Category: Music

Thanks, Mute Math

Sometimes a song helps build your resolve, reminds you that there is more than your daily life, and coaxes you out of your comfort zone. One song in particular that has recently helped me in times of nervous retreat is Mute Math’s “Typical.” I would play it while driving around Little Rock, I played it when I drove across the Verrazano-Narrows bridge into Brooklyn, and it came up on my iPod the other day as I walked up the final flight of steps to my local train platform overlooking the city. It made me realize…I did it. I’m here.

I’m sure this will sound corny, but here are the lyrics:

Come on, can’t I dream for one day
There’s nothing that can’t be done
But how long should it take somebody
Before they can be someone?

‘Cause I know there’s
got to be another level
Somewhere closer to the other side
And I’m feeling like it’s now or never
Can I break the spell of the typical?

I’ve lived through my share of misfortune
And I’ve worked in the blazing sun
But how long should it take somebody
Before they can be someone?

And here’s the video:

Get to Know David Mead

The perfect cherry on top of my triumph yesterday was a MySpace bulletin from David Mead saying that he’d be playing at the Living Room last night. The Living Room, like most of the great tiny venues in New York, is located on the Lower East Side[1], just down Ludlow from Houston[2]. I was going to be at the Mercury Lounge last night to see my friend Elizabeth play trombone with one of her many bands. Fortunately her show was at 10 and David’s at 11.

Some background on David: he’s probably my favorite solo singer/songwriter in the world. Originally from the South, he moved up to NYC, then down to Nashville, and has moved back up recently. In addition to writing lyrics with smooth sophistication, he also composes melodies that grab you instantly. As a direct result of his immense talent, he’s not well known. I have all his CDs. Check out the tunes on his myspace page. If he were a movie, he’d be endlessly quotable: “trapped in the orbit of your rolling eyes,” “the lonesome weight of truth,” “and miles will make you notice / all you dream is real.” Here is David’s online lyric archive.

And, on top of it all, his journals are very entertaining and elegantly written.

1.) Let’s make a list of these tiny Lower East Side venues I’ve been to thus far, all within a 4 block radius of each other: The Living Room, Arlene’s Grocery, American Underground, the Mercury Lounge, Piano’s, Rockwood Music Hall.
2.) Scene of Tuesday night’s trucking maneuvers.

Lazy Sunday

It’s almost 2 p.m. and I’m still in my pajamas. I’ve been watching, copying and screen-grabbing a DVD that my brother made of old home movies. I uploaded several shots to flickr, so check those out.

Yesterday I ventured uptown to eat at Tom’s Restaurant, made famous by Seinfeld and Suzanne Vega. I also walked by the Flatiron building (also known as the Daily Bugle in the Spider-man movies), which I’d never managed to find before. I also spent a lot of time at Norman’s Sound and Vision; they were having a big 50% off sale in the basement. Here are the highlights:

The Old 97’s – Satellite Rides: $1.50
Pearl Jam -Ten: $1.50
Beastie Boys – To the 5 Boroughs: $2
Steely Dan – Two Against Nature: $1.50
Elvis Costello – Spike: $1.50

I’d wager that in the next few years, as CDs die off, this sort of thing will happen more often. Stores will start unloading used CDs at the same prices as used vinyl. $1 to $2. The retail CD stores are already gone; it’s just a matter of time before the secondhand places start disappearing.

Debbie Harry Eats Spiraling

So my friend Tom, frontman for Spiraling, got hired as Debbie Harry’s music director and keyboard player awhile back. He brought in his drummer Paul, and when I saw them on The Today Show last month[1], I noticed they had no bass player. But now I see by this picture at New York Magazine that bassist Bob has joined the group, thus making 3/4 of Spiraling into Debbie’s backing band.

These are the guys who make me want to move to NYC. Here are pics of them jamming in my music room last year.

1.) That was particularly freaky to watch, since I kept reminding myself, “these guys have slept on my living room floor. Now they’re on my living room TV.”

Excerpts from a Conversation

Here is an outtake from a discussion I had recently that a friend said was helpful to him, and it’s one of those things that I’ve felt but never verbalized, so here goes. His comments are indicated with a >, and mine are the replies.

>Britney Spears serves a purpose other than the enjoyment of music.

Yes, entertainment. In fact the same could be said of all rock and roll – it is by definition a package of music, theatrics, and often dance. Elvis’s hip shaking performances were what separated him from Carl Perkins (arguably the better musician) and made him so revolutionary. Musicians like us tend to miss the fact that the fashion, ideology, and socio-politics of rock and roll are more important to most people than pure music. And that’s fine. It’s tricky for music being an art form and an entertainment form, but insisting that all music should be art is like insisting that all speech should be poetry.

>why shouldn’t a person who has developed musical talent over the years be paid as well?

Because life isn’t fair. Getting paid for something involves things like luck, connections, and responsibility. It involves a lot more luck than most people realize. Just because you build it, that doesn’t guarantee people will come. And getting paid for making music? You’re at the mercy of an audience (the ultimate employer) who have their own interests which probably don’t match yours. To expect payment, you often have to make phone calls, get in front of club owners, sell yourself, promote, bargain, negotiate, compromise, and these are just more things that great artists are not often good at. But entertainers more often are.

>For some strange reason, I really like that song and can’t hear it enough!

I came up with a theory recently after sitting through the top 40 crap they play at the movie theater before the previews start. I actually liked one of the tunes, and that’s when it hit me…

Songs are like children: They can be conceived under the worst circumstances by horrible people whose motives are less than honorable, and yet they can still turn out to be absolutely magical. A great song can be born of complete insincerity and crass commercialism and, despite all of that, authentically move you. Occasionally works of art transcend the limitations of their maker.

Strange Intersection

I’m reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, and one of the latter chapters is called “Down the Memory Hole” (a reference to Orwell’s 1984), which was an interesting coincidence for me because I’ve been listening to Kevin Moore’s Memory Hole, a very, very interesting pastiche of found-audio that I highly recommend. It hovers somewhere between music and sample collage. It’s a meditation on politics, religion, and humanity. You can listen to it for free at ChromaKey.com (click on “Audio” and then on “Memory Hole.”

The first paragraph of that chapter in the book is the same paragraph that starts Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead. So I was twice struck. Here’s the passage in question, which sparked Brockmeier’s novel:

“Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many…can be recalled by name. But they are not living dead. There is a difference.”

-James Loewen. Lies My Teacher Told Me

In other news, I just got back from seeing Resident Evil 3, and while I lament the relegation of Milla Jovovich to the land of post-apocalyptic zombie movies, I have to say I completely understand the appeal of her status as an icon of bad-assery. I may even go see the inevitable part 4. But I won’t rush to see parts 1 or 2. Once upon a time she was a really good singer and musician. I also came to realize the appeal of zombie movies: they are the best excuse to see excessive violence without remorse. After all, they’re just zombies. They are the last frontier of justifiable slaughter.

Rodrigo Y Gabriela

These kids must have the best marketing team ever. I keep seeing them mentioned in all the magazines and blogs, and I am completely impressed by the fact that people enjoy them. They are fantastic, but musically they are doing nothing that Megadeth and Pantera haven’t done. They just do it in a different format. Indie rockers are apparently allowed to enjoy virtuosity when it comes in an unfamiliar context. And the added novelty of the female guitarist cranks up the appeal a few notches.

And by the same token, we’ll sadly never see Al DiMeola. John Mclaughlin or Paco DeLucia in Spin or Blender. Rodrigo Y Gabriela are the Gypsy Kings for a new generation. Here’s hoping more kids start playing guitar as a result. This may be the only way to get kids excited about playing the ever loving crap out of their guitars again.

Writing About Music Is Like Two-Stepping About Flying Buttresses

Since I started writing about music for Arkansas Times, people have told me I should more actively pursue it as a vocation. Apparently it’s something I do well.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but I think it has something to do with the fact that I take my writing ability for granted. It’s not a skill I recall spending a lot of time developing (as I’m sure this blog’s more meandering and malformed entries will attest), at least not after high school. I remember turning in my first essay to Mrs. Lewis in 10th grade and her comments about how horribly lame my writing was; I took it to heart and became determined to write effectively from then on, which lasted until senior year. After that it was the only real marketable skill I had, which led me to become an English major.

Music has always been the thing I’ve spent the most time developing, yet I’ve never wanted it to become my career. To do that, music would have to become work, and I don’t think I could stomach that. Plus the music I love most has proven time and again to be the least commercially successful.

My tastes in music tend to revolve almost exclusively around pure music and not lyrics. I think I distrust words as interlopers into music. I don’t need words in music; I’d be just fine without them, for the most part[1]. All they really do for me is give me something to sing, a way to participate. Music has the power to make crummy words sound great (just as truly great words have the power to improve crummy music). Rhythm and harmony are so powerful that songs of complete gibberish can become classics (“Wooly Bully,” “Tutti Frutti,” “Louie Louie,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit”). SO many songwriters compose tunes with decent lyrics but boring chords and arrangements; my perspective is: if you’re not going to step up to the plate musically, then go be a poet and see how well your words do by themselves. Don’t sail by with music to pick up the slack. Anyway, all of this ties into the fact that I approach music from my own little peculiar musician-oriented vantage point, so I’m probably not qualified to write about music for regular folk.

So I had lunch with Ted Ludwig on Friday and he told me that I’m probably more qualified to write about music because my background as a musician helps me to understand music on a deeper level. Maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s a great idea, since I don’t mind writing becoming work. It hardly seems like work, actually. Of course, the downside is that if I were to devote more time to writing about music, I’d probably get assigned to write about some trendy band that everyone’s excited about but me. And these bands are legion. I can’t begin to count the number of times the entire world goes ga-ga over some band that just strikes me as horribly bland. Even most indie rock strikes me as irritatingly boring.

So I doubt I’d be of much use to the world of rock journalism. I have a hard time writing about things that don’t excite me. Maybe my niche is writing about the stuff no one else wants to. So far at the Times I’ve covered old school hip-hop, jazz, and eccentric indie rock. Maybe there’s enough on the fringes for me to stay occupied.

1.) And I would also be just fine without musicals, which allow for the possibility of combining crummy music, insipid lyrics, poor acting and lame dancing into one reasonably nifty package that impresses only those people who don’t particularly care about those four constituent art forms. Don’t get me wrong, though, when it’s done right it’s transcendent (West Side Story, Oliver!). But I’m rarely impressed by musicals in general.