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On Bear in Heaven, Sunset Airway, Lower Dens

I would feel a little foolish dropping a link in this blog for everything I write somewhere else. But it makes sense to say that I’ve been spending a lot of time writing live show reviews for OPB Music. Barring any major lifestyle changes I’ll be posting on their site more and more often over the next few months.

This Bear in Heaven/Sunset Airway/Lower Dens piece is my most recent review.

I just like this song

I just like this song.

Scott’s Songs

I produced a television feature for Oregon Public Broadcasting. It’s advertised as a story about a Portland, Ore. band called Super XX Man. But it’s really about this guy, Scott Garred.

I was drawn to this story for its simplicity. Scott is prolific. He has just released his 13th album as Super XX Man. Anyone who has written over a hundred songs with moderate success has something to say. And his tale came embedded with a second angle. Scott works as a music therapist at Oregon State Hospital – the hospital featured in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

I got to know Scott well over the course of the project. I think ‘modest’ is the first word most people would use to describe him. He never talks in grand terms about his songwriting or his future plans. And Scott’s music as Super XX Man won’t put anyone out of their comfort zone. The songs pretty much follow straightforward rock and pop forms. On the surface, it’s all too uncomplicated.

I think Scott’s greatest talent as a songwriter is his ability to write a good song about anything. Scott is no Dylan, he’s no poet or philosopher. But by writing consistently and constantly over the past 15 years, his discography is effectively a vivid self-portrait. It’s not really a case of art imitating life. Rather it’s a life subsumed by art. Throughout the project I became more and more aware of this symbiotic relationship between Scott’s life and his music. This is the story I wanted to tell in the feature.

It was a challenge in the end to translate what I thought was interesting about Scott into a short documentary. A story about genius or anomaly will always be more compelling than one about a normal guy. But maybe you’ll see what I mean?

You can watch it here.

If It Be Your Will

Norwegian radio producer Kari Hesthamar interviewed Leonard Cohen in 2005. Their discussion is centered around Cohen’s affair with a woman named Marianne. She’s enshrined in a famous song he wrote for his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. They met in Hydra and their relationship lasted through the 1960’s.

In focusing on this particular relationship, the interview is a window into Cohen’s ideas about memory. Many of his thoughts are shaped from his experiences with Zen Buddhism. But there’s also something tangential to Buddhism, something more inherent to Cohen, something I might misinterpret as ambivalence, that seeps from his answers. When asked what he remembers from his time with Marianne, he responds:

“You remember when your children were born, or you remember when maybe the first time you saw Hydra, or maybe the first time you went on the stage with your guitar. A few things like that, but I don’t remember the life that I was leading, before I met Marianne, or after really, it seems to be all the same.”

The interview is produced as an audio story. Hesthamar intersperses ambient noise from his apartment as well as short interactions Cohen has with various friends throughout the interview. The production commands a similar presence to cinéma vérité. In listening to the piece, there is a strong feeling of provocation towards Cohen. She is almost pushing him to tell a particular version of the past. But the interview methodology is balanced by Cohen’s thoughtful words and the rich sonic texture created with music and ambient noise. It’s an unusual radio piece. It does a beautiful job of creating a space that is uniquely Cohen’s. It’s easy to fall prey to his words even if you’re not quite sure about them.

You can read a transcript of the interview here.

Into the World of Synesthesia

A short audio documentary I made for a class at Northwestern was recently aired on Chicago Public Radio. It’s about a neurological condition called synesthesia – the involuntary coupling  of two unrelated sensory or cognitive experiences.

You can listen to it on Chicago Public Radio’s site here.

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You may have noticed there hasn’t been much activity here for the past few months. I graduated college, moved to the Pacific Northwest, and started a full-time job. Not much time for blogging.

However, I am in the process of dreaming-up a new website that will host some of my published work and other miscellaneous projects. This may not launch for some time.

I hope you accept my excuses in the meantime. Look for me in the future.

Self-Promotion: The Liberty Sessions

For almost 1/3 of my life I’ve played guitar in a band with my friends called The Early. We released a new album today. It may our last release for a while. It would be great if you could stroll over to our Bandcamp page and check it out.

Here’s one of my favorite cuts from the “Liberty Sessions”

Bloodbuzz Ohio

For some time I’ve wondered why The National present themselves the way they do. Dim light. Black, white, gray, dark blue. Always dressed like Brooks Brothers models.  Sometimes I imagine a meeting they had early in their professional career where they decided to dress up a bit more to create more distance between the music and reality.  While the aura extends beyond music videos to their live performance, I think The National have a tendency to be too introverted, to come off as removed. This only feels disconcerting because their music is populist (read: the same way The Hold Steady are populist in the eyes of their audience) in tone and message.

But then what may appear as binary oppositions can amount to a sort of Brechtian realism. In ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’, Matt Berninger’s lyrics feel so intimate that the bourgeois appearances fall away: “I still owe money to the money to the money I owe/I never thought about love when I thought about home”. Those fancy clothes become a self-conscious hoax. He’s wearing them because he didn’t have time to change before going to the bar after work. In live performance, Berninger seems so genuinely unhappy that we guess he’s really feeling what he’s saying. In another song off their new record (High Violet), he repeats, “What makes you think I’m enjoying being led to the flood?” He yells it. The situation is god awful, but he’ll let his suit get wet.

The suits and the darkness also align with confessional imagery. Repentance and absolution. But there are so many moments where The National retreat from this sort of intimacy that I am not too confident in backing these claims. I haven’t ruled out the idea that these guys may just dress this way.

Aesthetic Bloodlust

Demystifying Musical Currency

I was pleasantly surprised to find this thoughtful piece of commentary questioning the nature of musical taste. Perhaps I found this article to be intriguing because it’s so rare to find anything on Pitchfork that steps back from the ephemera of indie rock vogue. Nitsuh Abebe‘s column (appropriately titled “Why We Fight”) politely bites the hand that feeds it by dissecting this exact culture industry. Abebe’s argument is age-old: our musical taste is framed by our subjective desire for fulfillment in the culture we consume. In his own words, he says our musical preferences are dictated by the way a particular artist’s cultural baggage, “can feel like the things you’re trying to become, and the things you’re afraid of becoming.”  We realize ourselves in every stage of this process. We listen to certain bands because we identify, in some way, not only with their sonic artistry, but also their social currency. These bands then form a constellation that shape our perception of all the music that follows.

I’ve written before about exemplars in relation to taste. In the same way music does not generate itself organically, neither do our cultural preferences. As wacky as it is that some pregnant mother’s subject their insides to Mozart by holding headphones to their stomachs, such stimuli will undoubtedly play some role in that individual’s future preferences. While I am certainly not saying these people will necessarily enjoy 18th century classical music, this influence could be as abstract as a general expectation for musical closure. Or, as Abebe discusses, a model subject for transgression. Outside the womb, our existence is accompanied by the soundtrack of thousands of songs and our individual sense of taste is defined by just those esoteric sounds, organized in such a way they are capable of breaking through the daily monotony. As many have demonstrated, we live in a world dictated by exemplars.

The most interesting point the Pitchfork article briefly touches is on the way this framing shapes the perception of popular music criticism. Abebe asks, “Have we reached some point where our knees jerk and we kick away anything any critic can write off as cutesy or “twee” or associate with the wrong movies?”Reading a review on Pitchfork or in any music magazine or blog is typically an exercise in cultural allusion. If you don’t know or get the references, you’ll often be lost at sea. And this is fair only up to the point where critics and their readers begin to establish unassailable hierarchies.

If we can’t move past our petty biases towards one reference over another, what values do we really have? Association becomes valued over the art itself. I think the problems people have with a site like Pitchfork rests not so much in its content, but with the people who consume the site’s opinions as dogma. When “good” becomes appropriated by entities completely external to the work,  criticism is no longer a meaningful practice. One could argue the work no longer exists.

But this is only a problem if listeners allow their musical preferences to be utterly swayed by whatever the critics frame as the new cool thing in context of artificial cultural constructs. In other words, it is important we frame our music’s value in terms of the “what we’re trying to become” rather than letting “the things we’re afraid of becoming” dictate what we say we like and don’t like. As soon as we let the latter take precedent, we sacrifice a large piece of our cultural individuality. Without the relative free will to decide what we actually think is cool, what else do we have?