  I found little to catch my interest in the bland fare served up on the radio and TV, and I was no longer surrounded by enthusiastic music fans who were willing to dig through the mountain of garbage to find the scattered pearls to share with me.  But that doesn’t mean that I stopped wanting to hear new (to me) music and exploring what’s out there–I just started going back in time to discover what I’d missed.  I’m always interested in roots and beginnings and how things evolve over time.  So here’s a small list of some of the delights I’ve encountered in my explorations.

Steely Dan – I always had an aversion to Steely Dan; in fact, it would be fair to say that I hated them, except for “Do It Again”.  They were too slick, too jazzy for my taste.  Well, guess what?  My taste changed over time, and not long ago there came a day when the Dan suddenly offered new delights to my ears.  I have since acquired their entire discography and their influence will be evident on our upcoming album.

The Police – Believe it or not, I didn’t appreciate them back in the 80’s.  I know, I know.

Patsy Cline – She was a little bit country, a little bit pop, and a little bit rock and roll.  What a great voice and an interesting musical palate.

Ella Fitzgerald – That voice!  My wife turned me on to Ella, and I have developed a fondness for the old standards through her.  It’s true, they don’t write ’em (or sing ’em) like that anymore.  Ella can do a good imitation of Louis Armstrong, in case you didn’t know.

The Anthology of American Folk Music – A treasure trove of music recorded in the late 20’s and early 30’s of the last century, including old English ballads, dance tunes, gospel, and blues, some of it recorded right here in the Tri-Cities.  If you want to hear our musical heritage and see where it led, this is a great place to start.

The first subject covered in my initial undergraduate chemical engineering class was unit conversions.  You know, like how many seconds in a year, how many ounces in a ton, or answering questions like “If a chicken-and-a-half chicken can lay an egg-and-a-half in a day-and-a-half, how long will it take 2 chickens to lay 4 eggs?”

I was reminded about unit conversions the other day at the studio (a.k.a. Brian’s Basement) when I saw a book Brian had purchased called An Inside Look at the Guitar Styles of Steely Dan.  The book itself is great.  But the cover photo is just, well… surreal.  In particular, check out Donald Fagen (the guy on the left).

Sure, the man is a genius, but have you ever seen a photo of someone who looked so cheerless?

Think about it.  Someone took a picture of him, he looked at the picture, and said “USE THAT ONE.”

And so, in honor of Donald, I have decided to rank my own fits of dissatisfaction using the FMU (Fagen Misery Units) scale.

Have to re-record a bass line? That’s one FMU: 

Sucky project at work? That’s a three-bagger:     

You get the idea.

FMU’s.  It’s gonna be a thing.

I occasionally am asked, “How do you write songs”?  The real answer is this: I have no clear idea.  I mean, I know about song structures—AAA, AABA, and so on.  I know about meter, rhyme, alliteration, and other poetic devices.  I know something of music theory.  These are all useful things to know, and I couldn’t finish a song without them.  But those flashes of inspiration that are the seeds of the songs—where do they come from?  Ah, now that is a mystery to me.

Those flashes most definitely do not come from my conscious mind.  If I sit down and try to consciously write a song, I will almost always fail.  Although I can put myself into a frame of mind where I am more receptive to inspiration, I can’t by force of will make it happen.  Most of the songs I have written come from little bits of chords or riffs that come to me while playing the guitar or piano.  I’ll be playing, and then suddenly I’m doing something that catches my ear.  When that happens, I have only a limited amount of time to record it before it passes completely out of my brain.  Once I have those little bits of music, it’s up to my conscious mind to build a structured song out of one or more of them.

Similarly, the ideas for lyrics come out of nowhere.  Generally, when I want to write lyrics for a song, I try to come up with a title first.  Often I’ll wrack my brains trying to think up a title without success.  Then one will pop into my head in the middle of the night, or when I’m getting out of the shower.  Particular lines of lyric will arrive this way, too.  I usually think lyrics that come this way are superior to the ones I have to consciously squeeze out.  Though sometimes I have only a vague notion of the meaning of the words.  Again, it’s up to my conscious mind to put together all these pieces into a coherent song.

When I look back at songs I have written, I often wonder, “Where did that come from?”  I have heard some songwriters say that they don’t write songs, the songs come through them from somewhere else.  I understand why they feel that way; I sometimes feel a sense of awe and wonder when music is flowing through me.  Whatever the source of that power, I’m grateful to be a conductor.

John here.  Though I’ve primarily played bass guitar in my collaborations with Brian over the last 10 years, I started out as a keyboard player.  And the first keyboard I ever played (in the first band I was ever in back in 10th grade) was the Farfisa Combo Compact.  The sound could be harsh, but the keyboard itself had a great feel, and was awesome for both rhythm accompaniment and solos, especially when paired with a Mutron Phasor II, which I also owned.

Sadly, I never liked that keyboard when I had it — there was another (a Crumar something-or-other) I lusted after that I could have afforded, but that my parents forbade me to buy (confession: my friend Tony and I spent one afternoon cutting wires in the Farfisa guts, in hopes of rendering it unusable so that my parents would relent and permit me to purchase the Crumar — note to kids out there: THIS DID NOT WORK). A few years later, I bought a 3 octave organ/string synthesizer and gave away the Farfisa.

Gave it away.

But if I hadn’t, I believe in my heart that I would have eventually created this video:

I’ve been taking classes in music production from Berklee College of Music Online recently, and one thing that has really struck home with me lately is how much computers have changed the nature of music production. Having done computer-based production for quite some time, it was not exactly news to me that computers have made making music easier and more affordable. It’s great that I can produce professional-quality music in my basement. However, it’s also now feasible, even easy, to make music without even being a musician. You don’t have to be able to play an instrument or sing on key anymore. You can easily string together clips of other people playing their instruments and make a new song out of it. You can use software to correct all the sour notes that come out of your mouth or via your fingers. You don’t have to be able to play in time, either. The software will correct your timing and even easily change your playing to have a more natural-sounding feel. It’s kind of frightening, really.

I won’t deny having taken advantage of various studio trickery in my time, but I will say that I value real people playing real instruments in real time over constructing the illusion of such with software. I hear the glossy, over-the-top productions on the radio these days, and see the Photoshopped photos on the covers of magazines and get angry, frankly. In “We Can Love” I wrote, “I’m so tired of plastic faces on every screen/The real world is marked with scars, the sacred and obscene”. I really feel like we’ve lost something, that the surface appearance of things is valued more that the substance. The illusion of crystalline perfection can’t truly mask the emptiness underneath, though. I have to believe that the countless hours I spent learning to play and improve my technique, and all the time I’ve performed for an audience, lend my music something that can’t be truly simulated by computer software. Otherwise, what was the point?

In diving into the murky world of marketing, I discovered that I needed to identify what genre of music Chameleon Red falls under.  I quickly ran smack dab into the modern phenomenon of genre proliferation.  Take a look at this list and you’ll see how ridiculous things have gotten:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popular_music_genres.

Look, I understand the need to differentiate between different flavors of music to some degree.  But genre distinctions are only useful if they’re reasonably well-known by a significant portion of the population.  If you say “Sadcore”, “Shoegaze”, or “Slowcore”, that means nothing to me and a whole lot of other people.  In fact, those genres are hotly disputed even among people who do know what they’re supposed to be, so there’s no real agreement on what they really are.  It all seems a bit cliquish and elitist to me, this painstaking categorization of bands into these tiny little categories and fighting to say who belongs in and who is out.

It’s this kind of narrow division between different kinds of music that (along with near monopolistic corporate control) has stagnated broadcast radio and satellite radio.  As a listener, I am quickly bored by hearing the same old thing all the time.  I want to be challenged.  I want a wide variety of things to listen to, and it doesn’t matter if I don’t like it all.  I’m being exposed to things outside of my comfort zone, which is a good thing.  And as a musician, I don’t like to be restricted on what I can and can’t play in order to fit a rigidly defined microgenre.

Inclusion rather than exclusivity.  Broad community vs. cliques.  Looking for commonality rather than differentiation.  In my opinion, that’s what it’s all about.  So what’s our genre?  Maybe you can put each individual song in a particular category, like folk-rock, hair metal, funk, country-rock, etc., but to me, it all falls under the heading of Rock.  And that’s as specific as I want to be.

It’s hard to find good new music these days…at least I find it so.  In fact, I more or less gave up for a long time, for a number of reasons.  Firstly, it seems like the good-to-suck ratio on the radio became so low that it just wasn’t worth it to listen anymore.  Popular music has gotten so homogenized that there’s a lowest common denominator sameness that’s accentuated by the strict adherence to format.  I suppose that’s not surprising; there are only four major record labels left (three, if UMG is allowed to gobble up EMI), subsidiaries of giant corporations all, and one corporation, Clear Channel, owns most U.S. radio stations.  The labels have become increasingly fearful of taking risks as the digital music ages has steadily eaten into their profits, and will only spend their money on sure things; mostly, established artists or artists/marketing whizzes who have already built their own fan bases.  Strict radio format means that artists whose music is hard to pigeonhole into a particular established genre will not be played, and if they’re not signed to a major label, forget it.  It all adds up to music that is strictly formula, overproduced and overcompressed (to make it sound louder—there’s a loudness war on, you know).

So how does one find good new music?  I generally like the philosophy of buying local first and supporting small businesses over giant corporations; so that seems like an obvious direction to move toward.  I’d rather buy music from the artist or band so that they get most of the profits, rather than support bloated corporations who only give a teensy percentage of music sales to the artists. Easier said than done, though; aside from going to local live music events (always a good idea), how does one sift through the literally thousands upon thousands of independent musical artists one can find on the Internet to find the good, even great music that’s undoubtedly there?  That’s one of the things I intend to explore in this blog; I’ll be reviewing independent artists and sharing ways of discovering new music outside the mainstream.