James Blood Ulmer

One of the musicians who most inspires me is James Blood Ulmer. Ulmer played guitar in Ornette Coleman's bands in the 1970s and has gone on to record many records as a band leader and frontman since. In 2005 Ulmer released Birthright, a record of solo performances which included new songs, blues covers, and solo guitar and flute. One song, "Geechee Joe", narrates the life of Ulmer's grandfather:

The distinctive elements of Ulmer's songwriting are brought to the surface in this performance. His music uses Ornette Coleman's harmolodic concept, but it draws ideas and elements from blues, country, and other American "roots" musics. The song structure is what we might expect from a folk or country song, and the improvisatory feel of the guitar arrangement simultaneously suggests (to me) the loosest front porch performance and the most sophisticated jazz interpretation. That the song shares its title with a Cab Calloway number is probably not lost on Ulmer either.

The bare arrangement helps the song achieve or suggest a variety of musical ideas in a short time. In this case the bare song is like a simple poem that lets the reader fill in the details - it encourages a form of active listening and engagement with the music. A bigger arrangement demands answers to questions which the bare version leaves productively ambiguous. Is it a folk song, a country song, a jazz song, or a blues? What are the chord changes? How many bars is that solo? How should we feel about Geechee Joe? Is this an anthem or an elegy?

Bare songs and hearing songs

I wrote in my last post that the way the music industry structures and delivers music can make it difficult to hear songs. The song may come to us as a framework for a powerful arrangement or performance, or even as a piece of a larger narrative about a particular celebrity. But, given that context, what possibilities arise when songs are presented in a bare form?

For very popular musicians, presenting bare, often acoustic, versions of popular songs has become a familiar gesture, meant to rekindle a sense of immediacy or authenticity around songs that have been heard dozens or hundreds of times. This tactic may have peaked in the '90s with the popularity of MTV Unplugged, but it is a standard element in the pop star playbook.

Another familiar mode of presenting the bare song is as a deliberate choice for a particular song - that is, for a performer who normally uses fuller arrangements to present a particular song in a simple way to highlight something about that song. This is the mode that I am most interested in because it seems more likely to be focused on the song itself, rather than the performer's persona. The two modes can also overlap or one mode can masquerade as the other. What I am interested in is not particularly authenticity, but a performance mode that lets the listener hear the song better as a song. Pining for a truly authentic performance is a little like visiting the location of the first McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts.

What (else) can songs do?

Songwriting is poorly understood, if at all. Take a critical look at songwriting advice and it becomes clear that the advice-givers are almost exclusively concerned with popular and industry success and have little regard for or awareness of the possibilities of the song itself. One popular advice listicle, for example, explains that music industry executives, who fancy themselves as song experts, can’t recognize the quality of a song unless they hear it in a slick sounding demo, because they listen to slick sounding demos all day. But how can it be that our song experts are actually unable to hear songs?

Songs are undertheorized. We don’t know what they are. I have read reams and reams of music criticism, journalism, and history, and the amount I’ve read that was actually about songs could probably fit on a few dozen pages. We understand the records, the recording process, the industry, the personalities, the costumes, the packaging, the tours, the TV appearances, but what about the songs?

In the music industry, songs are raw materials, like uncut diamonds to a jeweler or cows to a butcher. One of the music industry's activities is the transformation of songs into industrial products. A record is like a sausage - there's a song in there, but it's usually been mixed up with a lot of salt and spices and wrapped up in its own intestines. I don't intend that as a criticism - I love sausage and I love records - but I do think that this practice, of turning songs into records, blinds both listener and musician to other possible uses and lives that songs might have.

There are several assumptions about the lives of songs that go unstated in nearly all songwriting advice:

• Songs are potential records. The goal of songwriting should be to write songs that make good records.
• Songwriting is a craft. There might be some arty bits floating around it, but they are slightly embarrassing and best discussed in hushed tones or not at all.
• A song on its own - without a record or an arrangement - cannot make its way in the world.
• Songwriting is a commercial art. Regardless of genre, success is a meaningful concept.

These are observably true facts about the world, but it's possible to ignore them and create something different in the world. What if songwriting were not a commercial art, but whatever the opposite is - a fine art, a pure art, an art for art's sake, any of those romantic concepts that cynics say are outdated - what they don't know is that they've always been outdated, always been laughed at and dismissed, and always stuck around, like the awkward party guests you keep inviting because they're the only ones who bring good booze.

And if songwriting were truly an art, and not a craft or a raw material for commerce, wouldn't a song be enough? Couldn't a song stand on its own and speak in the world? Couldn't a song say all of the crooked, asymmetrical, complicated, unknowable things that a record just isn't the right place for? And what would that look like? How do we sit and listen to pure, bare songs?

Now that you know - more reissued music

Another old record, on the internet for the first time! Going in chronological order so far, I recorded this one in Murfreesboro, TN. No drum machines here, but some samples and other interesting touches. I think this record has a dreamy feel for a folk record - loose performances, hazy keyboards and electric guitars. Some decent songs, too - Crying in the night might be my favorite thing here, but maybe other people won't think it's as funny as I do.

she hate the war - old music from 2003

I'm putting my old records on the internet, where a lot of them have never been before.  This is the first one, and the first record I made by myself on a computer.  I started working on this right after moving to Nashville in 2002, recording in the small nearly furniture-free apartment I shared with a roommate.

I still like some of these songs a lot, while others are a little hard for me to listen to.  I won't say which are which, though - maybe you'll like the ones that I can't handle.

There are about eight more records where this came from, plus Hotel Universe records, and maybe some others, so keep an eye out.

Noise folk - is it a thing?

Sometimes I think of the music I want to do as noise folk, but is that even a thing?  I spent a little time today listening to the noise folk tag on band camp, just to see if other people think it's the same thing I do.  There's some intense stuff there, but I wanted to draw what little attention I can to two records that are pretty great, and have a real connection to what I think noise folk might be.

Grab bag reviews: Fairweather Currents

So I'm going to try something new: record reviews!  Starting with something I'm going to call grab bag reviews.  Once a week or so, I'm going to go look at the new records from Boston in Bandcamp, find one or more thing that I like, and do some kind of review.  I'm going to write out my ground rules here, since this is the internet and that seems to be the kind of thing people do:

• Positive reviews (why write about things that aren't good?)
• Focus on genres I care most about: home recording, singer-songwriter, hip hop, maybe some experimental or electronic stuff if I'm in the mood
• Local!  Extra points if there are songs are about Boston, because that will make me like them.
• Obscurity.  If it feels like no one else will review the record, that is a good reason to review it.

And so: Grab bag #1: Urban Forestry by Fairweather Currents

Five wordy, hushed, self-conscious, charming, home recorded songs.  The narrative that emerges is of one more college student new to Boston, trying to make sense of a new environment,  The cover is the Huntington Avenue Y.

Dylan Citron sings in a voice so gentle it can seem androgynous and strums on a dry, thin, acoustic guitar.  Crowd noise from parties, distorted drum machines, vocal samples, and slow, melodic piano lines all take their place in arrangements that are familiar but not stale or derivative.

The last song, "The Times Are Never-A-Changin'" drifts slowly over a piano arpeggio, punctuated by the crunching up and down of the piano's sustain pedal.  The lyrics suggest a young narrator grappling for his own relationship with the violence in the world around him, and the song ends with a brief sample of a gospel recording.  As the title suggests, it's a protest song that doesn't know quite what to say, and it's one of the highlights of a really nice EP.