Before You Listen

I have an album to recommend.

Normally I stick to songs, but in this case the album is by an obscure contemporary singer-songwriter, it’s very solidly good, and it seems like he could use the support.

I am developing a strong fondness for Lovers Leap by Dan Bryk. I picked it up on a whim, knowing nothing about it, along with a couple of other contemporary albums. On first listen, I loved the opening track, and the rest of album seemed distinctly the best of the group that I had purchased, but nothing particularly exceptional.

But, as I’ve gone back to listen to it, I feel like the album is very good, and repeated listening reveals the strengths of the songs that are sometimes obscured by his limitations as a performer.
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Breaking news, Chuck Berry is great.

This shouldn’t be any reason for surprise, but I just hadn’t listened to him at all until recently.

My general feelings about classics from the 50s are mixed. Some are great Johhny Cash’s Sun recordings, many are good (some Everly Brothers, some Buddy Holly, and Elvis’s Sun recordings are all worth hearing), but a significant amount pop music from the 50s feels too far removed from my formative musical tastes to be particularly interesting.

Chuck Berry is great (I repeat myself). Here are two tracks, the first of which is a straight ahead rocker, the second a little bit lighter, more casual fun with an entertaining wordiness for a Chuck Berry song.

• Roll Over Beethoven
• Too Much Monkey Business

If you enjoy them “Johnny B. Goode” and “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” at the least, are also essential and worth hearing the original versions if, like me, you’ve heard various covers (particularly of the former).

The discussion in the previous post reminded me to add a sidebar link to the Mudcat Cafe — the best online resource I have found for traditional music. It include an extensive database of lyrics, and active forums for people who perform, listen to, and enjoy traditional music. Well worth poking around.

If you haven’t read RS’s comment in the previous thread, he has a couple of great quotations reflecting different perspectives on “folk music.” Thinking about them made me realize that I feel like I have a hole in my vocabulary when thinking about “folk music.” Within the realm of what is commonly called “folk music” there are two categories that I feel are reasonably distinct. “Traditional music” refers specifically to songs that have been passed down as part of a musical tradition, and that have no recognized author. “Singer/songwriter” refers to a style of music that grew out of the folk revival, of people writing and performing their own songs, frequently with minimal arangement. Both of those can get fuzzy at the edges, but both of those terms have meaning for.

What I don’t have is a word for the area in between those two — of contemporary music written in an explicitly folk style. For example, there are a number of Ewan McColl songs that are frequently listed as (trad) e.g., “Shoals of Herring” Or, to pick a less clear cut example, I would say Woodie Guthrie and Joni Mitchell are clearly working in different styles. I feel like “singer/songwriter” describes Joni Mitchell well, but, even though Woody Guthrie was a singer/songwriter, I would like another term to describe his style of music.

I do like one definition proposed here

If I sing something not the way you’re used to hearing it, and you think I’ve got the tune or the words wrong, then it isn’t folk. On the other hand, if you think I’m singing a variant–then it’s folk. — Charlie Baum

On another note, there’s a very interesting discussion of lyric writing in hip-hop here. Well worth reading.

I was just listening to a folk compilation and, Sweet Lucy, immediately stood out as a great track. It’s a great example of the satisfaction of a minimally processed recording of good musicians playing music they like, having an unselfconsciously good time.

It also seemed to me to be very much of a time (1975 in this case), and that it would be hard for someone now to do something with exactly that spirit. Which made me think about it’s inclusion on a folk music compilation, which both feels right, and not unequivocal. It isn’t a traditional song, it is clearly influenced by then contemporary pop music (the fantastic vocal harmonies on the chorus feel, to me, like they draw as much from a group like the Lovin’ Spoonfuls as anything else). At the same time, it’s also obvious that the musicians involved have participated in the folk revival, and are actively involved in that musical culture, and that’s important.

Which, indirectly, helped me work out something that has been bothering me for a long time.
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Ella Fitzgerald Live at the Newport Jazz Festival (1957) singing a medley of sorts.

I don’t listen to that much jazz, so perhaps I’m a sucker for that sort of crowd-pleasing, high energy, showoffy, brilliant, incredible performance.

I just can’t figure out how she manages to avoid passing out from lack of oxygen (or hyperventilating) when she’s done. She is taking breaths, but it doesn’t seem like enough.

Following up on my earlier post about the process of getting used to a new song, I have an example.

I know that I like Fiona Apple’s Parting Gift, but I’m not sure I can articulate exactly why I like it.

To start I would say that I think the song is above average, but not great, but her performance is very good. The song didn’t catch my attention the first time I heard it because, while the chorus is memorable, the verses ran together for me. But as I’ve listened to it, I appreciate that her performance clearly has a sense of the song as a complete whole. I like the song better when I’ve heard a couple times, and can listen from the beginning knowing where the song is going.

I don’t know if I can give more specifics than that.
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Songs are short.

It’s impressive how much originality, surprise, emotion, and drama a song can pack into 2-6 minutes. At the same time, songs necessarily get a lot of their meaning from allusions to other musical or cultural tropes. A song, generally, isn’t going to try to invent something completely new (various form of avant guarde music excepted), it operates inside a cultural context, and gains a lot by being able to trigger familiar reference points.

As a simple example think about the hundreds of love songs that have been written (to quote John Hartford “you know, as much of a kick as love songs are, they sure are hard to write.”). They may draw upon specific personal experiences of love, but many are addressed to abstract cultural symbols of love and romance and play with, and against those conventions.

In the vein of songs mining cultural symbols, The Last Gunfighter Ballad by Guy Clark is a well crafted example.
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It’s interesting to speculate, when listening to a performance that clearly taps into genuine emotion, what motivates the singer.

I was listening last night to two versions of “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” — Peter La Farge’s original and a late Townes Van Zandt cover (released in 1997, after his death). Both are great, and break my heart, and are very different from each other.

Listen to the La Farge version first. It sounds to me like he knows he he has a good story* to work with, and he’s just going to tell it pretty much straight. He isn’t a songwriting genius, but it feels like the song stirs him ambitions. He feels that if he can tell the story as well as he can, and communicate that to other people, that it could make a difference in the world.
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Today, one of my very favorite songs ever. Ain’t Life A Brook by Ferron.

It’s one of the very few songs, indeed few works in any media, that I have so completely absorbed, that it is part of my perspective on the world. There are times when I think about something and am reminded of “Ain’t Life A Brook” and, rather than thinking “oh, there’s an image that relates” I think, “I’ve already been thinking about the situation in ways informed by ‘Ain’t Life A Brook.’”

That’s an extreme statement to make and, obviously, that says as much about me, and accidents of circumstance that this specific song would have such meaning for me. Even looking at it based on “objective” merit, however, I would say it’s a fabulous song.

It’s one of the best narrative songs that I can think of. It describes the evolution of emotional states of the narrator, over a period of years, in way that is economical and also very clear and specific.

Like the polished stone from the song, the language lacks any unnecessary ornament. Every word has a purpose in the song, and feels well chosen for the emotional tone.

Just read the opening lines

I watch you reading a book
I get to thinking our
Love’s a polished stone
You give me a long drawn look
I know pretty soon
You’re gonna leave our home
And of course I mind

It does so much in seven lines. It sets up a scene that is domestic and both peaceful and troubled. And how much pain is captured in the understated “of course I mind.”

Despite the fact that it’s a break-up song, the ways in which the song has influenced me don’t necessarily relate to break-ups. The phrases that are most likely to pop up in my head are:

… life don’t clickety-clack
Down a straight-line track
It comes together and it comes apart

and

I know love’s a gift
I thought yours was mine
And something
That I could keep

Both of those are just beautiful phrases about the contingencies of life and love.

In both of those sections, I feel reminded to appreciate the parts of life that are gifts, and to recognize that they may not last forever. By temperament, I am slow to incorporate new elements in my life into my sense of self, but when I do, I am loathe to give them up or change them. I feel like the song both speaks to, and cautions against that side of my personality.

Particularly in that second quote, I feel the tension in both sides of that equation. Both the hurt in someone withdrawing love (or the fear that someone might), and the problem in thinking that someone else’s love is something to be kept and owned.

I have, as a friend has described, “a slow emotional metabolism.” Since the song is about the experience of slowly metabolizing intense emotional experiences, it relates to my experience. I appreciate that the song takes a long view, and that things do resolve by the end of the song, but I also recognize in myself the problems of spending that much time working through emotions.

I should add, finally, that I have heard Ferron perform the song live — at a Pride rally a couple years ago. The whole situation was not ideal for a performance. She was performing outdoors, the sound was terrible, there was a section of people playing close attention, but also a large group of people half-engaged. When she got to “Ain’t Life A Brook” I experienced a sudden feeling of awe and wonder at that fact that I was watching the person who wrote the song perform it. It was the only time in my life that I’ve had that specific reaction to a performance — that a song seems so extraordinary and flawless that it’s remarkable to be reminded that it was written by a specific person, and that person is present.

How does one judge a cover differently from an original?

Some covers take a song and find a new heart that wasn’t present in the original. For example, Janis Joplin’s cover of “Me and Bobby McGee”. Most, however, are in some sort of dialog with the original — reinterpreting the song, while paying tribute to the success of the original.

How exactly that works is a tricky thing, and I have an example on which I would invite you to weigh in.

I have lately been enjoying listening to Nouvelle Vague (”New Wave”), a group that covers, mostly, post-punk classics set to a bossa nova arrangement. The idea sounds too clever by half, and it’s clearly derivative, but it works because the new arrangements are clever and well executess and pay sincere tribute to the originals.

Part of pleasure of listening to a Nouvelle Vague is, like a good compilation, it invites you to revisit the originals, and to put them in a different context and different sides of the music. As I said, in my post about evaluating songs, it makes me happy that someone did it.

It is interesting, however to think about the relationship to the original songs. Here are two examples, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” originally by Joy Division and “Guns of Brixton” originally by the Clash.

I like the second one better as a song, and as a performance, but I feel like the former is a better cover. I feel like the version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” gets to heart of the song in way that “The Guns of Brixton” doesn’t. The second cover is clever, and clearly respectful of the original, but I feel like, in some way, it avoids really engaging the original — it just uses it as a device.

I can’t articulate my feeling any more than that, and I’d be really curious for any thoughts, either if you disagree, or if you agree and have specific elements that you would highlight.

Love Will Tear Us Apart (original)
Love Will Tear Us Apart (cover)

Guns of Brixton (original)
Guns of Brixton (cover)