The new record is ready! Pop songs about everyday life. You can download it for any price, including no price, from the Bandcamp page.
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Sunday, June 26, 2016
Projects
I haven't posted in a while, but I wanted to put up links to two projects I worked on. The first is a piece of video art/scholarship that I made for the journal Hybrid Pedagogy. The piece is called Fountain: Scholarship and the Illusion of Permanence and it kind of brings together things I think about a lot at work with some ideas from the art and music projects I work on. The music is original, and the footage for the video was shot around Boston.
I also made a site called Newspaper Inspector which creates word clouds based on the digitized newspapers in the Library of Congress' Chronicling America collection.
And most exciting to me, the new album Pop Songs of the Everyday comes out on Tuesday!
I also made a site called Newspaper Inspector which creates word clouds based on the digitized newspapers in the Library of Congress' Chronicling America collection.
And most exciting to me, the new album Pop Songs of the Everyday comes out on Tuesday!
Friday, March 25, 2016
Riding in My Car - new video
This is the video for "Riding in My Car" - it's the first song I'm releasing off the new album, "Pop Songs of the Everyday". Magda Ostas and I shot the video around Boston. I hope you like it!
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Pop Songs of the Everyday
I'm also excited about the idea behind the record - songs that take place, in one sense or another, in the everyday world. What that means, exactly, varies from song to song. Some of the songs describe everyday events, like a long drive in the snow or a walk in the city. Other songs are about the usual topics - love, politics, life in general - but they address those topics in a way that stays, or tries to stay, true to everyday experience.
For me, writing songs that stay true to the everyday was both restrictive and liberating: restrictive because it cut off many familiar approaches and ideas, but liberating when it eliminated the need for every song to have the highest possible narrative stakes, and opened up songs I wouldn't have thought to write.
The everyday is hard to define, but it is this slippery, "know it when you see it" quality that makes it a promising concept for songwriters. For instance, writing songs of the everyday requires attention to the details of lived experience, but it doesn't follow that the songs of the everyday must, or even should, be autobiographical.
Once I started deliberately writing the songs for this record, it became clear that a number of songs I had already written, and even some that I had already recorded, would fit the project, while other songs would not. The non-everyday songs aren't bad - I like some of them a lot. But they depart from the everyday in some way, often because their characters are too mythological or allegorical for the confines of everyday life. Every real person has an everyday life, but I'm not so sure the same can be said for all fictional characters.
All of this may sound austere, but the sound of the record is anything but - the songs are packed full of sounds and instruments, and each song really has its own sound. I'm excited for people to hear the record very soon!
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Out Alone, Late
I made this record in 2005, and it's kind of a transitional record. I was trying to make a few things work at once - mixing real songs with some of the arrangement methods we were using in Hotel Universe and at the same time adding in new sounds. I bought an Alesis Micron, my first real synth, and started trying to program it. I think it all comes together on the record after this one, but here it's a little bit of a jumble. Still, there are a few things I really like, especially the instrumental "Ashburn", which starts with a harmonica/accordion vamp before the drum machines come in.
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Small-scale music practice
A couple of things have me thinking about ways of cultivating small-scale musical practices, especially in places like Boston, where I live, where the cultural and economic situation can make that difficult. Watching celebrity-driven, culture industry events like the Super Bowl halftime show and the Grammys suck all the air out of the cultural conversation got me started thinking about this. Then I watched an interesting documentary - This Ain't No Mouse Music - about Chris Strachwitz, founder of the folk label Arhoolie Records, who spent his life supporting musical traditions that were genuinely local - inescapably rooted in the rural South and Southwest.
But this piece, about the reasons why two local filmmakers and musicians are leaving Boston for LA, really struck me. I don't want to address all of the really complex civic and cultural issues that the piece and the Facebook post that inspired it bring up. What I do want to write about is the kind of artistic practice I think we all could support better: small-scale, truly non-commercial practice.
One thing that I have observed over the past 20 years or so is that, as a society, we have a decreasing interest and belief in non-commercial art, and especially in art that exists outside of our legitimizing institutions - outside of the major culture industries and their strange sibling, the international fine art market. This is reflected in our impoverished vocabulary for talking about this art. We don't talk anymore about artists "selling out". It's hard to imaging using the phrase like "art for art's sake" in a conversation about living artists, especially without air quotes. Online posts that simply point out the obvious vapidness of corporate pop are derided as "negative" or the product of jealousy on the part of less popular artists. We have been taught, gradually, to equate commercial success with quality, and to view art as a product in the market.
This ideology destroys small-scale art. With enough resources, it is certainly possible to create compelling work in the context of the international corporate economy. It is possible to use the vocabulary and resources of that world - to use celebrity, spectacle, and expensive creative teams to produce art that speaks to its audience in their role as citizens and consumers in our complex world. But that type of work relies on its proximity to the sources of that power - it feeds off the economic and cultural resources of a New York or an LA.
The art that exists outside of that context is different. Its scale and resources are human, not corporate. Its personal vocabularies stay personal; its inscrutable elements may stay inscrutable. I'll put it this way: a new Beyonce video has more in common with a blockbuster movie or a Jeff Koons sculpture than it does with the music I work on. And yet I feel, strangely that my music must "compete" with and be judged against popular music. And, on its own terms, small-scale music does compete - it's always been the best music, as music. But as spectacle, as cultural zeitgeist, as product - that's a different competition.
I've thought a lot about how to develop my music so that I can sustain what I need to do artistically. For me, that's meant learning to make the records I want to make on my own, in the time that I have. But one thing I find lacking in music is any sort of structure for legitimizing and rewarding really good work that's not part of the music industry. And I think that stems from the fact that we don't even have a vocabulary for that musical practice, even within local music scenes. We don't believe, anymore, that there is such a thing as non-commercial art. We mistake non-corporate art for failed corporate art. Even when we recognize the difference, we are corrected and shouted down by a cultural consensus that, even at the most banal levels, equates momentary popularity with success.
And yet - how many of our cherished writers and artists were recognized in their lifetimes? Do we really think the future will be any different? I'm not saying I or you or anyone we know is making art that will last after their death. But I do think that it takes a lot of people trying to make that art to produce the one person who actually makes it. If we give up on that kind of work - and I do think that we are giving up on it - it won't happen on its own.
The good news for musicians is that it's actually feasible to work like a poet or a painter - to follow your own rules and create your own music. Recording technology has been at least partially decoupled from the music industry. There are more inexpensive recording and distribution options than there have ever been, whether you prefer to work at home or in a studio.
What would increased support for non-commercial art look like? Maybe it would take the form of shared infrastructure and facilities, or support for human-scale publishers and record labels. But maybe it would also include much smaller changes. Could Boston become a city where having serious artistic pursuits is normal, even expected - where it wouldn't feel like something you should probably hide from your co-workers? What if there were a cultural understanding that sometimes art is neither a profession nor a hobby?
For me, Boston doesn't necessarily need its own film or music industry to rival the ones in New York or LA or even Atlanta and Nashville. I mean, I wouldn't turn it down, but it just seems unlikely. What it does need is thousands of people doing their own important creative work in a way that they can sustain over decades. I don't know what it looks like to build a community where that's supported, or even where it's possible, but I do think one first step is to name and value the creative work that takes place outside of the culture industry and the art world. I'd bet everything that that's the art that will matter in the end.
But this piece, about the reasons why two local filmmakers and musicians are leaving Boston for LA, really struck me. I don't want to address all of the really complex civic and cultural issues that the piece and the Facebook post that inspired it bring up. What I do want to write about is the kind of artistic practice I think we all could support better: small-scale, truly non-commercial practice.
One thing that I have observed over the past 20 years or so is that, as a society, we have a decreasing interest and belief in non-commercial art, and especially in art that exists outside of our legitimizing institutions - outside of the major culture industries and their strange sibling, the international fine art market. This is reflected in our impoverished vocabulary for talking about this art. We don't talk anymore about artists "selling out". It's hard to imaging using the phrase like "art for art's sake" in a conversation about living artists, especially without air quotes. Online posts that simply point out the obvious vapidness of corporate pop are derided as "negative" or the product of jealousy on the part of less popular artists. We have been taught, gradually, to equate commercial success with quality, and to view art as a product in the market.
This ideology destroys small-scale art. With enough resources, it is certainly possible to create compelling work in the context of the international corporate economy. It is possible to use the vocabulary and resources of that world - to use celebrity, spectacle, and expensive creative teams to produce art that speaks to its audience in their role as citizens and consumers in our complex world. But that type of work relies on its proximity to the sources of that power - it feeds off the economic and cultural resources of a New York or an LA.
The art that exists outside of that context is different. Its scale and resources are human, not corporate. Its personal vocabularies stay personal; its inscrutable elements may stay inscrutable. I'll put it this way: a new Beyonce video has more in common with a blockbuster movie or a Jeff Koons sculpture than it does with the music I work on. And yet I feel, strangely that my music must "compete" with and be judged against popular music. And, on its own terms, small-scale music does compete - it's always been the best music, as music. But as spectacle, as cultural zeitgeist, as product - that's a different competition.
I've thought a lot about how to develop my music so that I can sustain what I need to do artistically. For me, that's meant learning to make the records I want to make on my own, in the time that I have. But one thing I find lacking in music is any sort of structure for legitimizing and rewarding really good work that's not part of the music industry. And I think that stems from the fact that we don't even have a vocabulary for that musical practice, even within local music scenes. We don't believe, anymore, that there is such a thing as non-commercial art. We mistake non-corporate art for failed corporate art. Even when we recognize the difference, we are corrected and shouted down by a cultural consensus that, even at the most banal levels, equates momentary popularity with success.
And yet - how many of our cherished writers and artists were recognized in their lifetimes? Do we really think the future will be any different? I'm not saying I or you or anyone we know is making art that will last after their death. But I do think that it takes a lot of people trying to make that art to produce the one person who actually makes it. If we give up on that kind of work - and I do think that we are giving up on it - it won't happen on its own.
The good news for musicians is that it's actually feasible to work like a poet or a painter - to follow your own rules and create your own music. Recording technology has been at least partially decoupled from the music industry. There are more inexpensive recording and distribution options than there have ever been, whether you prefer to work at home or in a studio.
What would increased support for non-commercial art look like? Maybe it would take the form of shared infrastructure and facilities, or support for human-scale publishers and record labels. But maybe it would also include much smaller changes. Could Boston become a city where having serious artistic pursuits is normal, even expected - where it wouldn't feel like something you should probably hide from your co-workers? What if there were a cultural understanding that sometimes art is neither a profession nor a hobby?
For me, Boston doesn't necessarily need its own film or music industry to rival the ones in New York or LA or even Atlanta and Nashville. I mean, I wouldn't turn it down, but it just seems unlikely. What it does need is thousands of people doing their own important creative work in a way that they can sustain over decades. I don't know what it looks like to build a community where that's supported, or even where it's possible, but I do think one first step is to name and value the creative work that takes place outside of the culture industry and the art world. I'd bet everything that that's the art that will matter in the end.
Saturday, February 13, 2016
New old record - 2004 folk styles
Before I got a computer that I could record on, I made a lot of recordings straight to cassette. I had a four-track for complicated things, but more often I just recorded straight to a handheld cassette recorder, the kind you could buy for $30 at CVS or Radio Shack.
This isn't one of those records, but it's in that spirit. Live takes, as many songs a would fit on a CD, no overdubs, acoustic guitar and vocals, minimal processing. Some odd recording choices here - the vocal and guitar were on separate mics, and they are hard-panned left and right. I think it sounds cool on a decent stereo with the volume turned up - very close to the original sound in the room.
I was really invested in the idea of folk music - I think you can hear that in these songs - and I felt drawn to this recording style that was somehow supposed to be similar to a field recording. The panning idea comes from the first Bob Dylan record, which is not at all a field recording.
There are a bunch of songs here that hold up, I think. Silver Car is one that I still like to play.
This isn't one of those records, but it's in that spirit. Live takes, as many songs a would fit on a CD, no overdubs, acoustic guitar and vocals, minimal processing. Some odd recording choices here - the vocal and guitar were on separate mics, and they are hard-panned left and right. I think it sounds cool on a decent stereo with the volume turned up - very close to the original sound in the room.
I was really invested in the idea of folk music - I think you can hear that in these songs - and I felt drawn to this recording style that was somehow supposed to be similar to a field recording. The panning idea comes from the first Bob Dylan record, which is not at all a field recording.
There are a bunch of songs here that hold up, I think. Silver Car is one that I still like to play.
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