As discussed in a forthcoming post (which will probably be way too long), I've hurt my leg and have a little more time at the moment while it heals up. It's also left me feeling somewhat expansive. That gets us posts like this. No one's forcing you to be here.
TWO QUICK THOUGHTS ON MUSIC!!
(1) The Tug
I think it's compelling, catchy, and both very happy and very sad when songs have an element -- for me it is sense in the melody, but that's probably because I listen so predominantly to pop (broadly defined) -- that is always just out of reach. That tugs you along. It's not quite as simple as an unresolved progression or harmonic; it's a little more squishily defined than that in my mind. It's something that the song establishes and implies, generally musically or rhythmically, but never quite lands on; something that has but is absent -- that is almost clear from the way the song curves around it but never gives it to you.
For me, the tug is extremely strong on the title track, track 7, of the 1998 album Maybe You've Been Brainwashed, Too by New Radicals. I'll try to minimize the thing of describing music in writing. But what happens to me in this song is this: a spare guitar line, a chopped up melody line, and a driving simple rock beat combine to create a train that has great forward momentum but also holes in it. It feels to me like the verse melody line is always waiting to land somewhere it never quite reaches; it just keeps pulsing towards it in Gregg Alexander's tight sung melody line. The melody "lands" somewhere in the chorus, and that place is fine -- I like the song, it's a good song -- but what I love about this song is the implication of this thing during the verse, the promise that it never realizes; how there is a shadow of musical ascent traced out by what is there, and it's never ruined by actually trying to realize it.
Somewhere with more musical sophistication than me (you, probably) could easily read all this and say: "He just likes kind of tight melody lines." That might be it.
Another good example is "I'm Goin' Down" by Bruce Springsteen, which has the added awesome-song-thing of being a musically "happy"/upbeat song about a sad/downbeat topic. That is an awesome way for a song to be. But with respect to the tug, this one's a little different: it in fact almost does give the listener that vague thing it strives for, that landing implied by the rest of the song. The tightness of the verse melody line and (again) a simple guitar figure land perfectly, for me, in a chorus that is not just good but fantastic; fantastic for this song, for this melody. So, this may be a case where the tug proves itself in the exception: proves that exists not only because it does not exist, but because there are actual musical elements towards which songs that have it are "tugging" you, and they can sometimes land on it, it's just hard because those elements have to be just right so perhaps it's just as well if songs with the tug don't even try.
The last example is asinine, but I'm serious about it. It's lyrical rather than musical, and different from the other two examples also in that it wound up being the artifact of an error in hearing: it does not exist. But if it had existed, it would have been great.
For the first few weeks of the radio success of "I Get Knocked Down" (yes) by Chumbawumba, I did not think the chorus, these are the actual lyrics, went:
I get knocked down
but I get up again
&c.
I heard the chorus as this:
I get no-
but I get up again
and the "no-" was a clear cutoff, an expression of such ambivalent frustration the singer could not even complete it, allowing me, allowing anyone listening to put their own thing in the song, or more likely not put one specific thing -- not put "money" or "sex" into that gap -- but leave it wide open with their own unsayable inchoate longings, the things they aren't getting that are out of their reach and too frustrating to speak. I thought it was so great; so electrifying and great. I did not feel the same rush once I discovered what the real lyrics were.
(2) Josh Ritter's "The Temptation of Adam" and the evolution of understanding a song
To fully appreciate this, I suppose you should go listen to this wonderful song. My general point here is simple: a rich narrative song allows for our understanding of it to deepen and unfurl over time.
(I'm also probably bad at listening comprehension. I'll point out that I was never studying the song for its meaning; that said, the "many many listens" noted below were frequently attentive listens, during which I was listening to the song with nothing else going on.)
I think, as a writer, I find this interesting: how totally clear something can be -- once you know whats going on in "The Temptation of Adam" it's not complicated at all, and there's nothing cutesy or guarded holding the listener back from getting the song -- and yet how it can still take awhile for a reasonably intelligent, reasonably attentive reader/listener to get it.
From here on, if you don't know the song, you'll be checked out.
My understanding of Josh Ritter's "The Temptation of Adam" followed this progression:
Years 1 and 2: many many listens
It's a cool, offbeat song about people relaxing together and then falling into and out of love, or in love but then she somehow has to go away, at a country house or some secluded retreat, the kind of place where wealthy and upper-middle-class people spend a few weeks over their summers.
Years 3, 4, 5: many many listens
Wow, I missed the point of this song! They're in a bunker! He's remembering the woman he loved, because they both were in some kind of bunker because there was like World War III, and then he lost her in what sounds like an explosion or maybe she decided to leave the bunker after the war I don't quite know... he "thinks about her leaving in the avalanche cascades," which sounds like an awful thing that happens when lots of bombs go off. It's sad and he's alone, and he's remembering the improbable romance of these 2 people brought together in a nuclear weapons facility by a catastrophe that annihilated mankind. And... I guess he's Adam, now, because he's the only one left? Hunh.
Years 5 - present: many listens
In Years 3 -5, there was a lot I shrugged off. I had never really understood the lines at the end; about how he "think[s] about that great big button, and [he's] tempted." And I'd never really understood the lines before that, about how something tells him that things "just won't work out above, that [their] love will live a half-life on the surface." I sort of wrote this all off on the grounds that, in the song, bombs had been dropped and so if they went up top they'd die, obviously, everything would die, but...
and then I got it, finally, and it's completely straightforward! I mean, there's nothing I need to explain. If you listen to the words of the song, all of which are clearly sung by Ritter with just a simple guitar accompaniment, it tells the story of a guy who's in a nuclear facility where he has his finger on one of the "great big buttons" that would set whatever incipient nuclear holocaust has brought him there in motion, and there is a woman "Marie" who is a technician or something in this same facility, and they fall in love, and he thinks the circumstances of their falling in love (trapped in nuclear bunker, waiting to see if all the bombs will fly and the world will end) are particular enough that their relationship would not last in the regular world, so he's "tempted" (IT'S IN THE TITLE OF THE SONG!) to press the button, to set off the bombs, so that he and Marie can have their own forever down in this bunker.
It's great; it's a terrific feat of storytelling, and I'm so baffled as to why it took me so freaking long to get it.
TWO QUICK THOUGHTS ON MUSIC!!
(1) The Tug
I think it's compelling, catchy, and both very happy and very sad when songs have an element -- for me it is sense in the melody, but that's probably because I listen so predominantly to pop (broadly defined) -- that is always just out of reach. That tugs you along. It's not quite as simple as an unresolved progression or harmonic; it's a little more squishily defined than that in my mind. It's something that the song establishes and implies, generally musically or rhythmically, but never quite lands on; something that has but is absent -- that is almost clear from the way the song curves around it but never gives it to you.
For me, the tug is extremely strong on the title track, track 7, of the 1998 album Maybe You've Been Brainwashed, Too by New Radicals. I'll try to minimize the thing of describing music in writing. But what happens to me in this song is this: a spare guitar line, a chopped up melody line, and a driving simple rock beat combine to create a train that has great forward momentum but also holes in it. It feels to me like the verse melody line is always waiting to land somewhere it never quite reaches; it just keeps pulsing towards it in Gregg Alexander's tight sung melody line. The melody "lands" somewhere in the chorus, and that place is fine -- I like the song, it's a good song -- but what I love about this song is the implication of this thing during the verse, the promise that it never realizes; how there is a shadow of musical ascent traced out by what is there, and it's never ruined by actually trying to realize it.
Somewhere with more musical sophistication than me (you, probably) could easily read all this and say: "He just likes kind of tight melody lines." That might be it.
Another good example is "I'm Goin' Down" by Bruce Springsteen, which has the added awesome-song-thing of being a musically "happy"/upbeat song about a sad/downbeat topic. That is an awesome way for a song to be. But with respect to the tug, this one's a little different: it in fact almost does give the listener that vague thing it strives for, that landing implied by the rest of the song. The tightness of the verse melody line and (again) a simple guitar figure land perfectly, for me, in a chorus that is not just good but fantastic; fantastic for this song, for this melody. So, this may be a case where the tug proves itself in the exception: proves that exists not only because it does not exist, but because there are actual musical elements towards which songs that have it are "tugging" you, and they can sometimes land on it, it's just hard because those elements have to be just right so perhaps it's just as well if songs with the tug don't even try.
The last example is asinine, but I'm serious about it. It's lyrical rather than musical, and different from the other two examples also in that it wound up being the artifact of an error in hearing: it does not exist. But if it had existed, it would have been great.
For the first few weeks of the radio success of "I Get Knocked Down" (yes) by Chumbawumba, I did not think the chorus, these are the actual lyrics, went:
I get knocked down
but I get up again
&c.
I heard the chorus as this:
I get no-
but I get up again
and the "no-" was a clear cutoff, an expression of such ambivalent frustration the singer could not even complete it, allowing me, allowing anyone listening to put their own thing in the song, or more likely not put one specific thing -- not put "money" or "sex" into that gap -- but leave it wide open with their own unsayable inchoate longings, the things they aren't getting that are out of their reach and too frustrating to speak. I thought it was so great; so electrifying and great. I did not feel the same rush once I discovered what the real lyrics were.
(2) Josh Ritter's "The Temptation of Adam" and the evolution of understanding a song
To fully appreciate this, I suppose you should go listen to this wonderful song. My general point here is simple: a rich narrative song allows for our understanding of it to deepen and unfurl over time.
(I'm also probably bad at listening comprehension. I'll point out that I was never studying the song for its meaning; that said, the "many many listens" noted below were frequently attentive listens, during which I was listening to the song with nothing else going on.)
I think, as a writer, I find this interesting: how totally clear something can be -- once you know whats going on in "The Temptation of Adam" it's not complicated at all, and there's nothing cutesy or guarded holding the listener back from getting the song -- and yet how it can still take awhile for a reasonably intelligent, reasonably attentive reader/listener to get it.
From here on, if you don't know the song, you'll be checked out.
My understanding of Josh Ritter's "The Temptation of Adam" followed this progression:
Years 1 and 2: many many listens
It's a cool, offbeat song about people relaxing together and then falling into and out of love, or in love but then she somehow has to go away, at a country house or some secluded retreat, the kind of place where wealthy and upper-middle-class people spend a few weeks over their summers.
Years 3, 4, 5: many many listens
Wow, I missed the point of this song! They're in a bunker! He's remembering the woman he loved, because they both were in some kind of bunker because there was like World War III, and then he lost her in what sounds like an explosion or maybe she decided to leave the bunker after the war I don't quite know... he "thinks about her leaving in the avalanche cascades," which sounds like an awful thing that happens when lots of bombs go off. It's sad and he's alone, and he's remembering the improbable romance of these 2 people brought together in a nuclear weapons facility by a catastrophe that annihilated mankind. And... I guess he's Adam, now, because he's the only one left? Hunh.
Years 5 - present: many listens
In Years 3 -5, there was a lot I shrugged off. I had never really understood the lines at the end; about how he "think[s] about that great big button, and [he's] tempted." And I'd never really understood the lines before that, about how something tells him that things "just won't work out above, that [their] love will live a half-life on the surface." I sort of wrote this all off on the grounds that, in the song, bombs had been dropped and so if they went up top they'd die, obviously, everything would die, but...
and then I got it, finally, and it's completely straightforward! I mean, there's nothing I need to explain. If you listen to the words of the song, all of which are clearly sung by Ritter with just a simple guitar accompaniment, it tells the story of a guy who's in a nuclear facility where he has his finger on one of the "great big buttons" that would set whatever incipient nuclear holocaust has brought him there in motion, and there is a woman "Marie" who is a technician or something in this same facility, and they fall in love, and he thinks the circumstances of their falling in love (trapped in nuclear bunker, waiting to see if all the bombs will fly and the world will end) are particular enough that their relationship would not last in the regular world, so he's "tempted" (IT'S IN THE TITLE OF THE SONG!) to press the button, to set off the bombs, so that he and Marie can have their own forever down in this bunker.
It's great; it's a terrific feat of storytelling, and I'm so baffled as to why it took me so freaking long to get it.
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