Both Plastic Palace Alice and Potential Falcon are touring soon, you can see which dates I'm playing on the left. As you can imagine, it's going to be a fairly busy month for me, so expect less frequent posting. I have no intention of turning this blog into a tour diary, but I'll try to find some interesting material while I'm away. I'm particularly looking forward to playing in Perth and Hobart, as I've never been to Tasmania or Western Australia.
At the same time, Plastic Palace Alice has booked some studio time in Brisbane to coincide with our gig their. It should be a fun, if very busy, few days.
In his article for Pitchfork, "The Decade in Pop", Tom Ewing writes:
The widespread availability of free music is generally seen as bad news for pop stars and the kind of music they make-- but a quick glance at popularity charts on services like the Pirate Bay or Mininova should throw this into doubt. The same acts-- Gaga and the Peas among them-- spark torrent downloads as easily as they shift units. Turning celebrity into money might be more difficult, but there still seems to be a need for pop stars.
Back when Coolfer was still active, this was pretty much the conclusion that he'd reached, too. The whole article is an interesting read, and definitely relevant if, like me, you've been playing "Futuresex/Lovesounds" a lot recently.
I was reading Jonathan Green's blog at Crikey, and I came upon this post. In it, he talks about the Alison Krauss and Robert Plant album Raising Sand, and their song "Through the Morning".
I have a thing about this song, and the distinctive country minor-lilt of the harmonies. That interval, that particular pairing of vocal parts, IS country music. How does something like that evolve? Is is just based on a regional singing accent? What’s the thing? I can’t get that question out of my head. Listen to the chorus and ponder for me would you?
Well, there are a number of questions in that, obviously, and I - with my small knowledge of country music - can't answer all of them, but I can attempt to grasp some. Here is a very rough transcription of the vocal parts, with the bass note underneath (likely to be wrong: this was a very quick transcription, and the middle melody in particular I think I flubbed).
What's going on here? Most simply, this is a case of melodies moving in parallel thirds. This means that the diatonic interval of the third (meaning either a minor or major third, in order to keep within the key) is the primary interval between parts, and they move in the same direction - making them move in a parallel fashion. This is a form of voice-leading, but they are careful not to have too many instances in which the voices move in contrary motion (where once voice moves in the opposite direction to the other). This tends to make one melody stand out as dominant over other, supporting melodies, as opposed to having three independent and equally important parts. In this, the upper melody is always the primary focus.
This arrangement of vocal parts creates a preponderance of four types of intervals: thirds, sixths (the inverse of thirds: if you take an interval of a third and lower the top note by an octave you get the interval of a sixth), fifths and fourths (the inverse of a fifth). This is a very smooth set of intervals, containing none of the dissonances you hear in seconds or sevenths (seconds inverted).
I was talking about counterpoint earlier, when talking about Spoon's song "Don't Make Me a Target". This is similar, in that it uses the techniques of voice-leading, yet is also not really counterpoint, as the melodies are not independent. This form of part writing is all over country and pop music, which partly answers Green's question of "what's the thing?" However, it doesn't go the whole way, as nothing about what I have written distinguishes this part from a pop song with harmonies, or even a 19th century classical piece.
What really makes this so country is, obviously, a combination of factors: the instrumentation; the chord progression; the melody; the lyrics and, possibly most important of all, the phrasing. Listen to the syrupy way in which each vocalist slides from one note to the next, evoking the sound of the steel guitar you hear in the background. The method of harmonising the melody is an important part, but, when broken down like this, still only one factor.
Wings On Fire is Potential Falcon's new album, out two days ago (though I am still yet to own a physical copy), distributed by Stomp. This is the first album by one of my bands that I actually play on, so I'm excited to finally have it out. Recording it was a fun, intensive couple of days for most of us, though Simon spent considerably longer on it.
You can read a review of it at Mess and Noise here. While I feel like Simon must get a little bit sick of constantly having his band being compared to Aleks and the Ramps, I'm still at the giddy stages of being excited that anybody even knows who I am, and that I'm in other bands. Which is lame, but hey, at least I'm honest.
My piece on public domain art was posted on Meanjin's blog Spike today. It drew a reasonable response from Paul Squires, referring to my comment that freedom of use is "by itself, a good thing for art":
For the hundredth time. This is not a good thing for art because it means you will not have professional artists with time and energy to create extraordinary works of art. Except for ones from a certain socio-economic and educational background. Do you want this to happen?
As I posted in reply over at Spike, I think Squires missed my point about it being good "by itself": that is, divorced from the other implications, such as loss of income for artists. I actually agree with Squires about the danger of loss of royalty income making it impossible for artists to dedicate serious amounts of time working on their art. Instead, like most artists I know – who aren't well-known enough to really get much in the way of royalties –, they would have to spend the majority of their time working in a regular job.
However, there are counter-arguments to this position. Firstly, one of the hidden premises is that the average level of quality of work created by full-time professional artists is higher than that created by those people who work regular jobs to support their art. This may be true, but it can't simply be taken as fact. Moreover, if it isn't true, then it puts the rest of the argument on shaky ground. Remember, this isn't a point about the poor people involved in the creation, but the suggestion that the quality suffers as a result of artists losing royalty payments.
Secondly, people may be surprised to know how many people take their art very seriously, yet have no particular desire to earn an income from it. I was speaking to a drummer friend of mine recently about the idea of royalties, and his perspective was that he wouldn't care if someone used his music without paying him. Sure, he said, he would always appreciate the money, but he's under no illusions that he is going to make a living off of music in the first place: it's not something that he regards as fundamentally important.
This is a concept that I find hard to support myself, because earning a living from making music is something that I aspire to do. I can't imagine continuing to dedicate the same amount of time to music that I do currently, if I am unable to eventually make some kind of profit from it. But I'm only one person. And, counter to the implication made by Squires, I'm the one with the well-off background and tertiary education, not my friend (I'm not, therefore, suggesting that the correlation is backwards, but that I'm not sure there is one to be made at all).
Royalties are, of course, one of the few streams of revenue that popular artists can still rely on to make some money from, and in this era of uncertainty in the music industry, it can seem a little off to suggest that artists should give this up, along with album sales. However, my original post was explicitly about Michael Jackson. That is, it was a post about dead artists, not live ones. While there is still, obviously, an argument to be made about continuing to pay royalties to copyright holders after an artist's death, it's a separate one, and not the argument Squire put forth in his comment.
The Hopetoun is a well-loved music venue in Sydney, and news of its closure is pretty sad, if for no other reason than the fact that Plastic Palace Alice was booked to play there in November. If you read this update, however, you can see that they'd been given the notice to comply to new standards several months ago. It seems likely that they kept booking shows because they didn't know when they would finally be forced to close, and hoped to hold on for as long as possible. The other option was to stop booking shows and to lose money in the process.
Not an enviable position to be in, but I can imagine that a lot of bands forced to reorganise their tour schedules will be pretty upset about not being told sooner. Let's hope they can get everything updated as early as possible. It was a popular venue, and no doubt it will be missed.
This post is a response to this competition that happened a while ago (via Kottke) The winning concept resonated with me, and this is an attempt to deal with the thoughts I've had about public domain art since then (It's worth reading the Jury comments on the website, which sum up some things I don't bring up in this post).
The idea of art in the public domain is a powerful one, I think. It doesn't just mean that it's free for someone to use, it also means that they don't have any restrictions on how they use it. This is, by itself, a good thing for art. Let's assume that Michael Jackson's music became public domain tomorrow. The recordings would still be covered (under separate laws), so it wouldn't mean everyone would be free to sample those without fear of legal action, although getting the clearances for Jackson's recordings appears to be much easier than for, say, The Beatles. Here are some things that would result:
• Artists wouldn't have to pay, or seek permission, to record their own versions of the songs.
• Artists would be free to incorporate any musical idea found within the songs, without threat of legal action.
• While, like with recordings, specific published versions of the sheet music would still be protected, people would be free to publish and distribute their own transcriptions of the music, even for commercial use.
Some likely implications would be:
• The songs would be used more often in commercials, films, musicals, ringtones, etc, as the costs would be limited to, at most, paying performers to cover the work in question.
• We would hear a lot more music that would obviously incorporate elements of Michael Jackson tunes.
• His music would feature heavily in educational texts.
As a result of these points, you might say that Jackson's music would be overly re-recorded, and used to sell anything, while the brilliance of the original recordings would be diluted by the endless crap surrounding them. Not only that, but artists would unduly profit from Jackson's talents by stealing his ideas to use in their own compositions. These are fair points, possibly, though certainly not the main objection most people would have to art entering the public domain immediately after death (or even before). Musicians, typically, do not earn much money through performing, or even recording, their works. They do, however, earn reasonable amounts of money through royalties, which they wouldn't be entitled to if their work was considered public domain. However, if a work retains currency in popular culture, someone is going to profit from it. If not the composer, through royalties, then it will be the company that uses the song on an advertisement, or the band that records their own version for an album, or a publishing company that sells the sheet music for the songs. Surely the artist, or their estate, should receive some compensation in these situations?
I'm not so sure, but it's a tough question. The thing about the Michael Jackson clock, though, is this:
We live in an era of constant change. Since the advent of sound recordings, the popularity of musical groups has changed dramatically over the course of a couple of years, if not months. Things that are culturally significant now may be completely forgotten in 70 years (the opposite is, of course, possible too). When Michael Jackson's music enters the public domain, who will care? Will young music students, sick of playing Beethoven or Dvorak, get excited by the opportunity to play "Billy Jean"? Will musicians suddenly get to release their song that sets the melody and text of "Smooth Criminal" to something else, something we possibly haven't even heard of? Most likely not, because his music will probably be dead to popular culture.
People of all ages get excited by Michael Jackson. His music (and his dancing and his video clips) inspires us, and it tugs at us and it makes us grin and laugh and cry in wonder, and it compels us to listen! If his music were in the public domain now, it could mean something, it could enable people to more readily tap into their feelings about his music. In 70 years, those people who were fortunate enough to be teenagers when Thriller was released will be over 100. Who does it serve to keep his music copyright until then?
Plastic Palace Alice is in the process of having some tracks mixed, most likely for an album that is tentatively scheduled for some time next year. We recorded a few songs quite a while ago now, maybe over a year ago, but they were sort of put on hold for a while. More recently, we went to another studio and re-recorded some parts with our new pianist Quinn, and relatively recently we released the first single of the bunch, "No Shame", to a fairly underwhelming response. Now we are listening to the next two songs, and it's quite funny to hear them again after such a long time.
Work commitments meant that I was only in the studio very briefly for each of the two days of the re-recording. I didn't hear any of the other parts, but simply turned up with my equipment, ran through a few takes of each song, then packed up and went home. There was little time to discuss much, but these were songs we'd played quite a lot live, so at least I didn't have to figure out what to play, which can be difficult to do on the clock.
So, getting these mixes back has been fun. There is always much emailing between the members of the band, working out what we like and what we don't, before sending all of our thoughts back to the mixer, so that he can refine his take. It's surprising how much of a difference very small things can make, too. When we got out first mix back of the song "Carrion" – a live staple for two years now – I was disappointed, largely in my own playing in various sections. However, the second mix, with only some relatively minor changes, sounded much better as soon as I heard it. A couple of effects have been added, the balance of instruments and vocals changed in parts, and suddenly it's a whole different thing, while still – paradoxically – sounding the same.
It's a little bit like The Uniform Project: you can see that it's the same dress, but you keep seeing it in a different light. I think that makes the stuff Ben adds in the mixing rooms the accessories.
17 September 2009 —
Reuniting
A few months ago I did a Q&A with Inpress, no doubt because some other band had pulled out at the last minute. It was just a few questions in an email that are pretty much the same for every band, in fact, I have a pretty strong memory of answering exactly the same questions a couple of years ago when we were promoting our album.
So when it got to the question "what is your favourite song lyric and why?", I felt like I'd already done the Bod Dylan thing last time around. Instead, I opted for a lyric that had been sticking with me more recently, from The National's "So Far Around The Bend", which is on the Dark Was The Night compilation. The National always gets me with their lyrics, despite their relative simplicity. This one was no different, and it's not exactly poetry, but it seemed to sum up something about something.
You've been humming in a daze forever
waiting for Pavement to get back together
And now, it turns out, we will have to wait no longer (well, another year). Aside from the fact that this may make Stephen Malkmus' upcoming Melbourne gig more interesting, it also relates to this little post I had. Pavement reuniting, Pixies touring, Beastie Boys and Pearl Jam reissuing their old albums, Kurt Cobain singing Bon Jovi songs in Guitar Hero. The 80s are over: we're in the 90s now.
I was sitting in my local café this morning, talking to a friend of mine who is in a couple of bands I've shared a bill with, and who is currently studying music. We got talking about school, and about jazz, and it started to kind of tie in with what I was writing in the post below this one: that the skills we learn from playing jazz aren't necessarily useful for playing more popular styles of music. Which got me wondering why so many institutions teach jazz, and why so many people study it.
I love jazz, and I basically always have, thanks to a sister who dragged me and my family to Freeboppers gigs when I was about 9. It was only when I got to uni that I actively started building a jazz record collection though, and I was 22 by the time I enrolled in the jazz program at Monash. Although there were plenty of other people my age and older, the vast majority of students in the course started their first year when they were 18 and fresh out of high school. I quickly became friends with several people who also loved jazz the way I did, but they were in a surprisingly small minority. A large number of people enrolled in the course wanted to play other styles of music much more, such as reggae, hip hop, funk, drum and bass, and other groove-based music. So there was a kind of link, but it was often frustrating for these students to be told that they had to learn how to improvise over Charlie Parker tunes.
By and large, the music conservatories in Melbourne fall into two basic categories: those that train classical musicians – often know as "repertoire" students - and those that train jazz musicians - or "improvisation" students. There are certainly differences between schools, but even the more popular-leaning schools teach a lot of jazz. Which is all well and good if, like me, you decided that you wanted to be the next Bill Frisell. But for those people who wanted to play in rock bands, their courses would often be incredibly frustrating. While learning transcriptions of Wes Montgomery solos might be useful even if you wanted to do something more akin to Jimi Hendrix, if you were more interested in Animal Collective it might actually hinder your progress.
So, why are courses so biased towards jazz? The obvious answer is that it's easier to teach. Jazz requires countless hours of technical practise to master, and rewards deep study of classical harmony - which is relatively easily adapted to cover the harmonic frameworks more usually associated with jazz. Given the rate of harmonic change in most traditional jazz tunes, the level of complexity in the performance is extremely high, and requires a lot of knowledge of scales and chords in particular. If you wanted to fully come to grips with John Coltrane's "Giant Steps", you could easily spend several years investigating it. I know this, because people have done it.
But what if that level of attention was given to Talking Heads? Would the music wither under such scrutiny? Would the simplicity of the chord progressions bore the student after mere weeks? Would the techniques required for playing "I Zimbra" be mastered in a single technical workshop? Quite possibly. But what if the opposite happened? If I'd spent three years studying Talking Heads, what kind of musician would I be now?