Music Write-Ups
How do you know Chris Earley?
How many MP3s do you have on your hard drive? <10
I was so cool the day I got my Motorola SLVR. It had just come out, and in a fortuitous confluence of circumstances, my cell phone contract was running out and I had Cingular by the tomatoes. I walked out of the store with my shiny new phone, camera and all.
Turns out it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. The interface is, by and large, horrendous. The battery has started to die after little more than a day. The thing doesn’t even have an auto-lock. But one feature it does have, besides the très chic form factor, is iTunes built in. I can plug it into my computer and download mp3s, and play my music anywhere straight from my phone. The memory, however, is pretty limited, so I had to pick only the few songs I wanted to have with me and be able to play for people at any time. What an exercise, right?
The first song I put on my phone was “Graovo Dance.”
You are lucky. I have listened to this song most often on the same cell-phone speaker that brutally distorts the voices of all my friends and family. But you, you can listen to it on multimedia speakers attached to your computer. It’s not surround sound, but it’s still a big step up. I have to say though, the tabla break sounds pretty good, even through that tiny little cone.
Yes, you read that right, there’s a tabla break. Are you listening to the song yet?
-ryan
Bear with me here. This song starts with Don Byron by himself, then the piano and drums come in, then at the very end they drop out again and it’s Byron alone again. So I was listening to this song in the living room at my parents’ house, and there’s a little pause right after the first lick that Byron plays on his solo at the end (it’s at about 4:05, for those of you counting), and in that little pause, I said “Uuuh!” without even thinking about it.
So I’m sharing this song for the following reasons:
-ryan
This was my writing year.
I don’t mean songwriting. That happened back in 2005. This year was about, real, honest, no-frills writing.
Most obviously, I have been writing for songotheday this year. But there’s more than that: I also started my blog this year, on January 1st. With very few exceptions, I’ve been posting every other day. And then there’s writing once removed: This is my third year working for the Creative Writing Program at Stanford, and I’ve finally started to read what the people there are writing. And I’ve started to understand what they go through, how writing is a process, and you can learn to do it better. I’ve also started to understand why they chose writing over teaching or banking or lawyering: it’s the record. The permanent record of imagination. And with writing, that record is so magnificently transparent. Everyone’s had that moment where they think, “I wish I could just explain what’s going on in my head right now in a way that people would understand.” But writers actually can do that.
Writers can. Musicians can’t.
Musicians are given a Fender Strat and a crappy amp, and asked to communicate something. Then critics, who are much better-equipped to direct our thought processes, have their way with the music. Consumers have a voice too, although it’s usually put to limited analytical use in some variation of the following: “I love dancing to this,” “I can’t dance to this,” “I like the words,” “I don’t like the words,” “Why do rappers have to swear so much.” But musicians, they can’t even say those things. All they have is a guitar.
The thing is, Kevin Shields, leader of My Bloody Valentine, came really really close to actually saying something.
I urge you, I beg you, go buy a copy of this album to listen to before the new year. It’s called “Loveless.” I posted the first track on here. It’s about sex, I think. Specifically, that sort of somnambulent, early-morning, pre-coffee sex. The rest of the album doesn’t let down, either. It breaks down genre walls, blah, blah, blah. It does all that good musical stuff, but most importantly: it makes you understand something that you didn’t before. It’s like having a guitar plugged directly into the language center of your brain, with that white knob marked “Volume” turned to where the “10″ meets the indicator line. And when you turn off and unplug, the reverberation is still there but the air has changed somehow. And so have you.
You’re ready for 2008.
-Ryan
My friends like to call me a hipster, because it really annoys me and my friends are a**holes. They also claim that my denial of hipsterdom makes me more of a hipster, which is a classic example of “begging the question” and therefore a logical fallacy. Not that that deters them.
My a**hole friends base their critique on a study of many aspects of my life, but since this is a music blog, I’ll address the music part. The way I understand it, they are calling me music-snobby (a classic hipster trait) because I take music pretty seriously, and I have a tendency towards art music coupled with an intense distaste for Coldplay. (There, I said it. I once undiplomatically described Coldplay as “vacuous music for vacuous people” to a Coldplay fan. She didn’t take it well.)
Part of the reason I don’t want to be identified as a hipster is because it instantly devalues pretty much every life decision I have made or will make in the realm of music. For instance, usually hipsters are the type who start a band without learning to play their respective instruments. On the surface, I appear as though I might be a hipster because I was in a band, but the thing is, I was acually playing somewhat advanced, creative things on an analog keyboard as opposed to recklessly triggering samples from a synthesizer. In order to do so, I had to practice piano, and a lot of it. If I let the hipster label stick, it’s like all the practicing goes for nothing.
But there’s also the music we listen to. And here’s maybe the most important thing I’ll say – something that’s going to transcend this little rant I’m on and actually mean something: my absolute favorite thing to listen to, in the entire world, is…
…silence.
There was a kinda weird ethnomusicology professor at UCSD who gave a guest lecture in one of my classes, and I remember in particular this one piece of advice she gave. She said that we should stop using music as a drug. And if you think about it, we do use music as a drug in so many ways; it’s something we use to alter our mood or perception of something, but in doing so we obscure what is actually happening. This is true of movies, of commercials, in elevators, in shopping malls. More threateningly though, it happens in clubs, at colleges, in places where what is being billed as “music” is actually a very sinister kind of placebo. Because music at its best is more than an excuse to dance. I’m not saying dance music or 50 Cent or Britney or whatever don’t have a place in the world, but I am saying that the more we see of them, the more we lose our ability to distinguish them from musicians that can have a deeper, more meaningful impact on our brainwaves. The hipster with his third-gen iPod is the classical example who is hooked on the drug. That’s not me.
So if we’re not really listening to the music, if we’re no longer aware of it, can’t we just turn it off and talk to each other? Or better yet, just be comfortable enough with each other to not talk at all?
Today’s song is about a hipster.
Ryan Jacobs loves all his friends and doesn’t really think they are a**holes.
-ryan
One of my dirty secrets is that I used to be a “Starbucks Partner”: I worked at the Starbucks-owned Hear Music in Stanford Shopping Center before it closed. It was one of the less crappy jobs available to a high schooler, which I was at the time. The best part was that on my breaks, I could listen to anything in the store. One day, a Steve Reich complete works box set came in. I didn’t know who Steve Reich was. I knew he was filed in “Classical,” but the box didn’t look like one of the regular classical CDs with cover art featuring 18th century frescoes and shit. So I thought I’d listen.
“New York Counterpoint” was in that box. I found it by dumb luck.
Fast forward to my undergrad years in the UCSD music department, which prides itself on nurturing the avant-garde. I thought surely I’d hear this kind of stuff again. But it turns out that within the severely marginalized genre of contemporary art music, there are actually miniature genre wars and marginalization within the genre. Steve Reich has been dubbed a “Minimalist” composer (a term that doesn’t mean what it seems it obviously should mean - that’s part of the problem, but let’s not go there) and it turns out that minimalism has kind of a bad rap at UCSD because it’s not a rigorous enough mode of composition or whatever, so it only gets mentioned in class sort of as something to maybe be aware of. And there I was, having been thinking I was finally in a place where people liked crazy music like me, being told that one of my favorite pieces of music in the world - a piece I was actually excited about that sounded new and fresh and innovative - was not something we’d be spending our time listening to.
I don’t think it was a conscious decision, but I think that’s around the time I decided that if I really wanted to learn about music, I was going to have to at least partly teach myself. So I went to the library, and I listened to La Monte Young and Philip Glass and Terry Riley and all the other minimalists, and I found their scores, and then I listened to the postminimalists and the so-called “holy minimalists” and all of it. And I realized that for all its talk of inclusivity, the professors at UCSD had their own biases. I think most of them would acknowledge that, but I also can think of a few who probably would not.
What if I had never opened that box at Hear Music? I might have ended up five years later thinking Brian Ferneyhough (exponent of the “new complexity” school of composition) was the be-all and end-all of modern Western music. Or worse, I might have left like too many of my peers, with only a degree in my hand and a sour taste in my mouth. It seems like such a small thing, but the coincidence that led me to listen to this piece before embarking on my higher educational career had a very tangible impact on what I was able to learn and accomplish. In a very real sense, “New York Counterpoint” changed my life. It may or may not change your life, but at the very least, it will probably change your opinion of the clarinet.
-Ryan Jacobs
Una Muy Bonita - A very pretty one.
This song is by Ornette Coleman (this whole SFJazz Collective CD is, in fact, a tribute to Ornette). A lot of people thought Ornette was crazy; a lot of people thought he didn’t know how to play his horn. There’s a trumpet player named Don Cherry who said, “The day I met Ornette, it was about 90 degrees and he had on an overcoat. I was scared of him.” Ornette played with an enormous amount of palpable, percussive intensity.
Joshua Redman, son of saxophonist Dewey Redman, went to Harvard and was on his way to becoming a lawyer. Then, he won a national jazz saxophone competition (yes, these exist) and went pro. He’s a young guy. The San Francisco Jazz Festival made him the Artistic Director and gave him money to get a band of passionate young musicians together and rehearse. The result is the SFJazz Collective, an octet that commissions arrangements honoring seminal and often underexposed jazz figures like Ornette Coleman.
Isn’t it amazing how this really sounds like a group called the SFJazz Collective, not the NYJazz Collective? If you’ve been to San Francisco and New York, you know what I mean. Listen to the band mess up at a little over 9 minutes in, and laugh it off. Listen to the drummer spur on the band with hoots from the back. Listen to the vibraphone player play every single tone bar on his instrument, and drive the groove. With mallets. Listen to the city’s hills, fog, and noisy calm. Listen to what can only happen in San Francisco, when you decide that professional musicians deserve conditions ripe for making art instead of money.
When I was in high school, I played on an outdoor stage for the opening of the San Francisco Jazz Festival on one of San Francisco’s trademark perfect October days. People took time out of the middle of their day to listen to a bunch of kids play their horns. And they enjoyed it. The music we played was pretty good, not great. But it didn’t matter. And whenever I make the drive up to the city now, along route 280 (the most beautiful highway in the country), I always have some kind of experience that reminds me that San Francisco’s a different kind of place. No one’s worried about manifest destiny, ’cause they’re already at the destination.
This band may as well have been playing outdoors.
This band is the soundtrack to 280 North.
-Ryan Jacobs
For my birthday, my girlfriend gave me a little Moleskine journal filled with blank music paper. I carry it in my bag, and sometimes when I’m at a coffee shop or trying to kill time somewhere, I try and write song lyrics in it. When I’m at home, I keep it beside me as I play guitar so I can stop every now and then to record some tablature.
Today was a coffee shop & lyrics day. But I went to the coffee shop at a strange time - it was that time of day when the sun is low in the sky but not quite setting. And light was just streaming into the place through the windows and the big openings left by the sliding doors. The bar stools, the big tables, the little tables, the water jug, the salt shakers, the registers, the black-and-white urban photographs on the wall, they were all soaked in fiery rays. For whatever reason, that made me think of this song - I thought maybe everyone around me would just wander into the sun (like, actually walk into the sky and into a burning ball of flame) singing “thank God it’s fatal.”
And I have no idea why, but that thought cured me of a writer’s block that’s been dogging me for awhile now. In the span of one coffee & cheesecake, I had two verses that are good enough that I don’t even think they need revision. That’s never happened to me before, ever. The thing is, the song I wrote is about a groomsman at a wedding who is in love with the bride - usually my songs aren’t quite that heavy. But I think “Heretics” got me in the right frame of mind - the frame where it’s ok to hurt, and where we wring damage “upon ourselves and others” and thank God that it all ends, but then say “Wait just a second now / It’s not all that bad.”
-Ryan Jacobs
“It may be years until the day/My dreams will match up with my pay”
Pretty much sums it up.
This song touches on something so universal among my generation - that feeling that we want to get our life started and we just can’t, and the magnetically opposite feeling of what the hell, let’s make the most of it.
The short story on Feist: She sang in a punk band and lost her voice. It could have been permanent. She went on vocal rest and learned to play guitar. Imagine, for a second, that the ability to do the one thing you love to do more than anything were taken away from you in your late 20s. You had to go a year working to be able to do that one thing. Imagine that at the end of that year, you could do that one thing again, not quite the same as you used to, but well enough. What would that be like? What would you think? Maybe this song.
I have no illusions of my dreams ever matching up with my pay. I’m on the second floor living without a yard. But hey, I’m still playing music.
-Ryan Jacobs
What do you drink with music like this? Tea? Coffee? Scotch?
Last time I played this song, I was drinking a champagne cocktail, made with mango and pear juice infused with lavender. A little girly, maybe, but the reason I was drinking this particular drink is because I was co-hosting a cocktail party. I was living with a friend of mine, housesitting for her dad, a professor who was on sabbatical for 3 months in China. Since we had a nice house all to ourselves, we decided this was our one chance to throw a fancy party with real stemware and everything. We invented the aforementioned drink for the occasion.
For whatever reason, a few people decided to show up right on time for this party. I had just gotten out of the shower and thrown on my shirt and tie when I heard the doorbell. I ran to join the party, sans shoes. Some of the first people to come were one of the girls I work with, who I found out later used to be a pretty serious classical musician, and a friend of mine who likes to DJ. We poured the drinks, and then I realized that in all the rush we had forgotten to get music ready. So I put on this Joe Lovano CD, and there were my co-worker and I in our formal wear hanging out in the living room at the waxing moment of the party - one of the nicest moments I’d had in awhile.
It didn’t last. The DJ had brought a House mix with some of his favorite artists which he asked me to put on (I actually wonder if he realized he made a faux pas, because as he brought me the CD, my coworker was in the middle of remarking how much she was enjoying the current selection…so much for first impressions). I obliged, and it was actually a good CD, but not the right time for it, and just like that, the vibe was gone and we moved on to the Mojitos.
The CD is called “I’m All For You,” and comes highly recommended if you’re looking for some evening music.
-Ryan Jacobs
One of my friends told me about the Weakerthans when I was in college. He was like a hipster with a good attitude. Maybe the good attitude came from listening to this song - it’s sort of a wake-up call to people who embrace their ennui a little too strongly. It’s told from the perspective of the singer’s cat, who doesn’t buy into the whole indie-rocker schtick; I’d like to officially give the Weakerthans the award for “Most accurately capturing the personality of a cat in a song.” Is that an award? Cause it should be.
P.S. This whole CD is really great, it’s called Reconstruction Site and it’s one of those albums that really is an album, in the full sense of the word.
-Ryan Jacobs