Author: Nick
Arrangements, bare songs, and idioms
- A spiritual/religious interpretation of the song’s lyrics is foregrounded over an interpersonal/relationship interpretation. In the first B section (“If I have been unkind…”), the speaker could be justifying himself to a lover, or asking forgiveness of a supreme being; the gospel interpretation puts a heavy thumb on the scales.
- The performance starts to overwhelm the song, making it more difficult to listen to the lyrics. This softens the blow of some of the more surprising images in the song (“a baby, stillborn”; “a pretty woman standing in her darkened door”).
- The meaning of the song’s lyrics may even be mingled, for the listener, with the meaning of the gospel standards the arrangement suggests. While this kind of interpretation – enhancing or changing the meaning of a song through an unexpected arrangement – can be wonderful, I’m not sure that it works that way here.
James Blood Ulmer
One of the musicians who most inspires me is James Blood Ulmer. Ulmer played guitar in Ornette Coleman’s bands in the 1970s and has gone on to record many records as a band leader and frontman since. In 2005 Ulmer released Birthright, a record of solo performances which included new songs, blues covers, and solo guitar and flute. One song, “Geechee Joe”, narrates the life of Ulmer’s grandfather:
Bare songs and hearing songs
I wrote in my last post that the way the music industry structures and delivers music can make it difficult to hear songs. The song may come to us as a framework for a powerful arrangement or performance, or even as a piece of a larger narrative about a particular celebrity. But, given that context, what possibilities arise when songs are presented in a bare form?
For very popular musicians, presenting bare, often acoustic, versions of popular songs has become a familiar gesture, meant to rekindle a sense of immediacy or authenticity around songs that have been heard dozens or hundreds of times. This tactic may have peaked in the ’90s with the popularity of MTV Unplugged, but it is a standard element in the pop star playbook.
Another familiar mode of presenting the bare song is as a deliberate choice for a particular song – that is, for a performer who normally uses fuller arrangements to present a particular song in a simple way to highlight something about that song. This is the mode that I am most interested in because it seems more likely to be focused on the song itself, rather than the performer’s persona. The two modes can also overlap or one mode can masquerade as the other. What I am interested in is not particularly authenticity, but a performance mode that lets the listener hear the song better as a song. Pining for a truly authentic performance is a little like visiting the location of the first McDonald’s or Dunkin’ Donuts.
What (else) can songs do?
Songwriting is poorly understood, if at all. Take a critical look at songwriting advice and it becomes clear that the advice-givers are almost exclusively concerned with popular and industry success and have little regard for or awareness of the possibilities of the song itself. One popular advice listicle, for example, explains that music industry executives, who fancy themselves as song experts, can’t recognize the quality of a song unless they hear it in a slick sounding demo, because they listen to slick sounding demos all day. But how can it be that our song experts are actually unable to hear songs?
Songs are undertheorized. We don’t know what they are. I have read reams and reams of music criticism, journalism, and history, and the amount I’ve read that was actually about songs could probably fit on a few dozen pages. We understand the records, the recording process, the industry, the personalities, the costumes, the packaging, the tours, the TV appearances, but what about the songs?
In the music industry, songs are raw materials, like uncut diamonds to a jeweler or cows to a butcher. One of the music industry’s activities is the transformation of songs into industrial products. A record is like a sausage – there’s a song in there, but it’s usually been mixed up with a lot of salt and spices and wrapped up in its own intestines. I don’t intend that as a criticism – I love sausage and I love records – but I do think that this practice, of turning songs into records, blinds both listener and musician to other possible uses and lives that songs might have.
There are several assumptions about the lives of songs that go unstated in nearly all songwriting advice:
- Songs are potential records. The goal of songwriting should be to write songs that make good records.
- Songwriting is a craft. There might be some arty bits floating around it, but they are slightly embarrassing and best discussed in hushed tones or not at all.
- A song on its own – without a record or an arrangement – cannot make its way in the world.
- Songwriting is a commercial art. Regardless of genre, success is a meaningful concept.
Now that you know – more reissued music
Another old record, on the internet for the first time! Going in chronological order so far, I recorded this one in Murfreesboro, TN. No drum machines here, but some samples and other interesting touches. I think this record has a dreamy feel for a folk record – loose performances, hazy keyboards and electric guitars. Some decent songs, too – Crying in the night might be my favorite thing here, but maybe other people won’t think it’s as funny as I do.
she hate the war – old music from 2003
I’m putting my old records on the internet, where a lot of them have never been before. This is the first one, and the first record I made by myself on a computer. I started working on this right after moving to Nashville in 2002, recording in the small nearly furniture-free apartment I shared with a roommate.
I still like some of these songs a lot, while others are a little hard for me to listen to. I won’t say which are which, though – maybe you’ll like the ones that I can’t handle.
There are about eight more records where this came from, plus Hotel Universe records, and maybe some others, so keep an eye out.
Noise folk – is it a thing?
Sometimes I think of the music I want to do as noise folk, but is that even a thing? I spent a little time today listening to the noise folk tag on band camp, just to see if other people think it’s the same thing I do. There’s some intense stuff there, but I wanted to draw what little attention I can to two records that are pretty great, and have a real connection to what I think noise folk might be.
Red Wasp by Victor Florence is sweet and easy, with an edge that feels unforced. The songs walk the line between worn-in and familiar, and the production style is forceful without being abrasive. Florence has some other records that push harder against traditional forms and feel more collaged, and those are worth checking out as well.
Tucker Theodore’s To Make the Sun Hurt manages to be more noisy and more folk at the same time. Released as a cassette by Antiquated Future, the record oscillates between lo-if and destroyed, with feedback threatening to overwhelm the sound of acoustic guitar and vocals. Really strong finger-style guitar manages to push through the mix. Field recordings are an obvious point of reference, but the record doesn’t devolve into a genre exercise. Like finding a letter from your great-grandfather under the hood of your car.
Grab bag reviews: Fairweather Currents
- Positive reviews (why write about things that aren’t good?)
- Focus on genres I care most about: home recording, singer-songwriter, hip hop, maybe some experimental or electronic stuff if I’m in the mood
- Local! Extra points if there are songs are about Boston, because that will make me like them.
- Obscurity. If it feels like no one else will review the record, that is a good reason to review it.
Five wordy, hushed, self-conscious, charming, home recorded songs. The narrative that emerges is of one more college student new to Boston, trying to make sense of a new environment, The cover is the Huntington Avenue Y.
Dylan Citron sings in a voice so gentle it can seem androgynous and strums on a dry, thin, acoustic guitar. Crowd noise from parties, distorted drum machines, vocal samples, and slow, melodic piano lines all take their place in arrangements that are familiar but not stale or derivative.
The last song, “The Times Are Never-A-Changin'” drifts slowly over a piano arpeggio, punctuated by the crunching up and down of the piano’s sustain pedal. The lyrics suggest a young narrator grappling for his own relationship with the violence in the world around him, and the song ends with a brief sample of a gospel recording. As the title suggests, it’s a protest song that doesn’t know quite what to say, and it’s one of the highlights of a really nice EP.
radio radio
A song from how it left me blind may be playing this afternoon on the amazing Outlaw Roadshow radio show on WEMF! You can hear it live from 4-6 PM today.