Tom from Indiesongwriter.net has posted more thoughts about this business we call song – I’m not going to respond to all of them; I think those questions we substantially disagree on aren’t ones that I have interesting things to say about (yet). I will pick up on a couple of his points.
‘The listener’s emotions are what matter. Moving the listener is the point of songwriting. Expressing your own thoughts and feelings, while not wrong, is not the aim.’
I find Martin’s point about not having access to the listener’s emotions very odd. You do Martin, we all do. We all know that by putting this leap into our vocal melody, or using that change of chords or this riff we can evoke certain reactions. There is a musical language that songwriter and listener share and by finding interesting ways of using that language the songwriter creates a period of musical time in which the listener goes through an emotional journey.
Musicians do have that the ability to (try to) evoke a response in the listener – but, honestly, this isn’t how I write. I’m judging the response it evokes in me. It’s entirely possible that a listener who doesn’t have the musical touchstones I do would just see certain things I do as unmotivated or weird – but there’s very little in my music to frighten my horses, so to speak. I consider myself a fairly mainstream songwriter if the audience is me. But I really have no interest in tailoring my writing to the musical and lyrical vocabulary of someone who only speaks the language of Coldplay, or Madonna, or Hannah Montana. It would be nothing more than a hollow exercise for me to speak in tongues I consider coarse and unlyrical. Which is why, in the parlance of the physicist, I have an audience approximately equal to one.
But I will always edit myself in favour of the listener.
But appealling to oneself does not mean not thinking of the listener, paradoxically. I am aware that there are certain genres of music which, IMHBVOO (in my humble but very opinionated opinion), are much more fun to play than to listen to: certain styles of blues, and most of jazz. When I am writing, I am thinking of what I (or someone a bit like me) will enjoy when I listen back to it - not just how much fun it is to play. Or, in summary: STRONGLY AGREE.
As a little aside, Martin chose ‘Feeling Good’ by Nina Simone as one of the songs where the songwriter is telling you how they feel. This is a song that was written for a musical ‘The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd’. It’s the voice of a specific character, not the songwriters. Sure, the Simone performance is amazing, but it isn’t the songwriters telling us how they feel in this song. Even if it seems like it is.
Ah, Tom thinks he’s proven his point with this deft gambit of historical accuracy (and my ignorance): a song which appears to be a very personal work is in fact a piece written for MUSICAL THEATRE, the bastard genre which combines none of the sophistication of MUSIC with none of the subtlety of THEATRE – a song written in the voice of a character, and not, as I implied, a roar of pure emotion from the writer’s soul to the audience. But Tom has sewn the seeds of his own destruction – because it touches obliquely on the point that all of songwriting is storytelling (on some level, the original motivation for these posts).
In Todd Solondz’s (handily-titled) film Storytelling*, a character in a creating writing class recounts to her class the story of a (real-life) sexual encounter with the class tutor. Other students criticise the story for its “cliched nature”, “hypocrisy” and “inauthenticity”** to which the author protests “But it really happened!”. The tutor replies “I don’t know about what happened… [but] once you start writing, it ALL becomes fiction.” Presenting a story to the outside world, even one which “actually happened” or which is “how you really feel” makes it fiction (partly because other people don’t have access to your internal states, partly because “feeling a thing” and “communicating a thing” are different actions, and probably for loads of other reasons, some psychological). If all songwriting is fiction, then it just comes down to stories you’re interested in, stories your audience might be interested in***, and choosing stories you think you can tell well. IMHBVOO, that’s where the “write about what you know” dictum comes from: write about what motivates you, and what you can do service to. If you’re a talented enough writer that that covers a broad range of subjects that all sorts of people might be interested in, then think about what the audience might be interested in. I don’t think I am, so I would rather do something of limited appeal well (or at least better) – so I write about what I care about. I’d love it if you listened and got something from it – partly because it would indicate we have more in common than I necessarily intended, but more importantly because it would immediately double my fanbase.
—–
*If you intend to watch this film, a disclaimer: it contains very adult themes and very dark humour that most reasonable people will find offensive. You have been warned.
**I’m paraphrasing, I haven’t seen the film in over ten years
***I’ve indicated that in the solispistic world of The Sound of The Ladies, these two are the same, but that’s just storytelling, isn’t it?
Tom at indiesongwriter.net has responded to my previous post on storytelling. He says a number of interesting things, but I have a couple of points of housekeeping before I get to those…
I disagree with Martin, who finds ‘ambiguity or irony excessively frustrating’. I’d much prefer a musician not beat me over the head with obvious lyrics that just read like a page from a diary. Writing directly about yourself all the time is adolescent and self-indulgent.
The emotions that are important are the listener’s. Different listeners have different tastes and different genres have different conventions, but as a general point I’d say if you’re concerned with telling the listener how you feel you’re missing the point of the artform.
My original comment was that ‘I find artists that hide behind excessive ambiguity or irony excessively frustrating’. I didn’t go on to say, for reasons of brevity, that obviously irony and ambiguity can be used tastefully. However, I feel that, for some songwriters, irony is their highest calling, and by using it they feel as if they’re being terribly sophisticated (in an analagous way to crap songwriters thinking rhyming is more important than content). An ironic song can “beat me over the head” with its message, with the sting that it can also be beating me over the head with its cleverness. Like a Rolling Stone piles irony on irony, yet I don’t find it hard to discern it’s authorial voice. Songwriters, are you using irony to mask your real ideas because you’re afraid of expressing ideas directly? Or are you following the true path of Bob?
I think the crux of Tom’s argument is in the statement “The emotions that are important are the listener’s”. Well, I don’t know about anyone else – but I don’t have access to listener’s emotions. Nor do I presume to. I have access to my own, which to some degree I assume that others share. But one can just as easily indulge in grotesque sock-puppetry when claiming someone else’s voice to write with as one can lapse in self-absorption when writing with one’s own.
Tom states boldly that “Writing directly about yourself all the time is adolescent and self-indulgent”. I’m going to state just as boldly that songwriters are doing that all the time, apart from the times where they pretending they’re not. Between the tortured Creep singing about their own lack of self-esteem and The Decemberists telling stories about civil war USA are a legion of songwriters trying to find a balance between these two extremes.
Finally, Tom begs the question “if you’re concerned with telling the listener how you feel you’re missing the point of the artform”. Let’s leave aside all of the brilliant songs which do that* and ask, then, what the point of the artform is? For me, I write as a way of thinking out loud about the world and seeing whether people agree. I try to write songs which another songwriter would not write. I’m not a particularly avant-garde musician, so the way I try to be unique is to reflect my hopes, fears, thoughts and interests – which are at least somewhat unique, but that’s another discussion. If other people share some of those, I hope they will enjoy my music. If they don’t, that’s fine – there are probably writers out there who do more for them (my sales figures suggest that this is the case more often than not…). I mean, I do think about what might interest people – but to do that all the time would cause my songwriting to change in a way that, for me, obviates the point in doing it. What is “the point” of songwriting?
*literally off the top of my head: I’ve been loving you too long by Otis Redding, Feeling Good by Nina Simone, Hey Ya by Outkast, Spiritual by Spain…
I think storytelling in songwriting is quite an important idea, even for those songwriters who would never be seen dead with a fluffy beard or within punching distance of an acoustic guitar. And I find the tension between personal “confessional” (or at least personal storytelling) and imaginative/fictional storytelling fascinating.
I have an instinct which I’m attempting to correct with patience and attention which finds storytelling in songs irritating, for a variety of reasons. Reason 1: a lot of songs use very familiar tropes and structures, and in order to communicate a wordy story in a concise way, end up being very literal and predictable. For this reason, storytelling songs rarely move me in the way that a “story book” (with space to develop characters and locations and subtexts) or a more purely emotional song does. I tend to think conveying ideas in a song, especially descriptive or cerebral ones, is much harder than conveying emotions.
Secondly, in my youth I associated the genre with a certain kind of songwriter, casting his aloof and ironic eye over the tableaus of characters he’d created. And what the hell did Paul Simon know about being a poor boy – he had diamonds on the soles of his bloody shoes! The problem of putting themselves in another’s shoes is one that few songwriters seemed to be able to tackle interestingly or without condescension.
And the songs I loved were so often personal – songs which seemed to sacrifice proficiency or generality to individual integrity. Making something general is a quick way to make it generic.
But what of the other side? I’ve heard songwriters express the opinion that “after a while you realise that you’re not that interesting” – and songwriters should look beyond themselves for inspiration. Undoubtedly, “a thousand grudging young millionaires” talking about their pain makes for a very tedious musical landscape. However, I think implicit in this comment is the idea that writing about your feelings, opinions or personal experiences is something that a songwriter “grows out of” when their ego allows, which I think is an inaccurate reflection of artists. Artists I love are usually the ones who put a lot of themselves into the work – what they think or feel. Storytelling is well and good, but where is the human being in the story? What does the writer think about the story they’re telling? I find artists that hide behind excessive ambiguity or irony excessively frustrating*. If I can’t engage with an emotion, I’m fundamentally going to have problems with the song, however intelligent it thinks it is.
I’ve been in a particularly storyish cycle since I started writing We Went to the Bottom of the Ocean (many copies still available) – and for me the personal challenge has been to stretch the subject matter I try to write about. However, all of this material is linked, in my mind at least, to personal feelings, thoughts and internal states – and this is something that it’s probably easy to overlook when you’re listening to a song about a giant slug. But if these songs were nothing more than novelty songs about giant slugs, wouldn’t it be a greater and more egotistical folly to think anyone would care to listen?
*yes, I am talking about the post-Royal Tenenbaums work of US filmmaker Wes Anderson
This month’s podcast is out now – featuring the brand-new The Man Who Could Not Read Minds:
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Or, if you prefer, you can download it via the Sound of The Ladies podcast for free via iTunes or directly.
This is another very character-based song, about the only man in the world who can’t read minds – of course, this presupposes that everyone else can, and in this case, it’s somewhat involuntary and can’t be “switched off”. This becomes important in the later stages of the song where his broadcast-only brain means that he is the only person thinking thoughts which are untempered by the opinions of those around him*. It might seem pretty ego/meglomaniacal to write a song in the first person about this character, but I really think the world he lives in is way more awesome than our own, and although I’ve created the conceit of his being this “engine of creation”, it’s really as a mechanism for mocking Ayn Rand’s ideas of the entrepreneurial hero – which some people inexplicably take seriously. In this world, the Randian hero is the person who just talks and talks and is unable to hear other people’s opinions or criticisms. Hence all the references to the hilarious Atlas Shrugged (Jesus Christ, that’s a terrible book).
Musically I wanted it to sound a bit like the Rolling Stones meets Jon Frusciante – but I’m not a good enough guitarist so it sounds like one of those crap bands that try to sound like the 60s – Jet, or Cast, or… one of that crowd. Well, another experiment with some failures and some successes…
Oh, I should just clarify that Tim Harrington is the lead singer of indie band Les Savy Fav, and the line “We were there when the world got great, and we helped to make it that way” is not one of his lyrics (at least not one that appears on any of their albums, I think) - it’s something he had the crowd chanting at ATP 2007. So in a way, he was that positive fascist. Anyway, I find those words very inspiring, as naive as they are. So if I were broadcasting my brain thoughts and I ran out of ideas, I would say them over and over again. You’ll note I only say it once in this song, so I haven’t completely run dry…
*I should say that these would probably be much worse than ideas and opinions which have been shared and developed between groups of people, but if you imagine a world where you constantly heard people’s reactions to your thoughts and as a result your thoughts became more sympathetic and co-operative, someone who just blared out their ideas like a fascist would probably be a breath of fresh air to some people. Well, like the real world, I suppose.
The latest episode of the Sound of The Ladies podcast features a demo of a song called That’s just storytelling, dear - which, as I say in the podcast, I have quite mixed feelings about. The arrangement you hear is not really the style I would normally work in, and the vocals are all over the place (very sloppy) – but having said all that, there are things I really like about it, and sometimes overworking a song just exemplifies its flaws. So, rather than spending additional nights re-recording the vocals, developing the arrangement and ending up with something that would sound more polished but not necessarily better, I’ve decided to put it out in its warts and all form – not least because not doing so would mean the podcast came out even later…
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Or, if you prefer, you can download it via the Sound of The Ladies podcast for free via iTunes.
There have been plenty of times when people have responded positively to tracks I thought were underdeveloped or slightly cliched – because I’m not always right about the songs I write, and other people have different tastes – and fundamentally, there can be a fine line between a lyric which sounds cliched and obvious and one which has a broad emotional resonance. So get in touch if you think I have it all wrong.
Simon from indie blog extraordinaire Sweeping the Nation has featured The Sound of The Ladies’ The only girl who would ever break my heart on his compilation We make our own mythologies. Simon rounded up tracks from the cream of up and coming (or in our case, gently simmering) indie to create a showcase of fine DIY talent, and simultaneously benefit a good cause – most of the £3 cover charge goes to Macmillan Cancer, providing support to cancer sufferers and their families.
The Sound of The Ladies’ track featured is The only girl who would ever break my heart – to my ears, one of the best things I’ve ever done, and not available on any of our albums at the time of writing. You may have heard it on a SOTL podcast, so why not pay £3 and get it without all that chat, and with music from Her Name is Calla, Johnny Foreigner and 17 others? It is for charidee, after all.
If there’s anyone out there (seriously) in the market for any guitars, I’m selling… get in touch at thesoundoftheladies@gmail.com
Gibson Les Paul Studio Faded Mahogany 2007
Used for a lot of Sound of The Ladies, Monroe Transfer and Answer Me This! recordings. Fat 50s-style neck, all mahogany (I think), twin humbuckers, comes with plush-lined hard case.
But you don’t have to play prog for it to be a good one to play – it’s a very playable bass. I bought it second hand in 1994 and so it has some cosmetic damage on the body - but it was main fretted bass from 1994 until I bought a Fender Jazz last year. I’m not sure whether it’s a 700 or a 600, but its controls are a volume, a tone, and a series/parallel switch.
This month’s Sound of the Ladies podcast features a song not by the Sound of the Ladies: “To light, you’re just the same as the sky” is by The Overdrive Orchestra featuring textual artist Gethan Dick, taken from Trying and Trying and Trying:
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Or, if you prefer, you can download it via the Sound of The Ladies podcast for free via iTunes. So why is a song by a textual artist backed by a six-guitar ambient rock band featuring on The Sound of the Ladies Podcast? Well, if you’ve been paying attention you’ll probably know; and if not, you’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out…
Next Tuesday (April 12th), The Sound of the Ladies perform at a very special night as part of the London Word Festival. “Books vs Cigarettes” is inspired by George Orwell’s essay on the pleasure of his particular vice, books, comparing the costs to the amount a smoker spends every week on their drug of choice. A host of comedians including Robin Ince and Jo Neary will be expounding on their favourite vices, and The Sound of The Ladies will be around to provide a little musical styling in the interim. There will be all sorts of tasty treats baked from Orwell’s own recipes (really) over the course of the evening too. Mmm.
“Books vs Cigarettes” will take place at Dalston Boys club from 8pm on Tuesday; you can find the venue here:
Some of you might have heard this song around. I didn’t write it; this is just a cover.
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It’s a really difficult song to sing as a 32-year old; some of the lyrics are really difficult to milk any kind of meaning from; others just seem incredibly sad. Production-wise, this version was very much inspired by Tom Waits’ That Feel from his nearless flawless 1992 album Bone Machine. For this record, he carried out the sessions at Prairie Sun Studios - supposedly a converted chicken farm, but that might be a bit of Waits folklore. The album is full of room sound, apparently achieved by using LOTS of room mics, overcompressing them, rerecording the playback track in the live room – making an album incredibly rooted in space. The impulse response of his coughing, creaking and stamping illuminates the sonic space like a torch sweeping around a deserted building; forcing the recordings into a real space gives them a 3D quality that clean, acoustically dead recording methods simply lack. Waits was able, in part, to use this technique because he had a great sounding room; the high-ceilinged but not especially large space I record in doesn’t sound nearly as good, but does create a certain “hoe-down in the basement” vibe which I think really suits this track.
That Feel specifically uses a lot of stumbled, overtalked, loosely-timed backing vocals which people like Will Oldham have done since – and for some reason I heard this song with the same swaying, stumbling gait. Sadly, I don’t own a brake drum, so a hand-played snare had to suffice.
What on earth possessed me to rearrange a song popularized by a 13-year-old girl in the style of a Tom Waits album recorded before she was born? Dunno. Spirit of experimentation?
As I mentioned recently, I’ve become a one-man dynamo of recording output, single-handedly saving the music industry with, uh my industry. I thought, then, that I would take a short break from plugging Songs from the Scientific Cabaret to plug something else.
That something else is Geek Like Me, a compilation of songs put together by the organisers of the Geek Pop festival, featuring Helen Arney, MJ Hibbert and Vom Vorton, Spirit of Play, Karmadillo and, of course, The Sound of The Ladies. Uncharacteristically, our contribution to the minialbum is not a song about science, it is a regular Sound of The Ladies track called “Day of the Snail”:
Day of The Snail is a story about a little guy with an admittedly quite logical theory about voodoo, a fear of malignant conspiracies, and an obsession with snails, the latter paired with a seeming lack of awareness of how his situation mirrors theirs. The song appeared on the podcast several months ago, but this version is a band arrangement recorded “live in the studio” with Jim Footner and Will Elsdale.
The Geek Like Me minialbum features some great tracks by the other artists too – so head over to their bandcamp page and give it a whirl…
It’s true. Without me, the music industry would crumble. Well, maybe not sales-wise…
By some freak of chance, last week marked the release of three records to which I had some significant contribution. Don’t worry, it doesn’t happen very often..
The first you know, I’m sure: Songs from the Scientific Cabaret is my first full-length album as Dr Martin Austwick, featuring ten songs about science, and available as a pay-what-you want download or limited edition CD (presented in a petri dish, with accompanying sleeve notes in the form of a scientific paper):
Release two is Geekpop’s Geek Like Me mini-album, featuring a one-off band version of The Sound of the Ladies’ The Day of The Snail*, along with tracks by Spirit of Play, MJ Hibbert, Helen Arney and your favourite geeky musos:
Last but not least is The Overdrive Orchestra’s Never Outnumbered EP, where I played guitar on all the tracks, alongside the other 5 guitarists. Yes, five – hence “The Overdrive Orchestra”. One of those tracks is “To light, you’re just the same as the sky”, written about my previous day job as a researcher in biomedical optics by Gethan Dick as part of the “Trying and Trying and Trying” project:
A lot of science. A lot of music. There will be a test.
The limited edition run of CDs for “Songs from the Scientific Cabaret” are finally ready to greet the world, and fine they look too:
A micrograph of stained penicillin is printed onto the CDs, which are presented in an attractive Petri Dish setting. The album sleeve notes come in the form of a 20-page scientific paper, telling you all you could ever wish to know about the origins, methods and results of this art/science endeavour, as well as full lyrics and some scientific background to explain the songs.
It’s available now to pre-order for £7 + £1.50 p+p in the UK and will ship on March 10th, when the digital version will also be available for download.
However! If you come to The GeekPop Launch Night (March 10th, Wilton’s Music Hall, tickets £10), you are entitled to buy a copy of this incredible package for only £4. £4! That’s a £4.50 saving, or equivalently, like getting the launch night ticket half price!* You’re welcome.
If that’s not enough to convince you, the night also features Steve Mould, The Amateur Transplants, and takes place in one of the most amazingly Lynchian venues I think I’ll ever have the pleasure to play. They say you play Wilton’s twice in your career: one on the way up, and once on the way down… it’s good to be back**.
*pretty much
**actually, it’s my first time. But let’s not read anything into that…
Plans continue apace for the release of “Songs from the Scientific Cabaret” – CDs are on their way to the pressing plant, tracks are uploaded to BandCamp, and I have a job lot of petri dishes about to arrive at my door! In the meantime, I’ve been putting the band through their paces for the geekpop launch night:
at a mere £10 – and for this, not only do you get Dr Martin Austwick and his Beautiful Band, you also get Steve Mould and the musical stylings of The Amateur Transplants. NOT ONLY THAT – people at the Launch Night will also be able to buy a copy of the limited run CD* for only £4 (available on the website for £8 including postage!). You’d be CRAZY not to COME!!!!
Ahem. You can find more info here, if you’re a Facebooky type:
This is a very sad song. If you like, you can let the seemingly humourous references to Winona Ryder and Richard Linklater lull you into the sense that this is a flip or at least somewhat frivolous tune. But the song is about some very sad things that happened once upon a time, and I put those things about Winona Ryder in there, not to floccinaucinihilipilificate*, but to remind myself of the things that inspire or inspired me in this sad and beautiful world, and so to temper it with a weird sort of hope. I’d say that every word of it is true, but I don’t think I know anyone who’s ever caught malaria. At least if I do, someone’s keeping their cards very close to their chest.
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*To pass something off as if it were nothing but a feather
I know that mid-January is a bit late to be rounding up 2010 and looking into 2011 - but I had gastric flu for the first week of the year which , along with the usual Xmas and New Year Business, meant my 2011 didn’t really begin until this week. 2010 was a year of big changes – new job, engagement, released my first album, recorded my second album (more of which later), and a bunch of other stuff so multitudinous that I’ve forgotten most of them.
So let’s look forward: the second album I alluded to above is my first Songs about Science album, under the moniker “Dr Martin Austwick”, featuring 7 songs drawn from my various science performances over the last 4 years, and including 3 others which previously appeared on my “Songs about Space EP”. I’ve chosen to do this as Dr Martin Austwick rather than The Sound of The Ladies, because the music is really rather different and it was getting confusing. This new album will be out on March 10th, and to celebrate its release, I’ll be playing at the GeekPop 2011 grand launch at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London. Not only that, but I’ll be bringing a band. Expect more news about the album and the launch here..
Another big project I was working on last year is coming to fruition – “Trying and Trying and Trying” by Gethan Dick. Gethan is a textual artist and TTT is a Wellcome Trust-funded project to create art out of science. Last June (when I was a medical physicist), Gethan visited me and we talked a lot about my work – then she went away and created prose that would be set to music. In a weirdly schizophrenic twist, I then played guitar (as part of Overdrive Orchestra) on the music for the piece. The album will be released on February 23rd, and they’ll be an awesome launch party at which I’ll be playing as part of Overdrive Orchestra; in the meantime, you can hear some of the tracks on Reverb Nation.
Now I know that this is a lot to take in; I won’t expect you to remember it all and will pester you incessantly to come to both. The next couple of months are going to be sciencey as all hell!
By the time you listen to this, you probably won’t be feeling remotely festive, but here is Xmas/January’s podcast. Sorry it’s so late. Happy New Year anyway.
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I just got back from the curated music festival Bowlie 2, hotbed of exclusive indie chic (although this time, generally more melodic and with fewer sweary bandnames, thanks to the fact that Belle and Sebastian were curating and not bloody Pitchfork), and of course water slides, Herta hot dogs and ennui (all three courtesy of its Butlins location). The usual fun times were had: I especially enjoyed B+S, a bit of Frightened Rabbit, Zoey Goey, Dirty Projectors were much better than when I last saw them (about 2 years ago), the Vaselines were ok, The Zombies amazing at points, even Crystal Castles were good. But a couple of bands made me wonder about the changing nature of indie music, which is the point of this post and not just to list bands with stupid names.
Let’s take Jenny Lewis, here under her guise as bassist/singer for Jenny and Johnny, a band she formed with her best bf (if that doesn’t scream “vanity project”…). I should be clear that I don’t really enjoy Jenny Lewis’ music – I think I see what she’s trying to achieve and I don’t think she does it very well or interestingly – although she is clearly very talented. The point is not to criticise the quality of Jenny and Johnny – but more to point out that their music is very mainstream (not a word I’ve had to use since 1990, but since it perfectly describes what I mean, let’s go with it) – they were a rock band, pure and simple, with no “post-” or “math-” or even “folk-” prefix to muddy the clear waters of four to the floor. Now, when I started listening to independent music in the 90s, it was as an alternative to the mainstream rock music around on major labels – the bands too odd to be given a “proper” record deal. I suppose I’ve never completely grown out of that attitude, because I found it a bit of a shock to hear a band that sounds like Joan Jett at an indie schmindie fest like ATP/bowlie.
And it led me to ponder the world of independent music. Even when I was growing up, the indie music I listened to was often on major labels – Nirvana ensured that noisy weird guitar bands would forever have a place in the major label roster (I think all of the big grunge bands were on majors, unless I’m mistaken). The collapse of the mainstream record industry, the rise if big indie labels and the democratisation of music production over the last 15 years has totally changed the game – now more and more artists will be indie by default. In that context, the indie artist is pretty much everyone – certainly any musician who writes their own songs and has yet to appear on a TV talent show – and so, independent music becomes a broad church. Sure, there will be extreme noise terrorists chipping away at the periphery – but there will be a bell curve of more accessible music previously mopped up greedily by the majors. This is probably a pretty good state of affairs – indie is no longer “our music” but “everyone’s music”.
So how do I feel about that? Well, as nice as it is to be able to identify myself with a subculture, I have been banging on for YEARS about how putting the means of production into the hands of the artists will enable everyone to express themselves, so to be pissed off by the results of this new democracy is a tad hypocritical. I am curious about what a younger generation thinks of as indie or independent music, seen afresh without the cultural baggage of the 90s. Is indie music a business model, or a state of mind?
I’ve been rehearsing this week with a strange kind of band – a sort of conceptual post-rock group. They’re called The Overdrive Orchestra by virtue of their 6 guitarists (plus bass, drums and spoken vocals). This collective operate under a singularly odd set of rules, namely:
1) The line-up is never the same for two gigs.
Although built around the core of Steve Cross (ringleader), and Charlie Pyne and Matty Hoban often play bass and drums respectively, everything else changes. An OO incarnation practices twice, records once, then disbands.
2) The music is improvised.
3) Each song starts with a bassline (often borrowed from a mid-90s hiphop track). This does not change at all over the course of the song. The drums lead the dynamics, the guitarists follow suite.
4) Songs should be exactly 8 minutes long – the quality of a song is judged mainly by how close to 8 minutes long it is.
No idea why.
And that’s it. Semi-improvised 6-guitar weirdness. 6 guitars can chuck out a lot of sound, so OO often sounds like the house band on a paddle steamer to hell – although, we can manage a surprising amount of melodic niceness at moments. And then back, once more, into the boiling waters.
One of the pieces we’re playing is co-written by textual artist Gethan Dick, based on biomedical optics research I was doing in my previous job, and using the visible backscattered spectrum of Gethan’s finger to generate the dynamic structure. If that’s blowing your mind now, wait till you hear it…
We were in the studio yesterday recording The Gethan Dick Finger Song and some other fine stuff:
I started writing this post in praise of the concept album because I may be a serial concept album writer. I’ve just recorded my first full album of songs about science, and there is a nonzero probability that the next “straight” Sound of The Ladies album will be about animals. Or something less lame. “We went to the bottom of the ocean (or, what we did with our lives)” had a very nautical theme to it (although not all of the songs stuck to that) – so, am I becoming a repeat offender?
I think like most people nowadays, I associate the concept album with a particular era of 70s prog-rock, but I have to confess to not really understanding where a concept album ends and a regular one begins (in the case of prog rock, it could be argued “around the 4th disc/three-hour mark”). Wikipedia describes them as “unified by a theme, which can be instrumental, compositional, narrative, or lyrical” – but isn’t that any good album unified by the style and preoccupations of the songwriter?
I can think of three obvious classes of concept albums: “story” concept albums, “theme” concept albums, and “recording” concept albums.
In “story” concept albums, the songs link together to make some kind of narrative. In the olden days this would have been called a “musical” or “rock opera”, but now we should probably just call it “trapped in the closet-type albums” and be done with it. More auspicious examples might be Lou Reed’s depressing “Berlin”; “The Wall” by Pink Floyd; “Ziggy Stardust…”; the usual suspects.
So, the “recording” concept album; here something around the recording process dictates or constrains the style or storytelling. Tom Waits’ “Nighthawks at the Diner” is a studio album, recorded as-live complete with between-song banter from the “beat poet bum” character which was his persona at the time (for that matter, live albums could be considered in this bracket, but they rarely are). Albums recorded with basic instruments or recording equipment might come into that bracket too. Like that Bon Iver album that he supposedly recorded in a shed with a guitar knitted from his own chest rug. Whatevs.
“Theme” concept albums can be harder to pin down. These can work within constraints (like the above) or just try to touch on themes. “Colorful Ventures” apparently mentions a colour in each song title (7 tracks?) – I think we can agree that’s a clearcut case of a concept album. I’m happy that my “songs about science” album falls into that bracket. But what if it’s less obvious? Is the artist just arbitrarily assigning meaning to a disparate collection of songs? How about “Pet Sounds”, an album I’ve heard described as “representing Brian Wilson’s mental state at the time”. As opposed to all the albums where the songwriter studiously ignores their own thoughts and feelings? If that represents a concept album, then 90% of records released are concept albums. “Sergeant Pepper” apparently started life as a story and turned into the twee mess “we” know and love. Not a concept album. Well, in the Sound of The Ladies’ world, here are the ten concept albums that it’s ok to like*:
1) “I see a Darkness” by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (Death)
2) “The Transfiguration of Vincent” by M Ward (Break-up album)
3) “Bone Machine” by Tom Waits (Death again)
4) “Franks Wild Years” also by Tom Waits (Musician Frank O’Brien sees his life in flashback whilst freezing to death on a park bench)
5) “Doolittle” by Pixies (death, the bible)
6) “69 Love Songs” by The Magnetic Fields (duh!)
7) “The Residents’ Commercial Album” by the Residents (40 tracks, each just over a minute long)
8 )”Tallahassee” by The Mountain Goats (married couple move to Tallahassee, Florida to drink themselves to death)
9) “12 Golden Country Greats” by Ween (dada-rock duo play straightahead country songs)
10) Most albums by They Might Be Giants (science, no!, see (7) )
*Not forgetting the entire Sound of the Ladies catalogue(science, the sea, animals, sexual dysfunction, death, breaking up). According to my last.fm playlist, I listen to a lot of Noam Chomsky, who tends to make concept albums about anarchism and dissolving centres of state and corporate power, but I doubt he’ll take his omission too hard.
