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.
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
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.
Monday, February 8, 2016
Parts and structures of songs
You can do whatever you want in your songs! It's great, and it seems obvious, but sometimes it's easy to forget and feel like there are rules. One place where it's easy to forget this is in the shape and structure of songs.
To put it simply, your songs don't need verses and choruses and bridges. Maybe some of your ideas will work well in that structure, but others won't, and the struggle to force them into it will be exhausting. It will feel like you're stuck. But you're probably not stuck - you might just be ignoring the obvious solution to your problem.
One way to deal with this problem is to know a lot about song forms from various genres. This is great if it's something you can do - it gives you a broad vocabulary and makes sure you won't be stuck with the limited structures available in most pop music. But it can be just as liberating to simply allow the song to grow on its own, following the story you want to tell and the musical ideas that occur to you. You don't have to use a structure that's been tested in other genres - you can create your own song structures and make them work for you.
Following the song in this way can lead to subtle or dramatic changes in how your songs come out. For instance, you may find that a verse-chorus forms work well, but that you get a lot out of subtle variations in the verse form - maybe one verse has a few extra bars and uses a different chord progression. Or you may develop personal ideas about song parts. I find that I get a lot out of codas and outros, on all kinds of song forms. Going to a coda at the end of the song allows you to go somewhere musically that you might not be able to come back from, and it's a great opportunity to add a different tone or perspective to the song's lyrics. You might even get lucky and develop an entire new vocabulary of types of parts for your own songs.
The pop song is a powerful form, but it brings a lot of baggage. If your song tells a story, how do you keep the chorus from weighing down the narrative like so much dead weight? If your idea is much longer or shorter than 3 minutes, how do you make it feel right to the listener, and not like a song that's been truncated or artificially extended? Even if you usually write songs with verses and choruses (I certainly do), it helps to remember the range of options that exists out there. If you don't know what goes in the second verse, maybe it's time for the song to move on to it's C, D, and E sections.
So here's a song that sometimes feels like a pop song, and was even a little bit of a hit, but abandons that structure halfway through, before picking it up again at the end:
To put it simply, your songs don't need verses and choruses and bridges. Maybe some of your ideas will work well in that structure, but others won't, and the struggle to force them into it will be exhausting. It will feel like you're stuck. But you're probably not stuck - you might just be ignoring the obvious solution to your problem.
One way to deal with this problem is to know a lot about song forms from various genres. This is great if it's something you can do - it gives you a broad vocabulary and makes sure you won't be stuck with the limited structures available in most pop music. But it can be just as liberating to simply allow the song to grow on its own, following the story you want to tell and the musical ideas that occur to you. You don't have to use a structure that's been tested in other genres - you can create your own song structures and make them work for you.
Following the song in this way can lead to subtle or dramatic changes in how your songs come out. For instance, you may find that a verse-chorus forms work well, but that you get a lot out of subtle variations in the verse form - maybe one verse has a few extra bars and uses a different chord progression. Or you may develop personal ideas about song parts. I find that I get a lot out of codas and outros, on all kinds of song forms. Going to a coda at the end of the song allows you to go somewhere musically that you might not be able to come back from, and it's a great opportunity to add a different tone or perspective to the song's lyrics. You might even get lucky and develop an entire new vocabulary of types of parts for your own songs.
The pop song is a powerful form, but it brings a lot of baggage. If your song tells a story, how do you keep the chorus from weighing down the narrative like so much dead weight? If your idea is much longer or shorter than 3 minutes, how do you make it feel right to the listener, and not like a song that's been truncated or artificially extended? Even if you usually write songs with verses and choruses (I certainly do), it helps to remember the range of options that exists out there. If you don't know what goes in the second verse, maybe it's time for the song to move on to it's C, D, and E sections.
So here's a song that sometimes feels like a pop song, and was even a little bit of a hit, but abandons that structure halfway through, before picking it up again at the end:
Saturday, February 6, 2016
Folk music
"Folk music" is a dense, important, and contested concept. It doesn't mean any one thing, so you may as well make it mean something that works for you and your songs.
The two best books I've read on the concept of folk music are The Old, Weird America by Greil Marcus and How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life by John Fahey. The Marcus book is pretty well known - it's about Bob Dylan and the Band writing and recording the music that became the Basement Tapes, and tells a convincing story about exactly how certain themes and styles from obscure depression-era performers entered the pop music vernacular through Dylan and the Band.
The Fahey book is a collection of semi-autobiographical vignettes which, taken together, give a clear and complex picture of the guitarist's relationship to folk music. Assembled from clues sprinkled throughout the book, Fahey's history of folk music might start with the invention of folk music as an academic project of 19th century Germans and break apart with the ascendance of radio and television, which essentially dismantles the oral culture that the academic song collectors saw as the hallmark of the folk. By the time Fahey is working the folk festival circuit, very few of the performers can qualify as true members of the vaunted folk, attached to a pre-modern, oral culture.
Though Fahey is skeptical about the category of folk music, both as an abstraction borne out of academia and as a commodity marketed to a middle-class audience, he is clear that his own music is grounded in aesthetic concepts closely associated with folk music. One set of these concepts revolve around the guitar, around the importance of playing with a mix of open and fretted strings and, relatedly, the value of playing in a range of tunings to unlock the potential of the instrument. This approach to the guitar is not simply a matter of technique, a neutral way of achieving a pre-determined goal. Rather, it strongly favors certain approaches to harmony - choosing a tuning becomes the most critical step in composition or arrangement, and each tuning contains a certain unique set of possibilities and tendencies.
One implication of this approach is that guitar techniques, rather than being shared among all instrumentalists, are deeply personal - a player might guard his personal tunings and chord shapes jealously, or share them with a select few. For Fahey this secrecy introduces an enduring mystery around the music which shapes its aesthetic impact, and is only enhanced by other trappings of the genre, especially the improbable pseudonyms used to escape record contracts, or in Fahey's case, to deliberately reproduce that mystery.
There are a lot of interesting things about John Fahey's music, but to me one of the most interesting is this idiosyncratic relationship to folk music. Taking a step back and thinking about Fahey's approach to genre in general, we see that this approach - at once self-aware and visceral - might be available in a wide variety of settings and genres. Moving past a superficial understanding of genre is like learning to play in a new tuning - it opens up a new world of creative possibilities.
The two best books I've read on the concept of folk music are The Old, Weird America by Greil Marcus and How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life by John Fahey. The Marcus book is pretty well known - it's about Bob Dylan and the Band writing and recording the music that became the Basement Tapes, and tells a convincing story about exactly how certain themes and styles from obscure depression-era performers entered the pop music vernacular through Dylan and the Band.
The Fahey book is a collection of semi-autobiographical vignettes which, taken together, give a clear and complex picture of the guitarist's relationship to folk music. Assembled from clues sprinkled throughout the book, Fahey's history of folk music might start with the invention of folk music as an academic project of 19th century Germans and break apart with the ascendance of radio and television, which essentially dismantles the oral culture that the academic song collectors saw as the hallmark of the folk. By the time Fahey is working the folk festival circuit, very few of the performers can qualify as true members of the vaunted folk, attached to a pre-modern, oral culture.
Though Fahey is skeptical about the category of folk music, both as an abstraction borne out of academia and as a commodity marketed to a middle-class audience, he is clear that his own music is grounded in aesthetic concepts closely associated with folk music. One set of these concepts revolve around the guitar, around the importance of playing with a mix of open and fretted strings and, relatedly, the value of playing in a range of tunings to unlock the potential of the instrument. This approach to the guitar is not simply a matter of technique, a neutral way of achieving a pre-determined goal. Rather, it strongly favors certain approaches to harmony - choosing a tuning becomes the most critical step in composition or arrangement, and each tuning contains a certain unique set of possibilities and tendencies.
One implication of this approach is that guitar techniques, rather than being shared among all instrumentalists, are deeply personal - a player might guard his personal tunings and chord shapes jealously, or share them with a select few. For Fahey this secrecy introduces an enduring mystery around the music which shapes its aesthetic impact, and is only enhanced by other trappings of the genre, especially the improbable pseudonyms used to escape record contracts, or in Fahey's case, to deliberately reproduce that mystery.
There are a lot of interesting things about John Fahey's music, but to me one of the most interesting is this idiosyncratic relationship to folk music. Taking a step back and thinking about Fahey's approach to genre in general, we see that this approach - at once self-aware and visceral - might be available in a wide variety of settings and genres. Moving past a superficial understanding of genre is like learning to play in a new tuning - it opens up a new world of creative possibilities.
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Question your relationship to genre
Genre is critical to songwriting! To my ears, no songwriter is truly above genre - no songwriter I've heard is so unique that a critical listener can't place the genre or genres that gives the songs context. Performers can transplant songs from one genre of music to another, but this is often an interesting move because the song retains the flavor of its original setting. Moving the song to another genre produces an interesting musical moment because of the tension between the song and its setting.
As a songwriter, genre is one of your most powerful tools, but harnessing that power will require a sophisticated view of the genres you work in. The ways genre works musically - the characteristic chord progressions, melodic turns, and rhythms that define musical genres - are often discussed. What is often left out are the ways that a song's lyrics and lyrical themes are equally a part of its relationship to genre. Genres of music carry characteristic lyrical concerns. These are not rules - your country songs don't have to be about trucks, and your ballads don't have to be about love. One way to think of these characteristics is as audience expectations: if you start to play a certain type of song, listeners will immediately have their guesses as to what the song will be about. But you aren't trapped by those expectations - understanding genre allows you to fake left and go right. You can do this gently, delighting your audience by tweaking their expectations, or take it a step further to really shake them up.
One reason this kind of writing can be difficult is that we are deeply invested in the genres we write in, and it can feel awkward or even painful to look at them with a critical eye - it's a little like hearing your speaking voice recorded or seeing a candid photo of yourself. Take folk music - a genre I feel a certain commitment to. What does it mean, in 2015, for someone who lives in an urban setting to profess a commitment to folk music? What's the connection between various related sub-genres, between coffee house singer-songwriter fare and ballads passed down through an oral tradition? Can I write the songs I want to within the expectations set by a specific genre, or do I need to bend and twist the boundaries to get where I need to go?
Chances are that, whatever genre of music you write, your relationship to that genre is complicated. To borrow a phrase, musical genres are often copies with no original. You might see a performer who deeply inhabits the persona and culture of a particular genre and say, "that's the real deal, for sure," only to have the illusion broken when you find out where the person grew up, or where he lives now, or what her politics are, or any detail that reminds you the performer is a whole person and not just a stage persona. But that is as real as it gets.
What this means for songwriting is that the most interesting and authentic moments may come when you break your own chosen genre's rules of authenticity. In order to say the things you have to say, you may need to develop a deep and idiosyncratic relationship to the genres you write in.
As a songwriter, genre is one of your most powerful tools, but harnessing that power will require a sophisticated view of the genres you work in. The ways genre works musically - the characteristic chord progressions, melodic turns, and rhythms that define musical genres - are often discussed. What is often left out are the ways that a song's lyrics and lyrical themes are equally a part of its relationship to genre. Genres of music carry characteristic lyrical concerns. These are not rules - your country songs don't have to be about trucks, and your ballads don't have to be about love. One way to think of these characteristics is as audience expectations: if you start to play a certain type of song, listeners will immediately have their guesses as to what the song will be about. But you aren't trapped by those expectations - understanding genre allows you to fake left and go right. You can do this gently, delighting your audience by tweaking their expectations, or take it a step further to really shake them up.
One reason this kind of writing can be difficult is that we are deeply invested in the genres we write in, and it can feel awkward or even painful to look at them with a critical eye - it's a little like hearing your speaking voice recorded or seeing a candid photo of yourself. Take folk music - a genre I feel a certain commitment to. What does it mean, in 2015, for someone who lives in an urban setting to profess a commitment to folk music? What's the connection between various related sub-genres, between coffee house singer-songwriter fare and ballads passed down through an oral tradition? Can I write the songs I want to within the expectations set by a specific genre, or do I need to bend and twist the boundaries to get where I need to go?
Chances are that, whatever genre of music you write, your relationship to that genre is complicated. To borrow a phrase, musical genres are often copies with no original. You might see a performer who deeply inhabits the persona and culture of a particular genre and say, "that's the real deal, for sure," only to have the illusion broken when you find out where the person grew up, or where he lives now, or what her politics are, or any detail that reminds you the performer is a whole person and not just a stage persona. But that is as real as it gets.
What this means for songwriting is that the most interesting and authentic moments may come when you break your own chosen genre's rules of authenticity. In order to say the things you have to say, you may need to develop a deep and idiosyncratic relationship to the genres you write in.
Sunday, January 24, 2016
Strategy - the first Hotel Universe record
This is an exciting record to put back online - the first Hotel Universe album. In 2004 my friend Grace Marlier sent a cassette tape of her writing in the mail to me and some other friends. I decided to make a record out of that tape, with the initial idea that it would be like a hip hop record but with talking instead of rapping. I cobbled the music together on a laptop from what I had available - guitar, drum machine, a Casio keyboard, some samples, parts of tracks from other records I was working on. The songs used loops, but the recording software I was using could only loop accurately at tempos that were divisible by 30 beats per minute, so the songs are mostly at either 120 or 150 BPM.
Grace's vocals are straight from the cassette tape, complete with hiss and other tape artifacts, which are a big part of this record's sound. The vocals aren't intended to sync up with the music - the idea was something different, something that betrayed the way it was made. One of the tricks of records is to make it sound like the different tracks are part of a single synchronous performance, but this one makes the process a little more apparent.
There are three more Hotel Universe records, and the last one might be my favorite out of all the records I've made. Stay tuned!
Grace's vocals are straight from the cassette tape, complete with hiss and other tape artifacts, which are a big part of this record's sound. The vocals aren't intended to sync up with the music - the idea was something different, something that betrayed the way it was made. One of the tricks of records is to make it sound like the different tracks are part of a single synchronous performance, but this one makes the process a little more apparent.
There are three more Hotel Universe records, and the last one might be my favorite out of all the records I've made. Stay tuned!
Friday, January 15, 2016
Songwriting is writing
If I were teaching songwriting school, I would only have one punishment for naughty (or boring) students: write 100 times on the chalkboard, “songwriting is writing”.
Thinking of songwriting as a form of writing is an important and powerful idea that pushes and pulls our understanding of songs in two unfamiliar directions. First, if songwriting is writing than it deserves the respect that other forms of writing get. One sign of that respect is that we should care about the literary quality of a song, rather than only its commercial appeal. Another sign of respect for songwriting as writing is the amount of time we expect to spend on it - not on individual songs, necessarily, but on developing the skills needed to write interesting and original songs.
On the other hand, thinking of songwriting as writing may cause us to cast a more critical eye on songs. We may look at certain songs with a newfound disappointment, realizing that, while they may make nice sounding records, they don't accomplish very much as writing. Maybe they rehash worn-out ideas, both musically and lyrically. Maybe they are embarrassing or off-putting when we listen to them critically.
Songwriting is different from other forms of writing, of course. It uses music. It is more compressed than many other forms, though there are poetic forms, like haiku, that are even more compressed. Like traditional poetry, it often relies on established forms.
Still, songwriting has the potential to treat as expansive a range of themes and topics as any other literary form. It can be narrative and lyric, sometimes in the same song. It can be fictional or non-fictional, personal or anthemic, political or introspective.
It can be a struggle to think of songwriting as writing. Your parents and friends probably won't think of it as writing. Even the other songwriters you know might not really think of themselves as writers. But if you remind yourself that songwriting is writing, you may find that it opens up musical and lyrical possibilities for your songs that you had never considered.
If you're still not convinced, I'll offer this song as proof:
Along with this interview where Gillian Welch explains her process for writing this song and its companion, "Ruination Day, Part 2".
Thinking of songwriting as a form of writing is an important and powerful idea that pushes and pulls our understanding of songs in two unfamiliar directions. First, if songwriting is writing than it deserves the respect that other forms of writing get. One sign of that respect is that we should care about the literary quality of a song, rather than only its commercial appeal. Another sign of respect for songwriting as writing is the amount of time we expect to spend on it - not on individual songs, necessarily, but on developing the skills needed to write interesting and original songs.
On the other hand, thinking of songwriting as writing may cause us to cast a more critical eye on songs. We may look at certain songs with a newfound disappointment, realizing that, while they may make nice sounding records, they don't accomplish very much as writing. Maybe they rehash worn-out ideas, both musically and lyrically. Maybe they are embarrassing or off-putting when we listen to them critically.
Songwriting is different from other forms of writing, of course. It uses music. It is more compressed than many other forms, though there are poetic forms, like haiku, that are even more compressed. Like traditional poetry, it often relies on established forms.
Still, songwriting has the potential to treat as expansive a range of themes and topics as any other literary form. It can be narrative and lyric, sometimes in the same song. It can be fictional or non-fictional, personal or anthemic, political or introspective.
It can be a struggle to think of songwriting as writing. Your parents and friends probably won't think of it as writing. Even the other songwriters you know might not really think of themselves as writers. But if you remind yourself that songwriting is writing, you may find that it opens up musical and lyrical possibilities for your songs that you had never considered.
If you're still not convinced, I'll offer this song as proof:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)