An Andalusian Dog

It’s the first real week of my new blog, and you may not know me. I’ve decided to write this blog because I enjoy music, and because I think talking about the music we listen to and care about is the best way to find exciting new stuff.

I thought a nice way to start would be to introduce my music of the moment, and the band that sprung to mind were Lau : a modern scottish folk trio named for a kind of light they get in Orkney. If you want to know what kind of light, you’ll have to go visit (have a coffee at the reel while you’re there, and pass on my regards to the Wrigleys). The band consist of Kris Drever on guitar, Aidan O’Rourke on fiddle, and Martin Green on accordion. All three are fantastic musicians.

In the spirit of singling people out, I have to admit that I was wowed by Mr. Green’s performances on the two occasions that I’ve seen Lau. I’m an accordionist myself, and with all of the respect and admiration in the world for the brave men who taught me from the age of eight, I’d never before had an Accordion Idol. The man produces sounds I wouldn’t have thought possible from an instrument I claimed to know well, and must be seen to be believed.

The rest of Lau are just as fantastic, and really nice gents to boot. Martin just stands out because I have a chance to try and emulate him.

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Other current favourites include Florence and the Machine, Passion Pit, Ben Harper, Beethoven, Ed Sheeran, and Biffy Clyro. More on them another time, I think. I’d be tempted to call that collection eclectic if I didn’t know many genres are unrepresented, but there’s one thing I’d like to add before signing off.

I’m into a variety of music, some of it mainstream, some of it less so, but I enjoy the mix. I think that it’s easy to dismiss popular music just because it’s popular, especially in the X Factor era of shake and bake popstars. That doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy music in the top forty and admit to it. Maybe some day I’ll shock you with my preferences, but it’s important to know that they’re mine, and I will remain unrepentant.

Introductions was published on a Thursday

In the late seventies and early eighties, CBS billed The Clash as “The Only Band That Matters”. If I had been young in that era, I can believe that I would have thought so too: they were an incredible band, full of energy and change and musical experimentation.

I wasn’t young in the eighties. I was born in the eighties: 1986, the year The Clash died. Before we get carried away with thoughts of me being home to the reincarnated spirit of some angry punk band, let me get to my point. Having grown up in the age that I did, with Blur and Oasis warring over the guitar legacy of The Stone Roses, with the strains of Nirvana still echoing through the music of my youth, there was another band deserving of the title.

I don’t think anyone’s bothered to call them by it, but there we are: Pixies, the only band that matters.

I was introduced to Pixies by my older brother: to this day he considers it among the crown achievements of his brothership. He should - the band have had as much of an effect on my perception of what music should be as they had on the bands I’d grown up listening to. Let’s make this clear: if you like music involving guitars and drums that was made in the last twenty years, you’ve heard the influence of the Pixies.

Each and every song that they produced before imploding as a group circa 1993 is worth hearing. Doolittle would be my Desert Island Disc. If it hadn’t been before their time, I’d have happily replaced Voyager’s Golden Record with that LP.

I think that’s quite enough admiration for this week. Just one thing before I go: this blog is a stark weekly reminder of the situation that my inattention and Apple Inc’s marketing has put me in, and I can’t hold back any more.

I’m deeply frustrated musically at the moment, and it’s all down to iTunes Match. For those of you who don’t know, iTunes Match is a service that Apple are now offering whereby I can pay a small annual fee to have my entire music collection constantly available for download on my iPhone. This was an offer too good to miss, and I signed up as soon as the service was made available in the UK. The factor I had failed to consider was that I had signed into Amy’s iTunes account about 45 days prior, in order to download Ceremonials.

The rules say that I can’t sign back into my own account for the purposes of redownloading purchases (which iTunes Match counts as) for ninety days. That’s a reasonable rule, designed to stop me from acquiring all of my friends’ back catalogues too quickly. My problem stems from the fact that my iPhone decided to purge its music library in preparation for Match before telling me I couldn’t use it, which has left me with none of my own music on my phone. Roll on, 31st of January.

Pixies was published on a Sunday

Aren’t singles an interesting idea? They’re the tunes we hear on the radio, the ones that are pushed on us in shops. Generally, there’s a good reason for this: these songs are the best on the album that’s being sold, and that means that even if we don’t listen to the radio or go into music shops, the songs that people suggest we hear will generally be singles.

Because of the role of singles in discovering new music, I’ve learned to take that discovery with a pinch of salt. Sometimes, you’re lucky: if your introduction to The Shins is the same as mine (New Slang), you’ll be in for a treat. I’ve enjoyed all of the music I’ve heard from The Shins; the way each track opens a new door or peeks round a new corner has been really lovely.

Sometimes, you’re unlucky: I’d struggle to find a song as surprisingly fantastic as Crystal Fighters “Plage”, but on closer inspection I found it to be a real diamond in the rough. The list of great singles by bands I don’t dig is long: Deep Blue Something, Cyndi Lauper, The Smiths, Foo Fighters, and The Coral, to name a few.

I think this “it’s not all for me” attitude to bands is healthy, really. While there are a few bands that I love unconditionally, that list is mostly made up of acts that no longer write or perform. I guess that’s my way of avoiding a change of mind when a later, weirder album comes along. The bands that spring to mind here are Garbage and Radiohead.

My point, assuming for a second that I have one, is that bands will make the music they want to make, or that they think they can sell to pay the bills. They won’t always make the music you want to hear, but when they do you should embrace it and enjoy it. When they stop, you just stop listening. Do me a favour, and resist shouting Judas.

Seventy Eights was published on a Sunday

This week I got my music back: I’ve been feeling quite cheery as a result. Having a collection again has resulted in me listening to the music I don’t think to search for: my old favourites that I play on autopilot, like The Killers and Idlewild, but also music that I discovered live.

I’ve never been an avid concert-goer, but I think that whenever I have ventured out to a gig I’ve found something new and unexpected.

The very first live gig I went to was T in the park; I can’t even remember which year. I had two musical epiphanies in Balado that day - one band I’d never heard before, and one who I’d never heard in a favourable light. The unknown weren’t even meant to be there that day, and were standing in for Shed Seven. Whatever it was that caused the changed line up was a boon in my eyes, because that was the first time that I’d heard The Strokes, and that experience is as clear in my mind as if it were yesterday.

The band I grew to like were Placebo. I’d heard a whole bunch of their music, I had friends who liked them, but it never clicked until I saw their tremendous stage presence: the excitement, the momentum of it dragged me along, and now when I hear them recorded I understand so much better what that music is about.

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I think this discovery aspect of gigs is great - without it I’d likely never have heard of The Sounds or Drive-by Argument. Even better, though, is when you get the opportunity to go to a festival like the aforementioned Scottish rock bonanza or even something wee like Ceol Cholasa.

A festival means some headline acts you probably know and some smaller acts around the periphery that you can discover and learn about in an environment where it isn’t even rude to just wander off to get food or some such. That kind of relaxed environment is how I first heard Breabach, Bodega and The Poozies, and these are bands I listen to on a weekly basis.

So the moral is go! Explore the live music that comes to you, and go to the live music that sounds like it might be fun. It doesn’t have to become your life, but it’s silly to pass up an opportunity.

Live! was published on a Sunday

So this week I’ve been thinking again about a little game I unconsciously play when I’m listening to my record collection. Sometimes, when a song has a story to it, you can picture an extension to that story: a conclusion, or maybe a prequel of sorts. This is already feeling like an idea that needs an illustrative example.

The Example

The song “Run”, by Amy MacDonald, definitely has a story to it. If you haven’t heard it, the song is about two people who are uncertain about life, a point of view with which I can sympathise. They don’t know what’s coming or why things happen the way they do, but they’re determined to carry on and find out the hard way. This is summed up in the blazing chorus:

“I will run until my feet no longer run no more,
and I will kiss until my lips no longer feel no more,
and I will love until my heart it aches,
and I will love until my heart it breaks,
and I will love until there’s nothing more to live for.”

So with this song in mind, forward looking and determined to run itself ragged in the pursuit of understanding, love and happiness, we cast around looking for a conclusion to the story. That conclusion comes from another act I love: The Killers. The song in question is “For Reasons Unknown”. This tune is a lot less optimistic; viewing a hard-lived life from the other end, after the excitement and youth has gone and all that is left is an unabated confusion and desperation for meaning. The dovetail with “Run” is clearest in the chorus of this song:

“But my heart, it don’t beat, it don’t beat the way it used to,
and my eyes, they don’t see you no more,
and my lips, they don’t kiss, the don’t kiss the way they used to,
and my eyes don’t recognise you any more,
for reasons unknown”

Worn out.

If this kind of ending appeals, may I direct your attention to Richard Linklater’s fantastic bookending films - Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. If you think dialogue is the most important part of a motion picture, you’ll love these two.

Example Ends

Continuity was published on a Sunday

Another Sunday, another ramble…

This week, I bought Wagon Wheel, by Old Crow Medicine Show. If you don’t know anything about this song, first go and download and listen to it, and come back when it’s finished.

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Back? What did you think? I know, right? Can you believe it came out in ‘04?

Now, this song has a story behind it, of which there exist many and varied retellings. This is mine:

A young man was listening to tapes of some recording sessions featuring Bob Dylan, and hears the man himself mumbling out the chorus to a song the young man has never heard. After some investigation, the young man finds that the song was never recorded because it was never finished: Dylan had made up this chorus based on some snatches of lyrics he’d heard when he was young.

The hero of our piece, being young and filled with hubris, decides that the best course of action when faced with a song unfinished by his musical idol is to finish it off himself. Having done so, our troubadour starts playing his new song wherever he goes, only thinking to check up on copyright when his band, the Old Crow Medicine Show, put this song down for the world to hear.

The Result? Wagon Wheel, by Secor and Dylan.

And so I meander towards the title of this post: Wagon Wheel amounts to a cover, but expanded on and interpreted to a degree unusual in a cover version. This got me thinking about cover versions, and how I feel about them.

I’ve got a lot of covers in my record collection: from Groove Coverage’s version of Poison(awful, in case you’re wondering) to Glen Campbell’s cover of Good Riddance (Epic), and of course everything by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. I think one thing unifies these for me, though: I tend to prefer the original. There are undoubtedly lots of awesome covers, better than the originals in a variety of ways, but I think they’re still the minority. I even prefer Dolly’s I Will Always Love You.

See you next week.

Cover (Version) was published on a Sunday

So I’ve been looking back at the music of this week, as is my wont of a Sunday afternoon. The trend that I noticed this week was region of origin…

If you know me, and especially if you know me from the time I lived in England’s green and pleasant land, you’ll know that I’m Scottish. Fiercely Scottish. It’s a big part of who I am, and an important factor in my worldview, but what does it mean in real terms? Scotland isn’t a separate political entity, for at least another two years, and there’s frankly not much holding us separate from England.

Mostly it’s pride: pride in the performance of our sports teams, pride in our history of people and inventions, pride in the quality of our countryside. We consider ourselves to have a lot to be proud of in Scotland; from Glen Coe to James Clerk Maxwell. In a crude and probably futile attempt to stay on topic, I’m going to limit the remainder of this post to our music.

And so we come to the listing segment: Belle and Sebastian, Biffy Clyro, Drever, McCusker and Woomble, Glasvegas, Idlewild, Lau, Paolo Nutini, The Poozies, and Teenage Fanclub, to name a few.

That list was limited to artists currently listed in my iTunes match library, which indicates my liking for them. The problem that I have is that I honestly can’t tell if my enjoyment is based on good music, or based on (frankly unsettling) national pride. Maybe you could email me and let me know.

Family Tree was published on a Sunday

A Day Late and a Dollar Short: sorry about that.

In response to my last post, I was reminded that as well as the quality of the music I listen to and the pride I have in where it’s from, my enjoyment also stems from the place this music holds in the story of my life.

This struck a chord with me (it really did: the pun is coincidental). The events of my life, such as they are, have almost all been accompanied by some kind of music. there’s the obligatory “Our Song”, there’s the music that was playing when I read three quarters of The Amber Spyglass for the first time over the course of 8 hours. there’s also music my brothers played while I was growing up and music that swept the nation when I was a teen.

All of it, the entire soundtrack, pulls memories inexorably from wherever they’re stored and leaves them glistening dully in the light of Today. Sometimes this is great: I love that I can put on the record that I fell in love to and it’ll always make me smile with memories of hot chocolate and midnight on the river. Sometimes it’s unwelcome: we don’t always want to remember the past.

I think the thing that amazes me about these stories is the way they’re different for each of us, just like Kanji sound different in different parts of a word. the songs we listen to tell more than one story: there’s the one the lyricist wanted to tell, there’s the ones we make for ourselves by listening as a part of our own lives, and there’s the stories that everybody else who’s heard the song could tell.

Popular music, globalised and marketed, tells millions of stories with each play, and in some way all of that makes music more than just a form of entertainment: music is more like a key that unlocks hundreds upon hundreds of boxes, each containing a fragment of our species’ history. It’s easy to believe that what makes us human isn’t our tools and our houses, our writing or our exploration, but rather the music that we make each and every day, and the tale that music will come to tell.

I’ll see you next time.

Storytelling was published on a Monday

Hello again, dear reader; a double post!

This one is going to be shorter than the last, and less labour intensive for me. I wanted to take the opportunity of having been so slack last week to shoehorn in this titbit that I recently discovered.

You may have noticed that the way we listen to music has changed dramatically over the last twenty years or so. Almost nobody now listens to vinyl, or even tape, or CDs. Almost everybody that I know now selects and listens to music using entirely electronic, often solid-state, means. My listening is now done almost exclusively through music that has been streamed from the internet, either through a streaming service, a video sharing website, or iTunes Match in the case of my personal music library.

All of this has recently led apple to commission a new effort on the part of record producers to remaster their existing material with iTunes standard 256kbps AAC files in mind. Rather than thrashing around out of my depth on this topic, I’ll refer you over to the story that I recently read about this: Loudness, written by the Chicago Mastering Service.

This story was eye-opening for me. I learned a lot: for instance, did you know that digital noise had to be added to CD masters so that the silence that naturally occurs in a track wasn’t jarring to the ear? As well as the issues raised directly in the article, this got me thinking about the quality of the recordings we listen to, and how the equipment we use to listen highlights or downplays the efforts of the mastering chaps.

As I said before, all of the music that I listen to these days is streamed, and that means compressed. Now I’m very lucky (though audiophiles may disagree) in that my hearing is poor enough for 256kbps AAC to sound identical to very high bitrate master tracks to my ear. But a part of this “audio transparency” is down to my equipment.

I mostly listen through rubbish white apple headphones, which reduce the fidelity of any recording to a level that I could realistically master to. When I want to actually hear a tune (i.e. when I’m not on public transport), I listen on my big, clumsy, on-ear headphones. with relative quiet around me, the difference is quite astonishing. details that simply can’t be heard through earbuds reveal themselves seamlessly, basslines appear as if from nowhere, and the entire track will often just seem to come into focus.

If you want to try this at home with your own big headphones, I can recommend Under Pressure as a track that hides its light under a bushel through cheap equipment. It may as well be a different tune through a nice set of cans.

I said this would be shorter, and I hope it is. I’ll try to be more consistent in future.

See you next week.

Electronic Renaissance was published on a Sunday

Confession time: music is not my first love in the media pantheon. that title has always, and probably will always, belong to film. Before the worry kicks in that I’m changing the focus of this blog (and that I’ll have to find a new name for it), I’d like to reassure you that music is as important to a motion picture as it is to the events of our lives. So, on to the post itself: as the cryptic title implies, this week I’m looking at the role of soundtracks in telling the story of a film.

Let’s begin with a story:

This week, I found myself idly perusing the selection at netflix, my current vice. As I flicked back and forth through films of frankly dubious quality, I found one that I had seen and enjoyed in the last couple of years, Dan in Real Life. I was compelled to seek out one particular scene from this picture, in which the protagonist, Dan, plays a song on the acoustic guitar, accompanying his brother who is trying to serenade a new girlfriend.

The song that was chosen for wooing duty was Let My Love Open the Door by Pete Townshend, and the performance of it by the actors themselves is achingly poignant. This scene more or less makes the picture: the story would work without it, but our engagement with the characters is cemented by this outpouring of emotion and vulnerability.

As a result of rewatching this scene, I realised that I hadn’t ever heard the original (to my shame), and so I sought it out on the universal jukebox that is youtube. The copy that I found to listen to had been taken from a soundtrack album, but not that of Dan in Real Life; the image accompanying the audio was the poster art for Grosse Point Blank. As a result of this unexpected soundtrack Venn Diagram discovery, I later suggested to my brother that we might watch Grosse Point Blank, and fun was had by all.

This got me thinking about the importance of music to filmmaking: Gross Point Blank is a good example of a picture that is much improved by the artfully arranged soundtrack and original score. Watching it leaves one with an urge to raid the “eighties” section of ones music library for such classics as 99 Luftballons, Take On Me and my personal favourite, Under Pressure.

Another brilliant example of a soundtrack making a movie is my undisputed favourite movie of all time, Jurassic Park. As well as boasting pride of place in my childhood memories and CGI effects that have stood the test of time remarkably well (the thing was released in 1993), Jurassic Park offers up a stirring classical soundtrack by John Williams, master of all he surveys. If you don’t agree, that’s your prerogative, but I’d ask you to watch the picture again before making judgements of my taste.

As my last gasp at convincing you of the importance of a soundtrack as opposed to just a score, I’ll make one final suggestion. Go out and buy a copy of Clerks X, the tenth anniversary special edition DVD release of Kevin Smith’s debut. As well as giving you the opportunity to watch a ceaselessly entertaining picture and enjoy a commentary track in which the director badmouths the DVD format in favour of LaserDisc, you can watch the original edit of the movie, as submitted to Sundance. This version is soundtracked using music by local artists and friends of the director, and has an instantly different feel to the Miramax soundtracked theatrical edit.

That’s enough for one post, I think. That said, I didn’t post last week, so maybe you should keep reading…

Fiction was published on a Sunday

Looks like this week’s post is going to be dated with Monday’s date - I blame the daylight savings’ time thing wholeheartedly. I thought I’d use my post this week to tackle an issue that I raised back in my second post, namely the kind of music that I like.

Right now, for example, I’m listening to Biffy Clyro. My feelings about Pixies have already had a thorough airing. I’m also looking forward to another trip through The Beatles back catalogue. If you’ve been following along for a few weeks, you’ll probably feel like you know a bit about my musical tastes, and you’d mostly likely be right, up to a point. That point is exemplified by my most recent music purchase. Even if you normally ignore them, I’d advise following that link. You might be surprised.

When I was at school, and especially when I was at university, I was desperate to appear cool. This is a feat I’ve never managed, and since I officially became a teacher I think it has become something of a forlorn hope. As a silver lining to the loss of all hope, I gained a new found freedom in what I could admit to enjoying. If you’re already a teacher, there’s no further shame in appreciating the music of Gary Puckett and the Union Gap or Cyndi Lauper.

And so to my new purchase. There’s no two ways about it: I really do like Beyonce, and for that matter, I like listening to Katy Perry too. Now, I’m not saying that I like all of the music that these ladies produce, because a lot of it is frankly p_*. That sad fact aside, I like their voices, I like their confidence, sometimes I even just like to hear some music thats _upbeat for a change.

Just before I go: if you teach for a living, you might have been offended by my earlier comments. I’d like to apologise, but we all know that what I said is true. Complaints on a postcard, please.

See you next week.

Expectations was published on a Sunday

Hello again, dear reader, and welcome to the month of April.

This week, I’d like to present a short post about the way that music affects my state of mind: probably this’ll be the last metaphysical post for a wee while.

It was a very good friend of mine (who shall remain nameless) that threw into sharp relief the psychological effects of music listening. She has been known, on occasion, to work herself into a maelstrom of stress and panic about her work and the future direction of her career.

The first few (many) times this happened, I was at a loss for what to do to intervene. Being a rational, scientific sort, I was always keen to just explain the facts: you needn’t panic about getting this work done, you’ve never had difficulty achieving any of your goals, you’re immensely likeable and extraordinarily talented, etc. This never worked, not even once.

In the aftermath of a panic session, whilst significantly more lucid and rational, she explained the secret. Music

From that point onwards, my friend was always the recipient of tea and good, happy, chilled out music whenever the going got tough, and we were all the better for it.

I soon found that the same was true of me. Bad moods, bad days, panic attacks, fits of worry and stress were all best dealt with through the timely and sensible application of some good tunes, and this led to a visible change in my iTunes music library. All of my playlists are now named with a single word title, and that word is invariably a verb.

Finding the right blend of music is now often just a case of picking the word that best describes what I want to do for the next hour or so. I suppose if I had lived ten years earlier, these titles would have to have been written on the side af mix tapes, but the principle’d be the same.

Maybe you should try it yourself at home. Go on, pick some words, and then find the songs that make you do that thing most reliably. You’ll thank me for it one day, when you’re feeling glum and you put on the playlist called “grin” and chase those blues away.

Until the next time, stay safe.

The State I Am In was published on a Sunday

This week I’ve had two assignment deadlines, one for each course I’m currently doing with the OU. This has meant a lot of studying and university work, and over the last seven years, university work has meant three things: Music, Books and Tea. With a sufficient supply of all three, I’m confident that there’s nothing that is out of reach.

Of course, one must be selective about the music one listens to whilst studying: it is all too easy to become distracted even at the best of times, and I find that mostly instrumental tunes are called for. I have two segments of my music library that I seek out when I need a tune rather than a song, namely classical music and Scottish folk. Today I’d like to talk about the latter.

As I say, I’ve been fixated on music with little vocal element for the last week or so, and the guitarist who has come to my aid in this regard is the talented Kris Drever. I’m amazed most at the versatility of the music he has created as part of various collectives and on his own.

What I mean by this, since it is far from an obvious statement, is that it’s possible to just listen, to lose yourself completely to the compositions and performances and not need anything else to do, see, or think about, but also it is possible to appreciate the shape and colour that the music gives to another activity, in this case study.

If you wan a great example of this, go and buy a copy of Horizontigo, preferably a live version. Go now, I’ll be here when you come back. Go on.

Ok, now listen to it, loud, through the best setup you’ve got. For me, that’s my headphones, as discussed earlier. For you, it might be a nice amp and speakers. Make sure it’s clear, and make sure it’s loud enough. Don’t do anything else at all while you listen, just focus on the music: it’s an amazing piece.

That done, find a book or a picture you love to stare at and study, or some sewing or knitting or crochet you enjoy, and put that same piece of music on in the background. It’s a whole other experience.

And now imagine how much better that is with tea.

See you next week.

Wrapped Up In Books was published on a Sunday

This week (okay… fortnight), I found myself in a song: not wrapped up in the music, or playing on stage and lost in the performance, but actually experiencing the lyrics of a song.

I should pause at this point to acknowledge the fact that the song I experienced wasn’t the song I was listening to - that would have been too neat and, frankly, trite. With this in mind, this post will come in two parts: the “story” song, and the song I was listening to in the story.

So, what song was it that I lived out in real life recently? “Killing Me Softly With His Song”, as made famous by Roberta Flack and again by The Fugees. It wasn’t written by either act, although The Fugees certainly rearranged it somewhat and gave it a new name.

The song was originally written by Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel, to be sung by Lori Lieberman. So the story goes, Lieberman went to see Don McLean in concert, was struck by her own reaction to his song “Empty Chairs”, and told Gimbel of her experience. Gimbel then wrote the lyrics for the song, culling the title line from an Argentinian book he’d been given by Lalo Schifrin, and Fox wrote the music to pull it together.

As with all good stories, this one is debated by those involved, and as with all the stories I tell, this one is the aesthetically most enjoyable version I’ve heard. Regardless of the tale’s veracity, however, the words and meaning and story of the song are unmistakeable.

There he was, this young boy,
Stranger to my eyes,
Strumming my pain with his fingers,
Singing my life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song,
Killing my softly

Sometimes it really is possible for someone else to write and sing exactly what you feel, to get inside your life and sing your secrets out loud for all the world to hear. And it’s pretty unsettling when they do, which brings me on to my own experience.

I was listening to a man who couldn’t possibly be described as a young boy, but who nonetheless kills me softly with his song from time to time. Who is it that can get under my skin so reliably? Ben Harper.

I’ve been a bit of a Ben Harper fan for a long time now: he’s one of the illustrious artists that graced my childhood through passive listening. The walls of the house that I grew up in were anything but thin, but my brother wasn’t exactly shy of the volume control on his hi-fi. At the time I hated the intrusion, but it shaped and informed my music tastes to an extent that can’t be denied.

Thanks, Colm.

The song that was playing when I realised I was living a Roberta Flack song was Walk Away, but I’m sure if you investigate Harper’s back-catalogue you’ll find something that does the trick for you. And from then on, you can rest easy knowing that whenever you need to feel your letters have been found and each one read aloud, you’ll know where to turn.

I’ll see you soon.

I Could Be Dreaming was published on a Monday

So this week I’ve spent a few scattered hours with one of my favourite albums, listening to it twice in order and once shuffled. The wonders of modern technology, eh? It used to be that the only way to listen to an album on shuffle was by siting your washing machine too close to the record deck.

Anyway; the album. It was “Manners”, by a band called Passion Pit, that came back from the states with a friend of mine. (Just to clarify, she didn’t kidnap them or anything: they’re still in the USA, it was more the knowledge of them that hopped the pond.) (I guess people in the UK knew about them before that, actually: it was just that I first heard of them when she came back. I should steer clear of metaphor in future)

So yes, “Manners”: it’s an amazing wee album. If you’ve never heard of Passion Pit and you hate following links, they produce soaring electronic pop records, some of which you’ll have heard if you consume any significant quantity of televisual media: they’ve licensed a bunch of their songs for TV, film, and ads, and a selection have been used in remixes and mashups over the last few years: of particular note is Xaphoon Jones’s awesome blend of “Sleepyhead” and The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”.

There’s a nice mix of tracks on “Manners”: most feature thumping basslines and melodies so clear and ringing that they sound almost crystalline, but on the special edition of the album the additional tracks include stripped down versions of two of the singles. These analogue alternatives give a peek at the sheer musicality of Passion Pit, and provide a comfortable and relaxing denouement when the album plays in order.

In the course of my researches, I discovered a nice little titbit: to ensure vocal consistency in their sampling, Passion Pit drafted a choir for various tracks on the album. Which choir? The choir of PS22 on Staten Island, made up of 60-70 youngsters from the fifth grade.

One final thought: if you’re interested in the band, can I advise using the link above rather than a google image search? There’s an unfortunate naming coincidence with a film that you wouldn’t want your kids to watch.

Until next week, stay happy.

Asleep on a Sunbeam was published on a Sunday

Apologies once again for the long delay between posts: consider it training for the upcoming journey away. Yes, I’m leaving, and I shan’t be back for four weeks: that means a month’s break from this (semi) regular missive, though I may manage to find a city boring enough to provide blog-writing time somewhere along the way.

I thought I’d write this week about that glorious moment when you realise that the song you’ve been singing along to has two sets of lyrics: the ones that you hear and sing, and the ones that the vocalist is actually singing. I’ve recently started thinking of this as a boon rather than an embarrassment: not only do you get to enjoy the song, you get your very own version to take home and hum to yourself.

No recognition of a much shared, infrequently discussed phenomenon would be complete without plenty of excruciating examples, and I’ve three in mind as I write, starting with the subject of my last post, Passion Pit.

One of my favourite tracks from Manners is Moth’s Wings, a tumbling mass of synth, piano, hi-hat and soprano vocals, as close to the sensation of dreaming as any song I’ve ever heard. The jumble of sound that is the chorus partially obscures the lyrics, leading to my belief for nigh on a year that I was being encouraged to:

Put down your sonogram,
Come lay with me on the ground

Which admittedly didn’t seem right. Passion Pit were a new band to me, though, so you never know.

Sometimes you know.

The real lyrics, as I found out quite recently, are a much more sensible and rational sounding

Put down your sword and crown,
come lay with me on the ground

Which, whilst somewhat more anachronistic, is less bizarrely specific and oddly callous.

Next up is a matter close to my heart: ADELE’s Someone Like You. This song is, as everyone with ears will know, epic and heartfelt and almost troublingly mature in it’s outlook on a relationship that’s failed to work. My mishearings of this one worked to paint a subtly different picture of her feelings, and were many and small rather than single and sweeping.

it starts with the opening line of the chorus:

Never mind, I’ll find someone like you

Which I heard, and indeed still hear, with an extra word: a “how” where that comma is. This reshapes the lyric from a confident and forward looking line to a more nihilistic, blameless ignorance of the future.

The next detail is in the following line:

I wish nothing but the best for you, too

Which I can’t help but hear as

I wish nothing but the best for you two

Understandable, I feel, but it does change the tone somewhat. My version is, I think, excessively conciliatory given the apparent situation portrayed in the rest of the song.

The last tiny difference is further on in the chorus:

Don’t forget me, I beg,
I remember you said:
“Sometimes it lasts in love,
and sometimes it hurts instead”

This is a terribly subtle change, but my ear always hears

I’ll remember you said

A slightly more forward thinking aspect here, possibly to counter the change to the first line.

That turned out be quite in depth.

So as to not leave you too confused about the role of intent and interpretation in songwriting, I’ll leave you with a pair of classics.

First off is the quintessential misheard lyric: Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. For the record, I believe the actual lyrics of this song to include the following line:

Heathcliff! it’s me, your Cathy:
I’ve come home now.

and not the more naive interpretation

Heathcliff! It’s me, I’m a tree:
I’m a wombat!

But who am I to say? have a listen for yourself. I think I can be firm on one in particular, though: The White Stripes’ single My Doorbell definitely doesn’t include the following lyrics provided to me by a friend:

I’m thinking about my dog, hell;
When you gonna bring it,
when you gonna bring it?

I’ll see you again in June.

Is It Wicked Not To Care? was published on a Sunday

At last, back from my epic voyage, I have returned to the land of unpredictable weather and distinctively predictable familiarity, and so am able once more to choose the music that I listen to as well as when and how I listen. What did I learn in my (socially and musically) unaccompanied journey? A lot about art and European history, to be sure, but also that travelling sans audio is an experiment I do not wish to repeat.

After approximately a fortnight I was starting to feel the absence keenly, and by week three had begun to hum to myself on a semi-regular basis. during the fourth (and thankfully final) week, I found myself singing aloud in public places. Fortuitously, since there was no one around that I knew, this tendency will remain private unless I am foolish enough to publish my experiences in some public forum: a weblog, say.

So, dear reader, what did I fall upon on my return to self-determination? Why, a new album by a much loved band, of course. Not long before my tour began, I learned that, after a five year gap, a new record had been released by The Shins. D’you know ‘em? You have to hear this one song; it’ll change your life, I swear.

So I’ve spent the last week or so exploring my music library: it seems to have changed in my absence, filling up with great songs that I haven’t listened to for at least a month. I do keep finding myself drawn to Port of Morrow, though: for me, it’s an excellent sweet-spot between the familiar sound of a band I love and the joy of music discovery that I wrote about way back in my second post. In fact, I think I’ll go and listen to it now.

Until the next time, stay safe.

Wandering Alone was published on a Sunday

I talk a lot about lyrics, and that’s because I think they’re one of the more important parts of the music that I listen to. The lyrics are normally tasked with telling the story of a piece of music, and stories are the bread and butter of art in my book. Songs like Hurricane and Iowa are completely dominated by their lyrics: it is easy to imagine these songs written down or spoken out loud as poems, but much harder to picture them as instrumental pieces.

To clarify, I don’t mean to say that instrumental music is always a subsidiary addition to a piece: one need look no further than my recommendation of Horizontigo in an earlier post, and my collection is scattered with both classical pieces and more modern instrumentals from the likes of Mr. Scruff. You needn’t even go this far: imagine Sweet Child O’ Mine without the guitars, or Only You without synth. The balance of lyrics against instruments is often subtle, and thankfully left to better men than I. Still, the lyrics are what I listen to, if they’re there.

Mostly.

The great and powerful exception to this way of thinking about music comes in the form of bands who don’t sing in English. The inspiration for this post was the band Sigur Ros, but before I get on to them, let’s take a look at A couple of others: Rammstein, and Manu Chao. There’s three bands I wouldn’t have expected to reference in one sentence. Rammstein, of course, sing in German: I have to say that despite my total lack of ability to understand what’s going on, German is an aesthetically pleasing language for their kind of music. Heavy, gothic, and slightly scary in their mouths. Manu Chao, on the other hand, swaps between English, French and Spanish to suit the feeling of the song at hand. While I speak English natively, and can more or less follow along in French, I must admit to not knowing Spanish. At all.

If you’d asked me before I first heard Manu Chao, I’d have called that a deal breaker. It turns out that for a song like Minha Galera, lyrics aren’t as important as the feeling you get just from the melody and the sound of the lyrics, which are in Portuguese. Give it a listen, you might be surprised.

So, on to Sigur Ros, who until very recently hadn’t recorded a song in English. For the most part, they sing in their native Icelandic, a language more or less untouched for the last thousand years. As if to emphasise my point, though, they also frequently sing in a synthetic, purely aesthetic language they call Vonlenska; we would normally interpret that in english as “Hopelandic”. This is one of my favourite things about Sigur Ros: it’s not just me that listens without necessarily understanding every word. I don’t have to exert myself to divine meaning, because in a lot of cases, the only real meaning is portrayed through the sound of what’s being sung. The lyrics have no intrinsic meaning, no significance outside of the song. True vocal melody.

See you next time.

Simple Things was published on a Sunday

So today I wanted to write about music discovery, mostly because I’ve had occasion to try out something new on that front. Of course, that previous sentence misused the word “new” in just the same way that words were misused in an earlier post of mine. I guess I just can’t follow my own advice.

The new (to me) service that I’ve been alluding to is Rdio, and it’s pretty good. The premise is familiar; for a flat monthly fee, one can stream as many tunes as one wants, or optionally sync those tunes to one’s device for offline listening. The service costs just £5 a month, and when my free trial is over, I will absolutely be not signing up.

I had thought when I left Spotify’s service behind that it was because of the introduction of a policy that new customers sign up using their Facebook account. (I expunged my Facebook account back when I thought the service was still cool because I had concerns about their copyright policy for uploaded photographs. That issue may have been fixed by know, but I’m frankly glad I’m out of it now.) As it turns out, that may have just been a catalyst in my move away from by-song streaming.

Rdio is a service of two halves in my eyes. Users can search for a specific song or album, create playlists, and assemble a collection of the music the like to listen to. This is mirrored by the functionality of the Music app on my iPhone, or iTunes, or Sonora, or SongBird, or [insert name here], although backed, of course, by a much larger library of music. The other half is more in the vein of Last.fm, Pandora or The Sixty One: the user enters a band, or a song, or a genre, and they provide music that their system thinks you’ll enjoy.

This second kind of service is much more appealing to me: I’d rather have less work than more when it comes to finding something good to listen to, and I’d rather the tunes just keep rolling in. The problem I have with Rdio is that this aspect of the service isn’t great. Now Last.fm have a lot more information about what I listen too, so I would expect their radio to generally sound better to my ear, but the worst of it for the fine folks at Rdio is that Last.fm isn’t the only radio station better for me than theirs. In fact, I’d say there are a number of music services better suited to my needs than even Last.fm.

In an odd twist of fate for someone as tech and gadget driven as I am, those services are old-fashioned radio stations. For music discovery, I’d much rather listen to 6 Music than muck around trying to get Rdio or Last.fm to work: the tunes are hand-picked by humans, they’re often brand new to my ears and unlike anything I own (and therefore unlikely to turn up on Last.fm or Pandora), and the music is even interspersed with news and interviews with musicians. It’s a heady cocktail, and doesn’t require me to sign up for anything or hand over personal details or rights.

And I can listen to it while I’m in the car.

Until the next time, stay safe.

I Love My Car was published on a Wednesday

Today is really a follow up to last week’s post. I posted that, and then almost immediately opened an app on my phone and enjoyed the excitement of music discovery through non-radio means. Hypocrite.

In a sorry attempt to salvage some respectability and save face, I’m now going to devote some serious wordage to rationalising and self-justification. If you’d rather just read about the newly discovered band, skip the next two paragraphs.

I am basing my rationalising on the idea that what my last post was about wasn’t in fact new versus old, or high-tech versus low-tech, but that rather that it was about automatic versus manual. In this light, when I was singing the praises of broadcast radio, it was the DJs that I was in favour of, and the services I decried, whilst they exhibit different approaches and levels of quality in their algorithms,are all hobbled by the fact that they use algorithms at all.

The app that I fired up last week was not a machine driven recommendation service, but rather a magazine of sorts, called Band of the Day. The app is very simple, beautifully designed and engineered, and simply presents the user with a new band every day. The band are interviewed, a short biography is attached, and the app even provides a few sample tracks for your listening pleasure. There are also links to buy the entire catalogue of the days band, and even some videos if you go for that kind of thing. It’s a cool app, and it’s free; go download it.

The band that I found through this app are called Fang Island, and I’ve been listening to their second album Major a lot this week. I’d say I’ve been in need of some upbeat music of late, and I’d have to agree with the band when they say that their sound is “like everyone high-fiving everyone else”. The band that sprung to mind for camparative purposes was The Polyphonic Spree, but to be honest, that’s a terrible comparison to make.

The album is fantastic, and happy and fun, but it doesn’t have the naively optimistic feel of the Spree’s efforts. I’m going to bow to professional journalism now, and quote from an article for National Public Radio:

On this record, singer-guitarist Jason Bartell told NPR in an email, I think we are trying to dig past that surface-level positivity, and trying to mine a sort of core positivity that I feel is inherent in music itself.

I’d urge you to go have a listen, especially given that you can do so for free, in reasonable quality, at the site linked to the word Major above. You never know, they might be your new favourite band.

I’ll see you next time.

Beyond the Sunrise was published on a Friday

And the heart is hard to translate
It has a language of its own.
It talks in tongues and quiet sighs
In prayers and proclamations,
In the grand deeds of great men
And the smallest of gestures,
In short, shallow gasps.

Wow. Today I’m going to share some of my thoughts on lyrics, and by extension poetry, and the picture that they can paint.

I really love song lyrics. I’ve written about this before on this blog: about how important they can be and how sometimes you don’t need them at all, and about how easy they are to mistake for something completely different, and about how sometimes it’s just as if you’ve lived the story being told.

The aspect of lyrics that I most enjoy, though, is that (with a few exceptions) it’s all over inside of four minutes. This means that there isn’t time to fill in a long and detailed story and plot: the trick to lyric writing, as well as poetry, lies in being able to paint with broad brushstrokes and still imbue your words with real feeling and significance.

In writing, this is poetry. In painting, this is Impressionism. I don’t think it’s any coincidence at all that my favourite songs are the ones with intricate lyrics and my favourite artist is Van Gogh.

And yes, I did just compare Florence + The Machine to Vincent Van Gogh.

But my point is, they both do something wonderful. I can’t do it myself, which I think just adds to my wonder and admiration, but I can describe it. The artists I love can produce a representation of a place or a person or a situation, a representation that doesn’t look or sound like the real thing looks or sounds, but that instead looks or sounds like what it really is.

Which is beautiful.

I Could Be Dreaming was published on a Wednesday

Never judge a book by its cover.

This is a great sentiment, I think: appearances can be incredibly deceiving, and it’s a good plan to limit the assumptions you make about things based on them.

I do think the metaphor could use some work, though. As any publisher or marketing exec will tell you, the cover is there to allow judgment of a book. I mean, looking at the cover is no substitute for reading the thing, but there are a lot of books out there, and only so many that I have time to read.

Getting back to the point, and indeed the ongoing concept of this blog, the equivalent construct in music is the record sleeve, or CD case, or album art, depending on your musical vector of choice. And these objects, like the covers of books, exist both to protect their precious cargo and to invite the buyer to pre-judge the material inside. In some cases, this judgement is ably facilitated by the cover designer (i.e. Sinner by Drowning Pool, sometimes less so (lazy example: The White Album. Either way, it used to be that this was the first thing a buyer saw when browsing in a shop.

Of course, music has a distinct advantage over literature in that it takes far less time to consume, at least on the first run through. This means that buyers may already be familiar with at least the singles from an album before deciding to purchase. Indeed, with the increasing prevalence of services like Spotify and Rdio, The buyer may have heard the entire album more than once, and only be buying due to listening limits or for portable play.

My inspiration for writing this post was not simply album covers, though. I realised that these judgements we make based on the packaging and design of the product are perhaps the least of the judgements we make about the music we haven’t listened to.

As an example of this, I would be surprised if I have listened to and enjoyed more than three tracks that have been in the top forty in the last two years. There are of course exceptions to this, but I now consider “is in the charts” to be a reasonable selection criterion for music that I don’t want to waste valuable listening time on. Similarly, there are bands that I simply refuse to give time to.

I was going to produce a huge list at this juncture, but decided that it would not be in the interests of my mental health to do so.

My concern is that this exclusionary attitude has deafened me to some music that I could have otherwise enjoyed quite profitably over the years. Of course, I do have an example at this stage, since this post has been composed in honour of a band I’ve completely ignored until recently purely because of their rather arrogant name.

Their name.

And the example are The Cure. Good band, lots of really enjoyable tunes, but I’m only just getting into them myself, so don’t expect any advice or insights from me. Instead, go find a band you’d always assumed were rubbish and give them a try. You might be surprised.

Until the next time, good night and travel well.

Your Cover’s Blown was published on a Tuesday

I set sail on this beautiful pea-green blog with a pussycat, but now it’s been a year and a day, and I think it’s just about time we came back. I enjoyed writing this thing, but you can tell from the diminishing frequency of posts that I’ve found it harder and harder to set aside time for it as the year has gone on. Now comes the time to give in and say “no more”.

I hope that I leave behind an interesting insight into a year of my musical musings, and a taste of how I feel about the world of recorded audio. Whatever happens, this page will stay here, a 71kb reminder of 2012, the year the world didn’t end.

I’m afraid I haven’t much on my mind as regards music with which to embellish this final post, except to let you know that this week I finally got my hands on a vinyl copy of Doolittle, so now all I need to do is gold plate it and catch up with Voyager.

Hang on, is that it? Is he only going to talk about Pixies? Surely that post title is wrong, then?

Ah yes, the oftentimes cryptic blog titles. Well, since February, the title of every post (including this one) has been the name of a Belle & Sebastian song. I hope that makes up for naming the blog after a Pixies lyric.

Have a nice life, girls and boys.

Belle & Sebastian was published on a Sunday