The Sound of The Ladies

We’re very excited to be performing at the International Super Friends Network gig on May 22nd (as I write, next Wednesday) at the Black Heart in Camden. We’re especially excited because the audience will be getting a sneak preview of the new video for “10,000 letters of love”, which is pretty awesome. Believe me, I’ve seen it. We’ll be performing the song with the movie projected. It’s going to be beautiful.

Anyway, there’ll be a major unveiling in the coming weeks, but until then, come along and see it next Wednesday, and a night of cabaret, comedy and music. Tickets a paltry £3 in advance from this website.

You can also download it via iTunes or RSS.

The latest Sound of the Ladies podcast is out now on Soundcloud and iTunes, featuring “When the Nuclear Fire Rains Down”, about how we can use the knowledge accrued in museums to rebuild society following an apocalypse, any apocalypse really. Some museums are pretty good for this, for example the Science Museum tells you how to make a toaster from scratch and the Design Museum would let you reverse engineer some fab Conran sideboards – but not all museums are that useful. I’ve picked on a couple of small museums that are lovely, and you should visit (especially the Black Country Living museum, which is about far more than black pudding and hair shirts), and come to the conclusion that my music is a better way to rebuild society. The cult starts here!

The song was written for Museum’s Showoff in March, so enormous thanks to them for having me…

I’ve just finished David Byrne’s How Music Works, a 300+ page tome released late last year (ok, 300 pages is relatively short, but the book is very heavy for a commute). It’s a ronseal title for a book which is a thoughtful and reflective view of music as an acoustical, cultural, technological, spiritual, economical creative beast, framed by David Byrne’s experience as one of the more diverse artists to sell bucketloads of records. If you don’t know him, he started life with Talking Heads, an often difficult-to-listen-to new wave band that nevertheless spawned a ton of hits and became the most influential band in the world in the late nulls when everyone decided afrobeat was amazing.

It’s an uneven read: the beginning and end seem to be especially good. Early on, I really liked his discussion of the way that different acoustic spaces could mould the music performed in them; churches leading to longer, sustained notes, whereas smaller or unenclosed performance venues could allow percussion without it all tripping over itself. The middle really sags – there’s a lot of “when I was doing this album with Brian Eno, we decided to write songs around the sound of the tumble dryer” type moments, which unless you’re a Byrne completist is a bit dull.

I think he flounders a bit when he discusses the science of music – how it affects our brains – and in this and other areas, he can seem didactic and dismissive, dealing with subjects in a brisk, superficial or one-sided way. I get the impression that the reason for this is that he’s trying to create a breezy and accessible style, which is one of the strengths of the book – but in places it means he doesn’t provide very deep or balanced discussions. For the science bits he cites people like Phillip Ball who I would probably rather read on the brain side of music. This is also relegated to the end of the book, as is discussion of Pythagorean rational numbers, the music of the spheres et al – which feels a bit tacked-on.

Where he excels is the areas he’s obviously given a lot of thought to, outside the production of his own records. His dissection of the economics of music is really interesting if you’ve ever wondered how everyone who isn’t Madonna makes a living; and his discussion of the social value of music towards the end of the book chimes with a lot of the things I’ve thought about music for a while. He devotes  a chapter to “Amateurs”, stating:

It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves – they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation.

Leaving the obvious aside, Byrne gets into some interesting discussions about the value of creativity, and creative arts degrees and school subjects to build people’s ability to solve problems, to innovate, and to have innate self-confidence and resilience. I’m beginning to wonder whether a creative arts or even a humanities degree isn’t more useful than a physics degree, but that’s a discussion for another time.

It’s worth a read. Just not all the way through. And I feel like I need to do a hell of lot more reading to get below the surface – but after all, it’s a brave endeavour to take on how music works in 300 pages. Anyway, I discovered “Pulled Up” via 6Music last year, and it’s now my favourite Talking Heads song; as a result, I had it on Brain Jukebox throughout reading How Music Works. Now you can too:

http://youtu.be/dQFOfx3UCkQ

vermox

The new Sound of the Ladies podcast is out now, featuring a cover of “Oblivion” by Grimes from her 2012 album “Visions”:

You can also download it via iTunes or RSS or direct download.

Cover versions are always tricky, because you’re taking something you love and potentially making it less good. This is a particularly odd one, because my impression of this song is that it’s about fear and vulnerability, a specifically female version of it, actual fear of life and limb, which I’ve never experienced in the way she describes. Abandonment, loneliness, the need for love, those are pretty universal emotions, though.

A lot of the covers I do, I do because I enjoy singing and playing them, the more basic taking pleasure in music than staking a claim to be doing a better or more innovative version of the original (this cover is much less exciting than the original). There’s no point in doing an identical cover, but I believe that this very rarely happens in practice anyway – people’s flaws override most attempts at mimicry, unless they’re trying really hard. Grimes’ original version is electronic pop, and making it into a song people might sing to each other around the campfire made sense to me, even if it has served to upset some fans of the original.

I’ve been listening to some back episodes of David Pickering’s excellent “Getting Better Acquainted” podcast, particularly to Episode 5 in which he interviews Sarah Nicolls, a pianist who works a lot with prepared pianos. At one point they’re discussing recording and how it’s annoying how some people are very perfectionist as a form of eternal procrastination. This made me realise I’ve probably not talked about my feelings about live vs recording much before, and that might be slightly interesting, especially as I’m reading David Byrne’s How Music Works  very slowly, because it is slightly boring.

I prefer listening to recording to live gigs. The sound quality is better, you listen again and again, and the experience is a personal one. I don’t especially enjoy large public experiences, I think music is usually a matter of personal taste and it can make you feel very vulnerable to have strong emotional reactions to things. Also, there weren’t decent gigs in the town I grew up in, so it was recorded music that transported me from my surroundings to musicville.

As I got older, I saw the value of live music; the improvisation, the spontaneity, or at the very least, the fact that the art was being created as you watched. Hence “performance art”. Ironically, it was Jeff Buckley’s recording “Live at Sin-e” that really convinced me of the magic of live. There, the art really was being created and decided in the moment.

But that’s a hard genie to put in a bottle. Maybe with a live recording, sometimes, you do it. But if you try it in the studio, you often fail. Note that I say this not because I’m a skilful live musician and a whizz in the studio – quite the opposite. If you’re a skilful live musician, studio recording is easy – you can just turn up and do what you do live. The arrangement and so on might be quite different, however.

Here’s the thing: live is forgiving. That fretboard noise, that slightly flat or boring vocal note, even a wrong chord – live they don’t matter. People are there to see a performance, not check whether you played the right notes the right way – otherwise why would anyone ever listen to Ian Brown sing live? Equally, turning up and playing the right notes the right way isn’t a performance. The studio is a magnifying glass – any shortcomings will be writ large. If you’re a supertalented musician, that’s not a problem; if, like me, you’re not, it’s terrifying, and the more you think about it the harder it gets to get it right.

But there’s no audience in the studio. Your only audience is the people listening to the final recording. They don’t care if you got that solo in one take or ten, they don’t know if that vocal is a comp from three sessions. Realising this, recording becomes less about ego and performance (“I have to play the best”), and more about representing the song (“the song has to sound as good as it can”*). What can you do to chisel out the idea of that song from the block of near-infinite opportunities in front of you?

This approach has several potential drawbacks. Firstly it encourages you to be a lazy musician. This doesn’t really bother me. It’s better you’re making music than not, and if you’re more interested in being a good musician than making good music, you probably shouldn’t be a songwriter/composer, you should be a musician and listen to other people when they tell you what to play. But if you never improve as a player, I think this can drive you toward studio perfectionism of the wrong kind – if you’re just focussing on playing the part “properly”, you can close yourself off to “mistakes” that might be better than what you were playing! Capable players have more freedom to try new things out.

Back to Dave’s point: I also think studio perfectionism is bad, but realising where I wanted to apply pressure and where I could slack off is the only reason my recordings sound halfway decent. As with many things in life, it’s worth working at the stuff that really makes a difference, and the rest – you can ignore it if you want, or put in extra effort getting that right if you think it’s important. That’s up to you.

*note that I don’t necessarily mean “as slick and hi fi as possible”