Happy Monday,
Last week I rolled out the Five Things, which are a means of figuring out issues in a creative work, especially art and music. The Five Things are: Mood, Metaphor, Narrative/Thrust, Individuation/Character and Technique.
We’re going to roll around in MOOD today, but bumping into the other elements as well, because they’re always all present.
Beyond this, though, and perhaps before it, one needs to have a library.
What’s a library? It’s a storage area for ideas, images, experiences, music, films, poems, remembered conversations—all the things in our heads that we pull out and reshape into new ideas. And you want to keep growing that library by putting new ideas into it.
I found this while reading, and it is just the thing for adding to your library. Pick any one of these seven music websites and keep it on in the background this week. Stick some stuff in your head.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-215656000
Meute
If that link is too much work, just listen to this: Meute. A German brass band that plays techno. So good.
https://youtu.be/JPcVyq_BYjU?si=qrL9rcPH5B2QP3kK
While you listen, we’ll apply the Five Things.
So, applying the Five Things to Meute…
Obviously this is very mood driven. Strong grooves are always indicative of mood as a main driver. I can’t really put the mood of this into words. Obviously festive, with a wonderful energy—the mood of a dance club. A sustained sort of suspense. There are some shifts of that mood, but they’re minor. It never really changes what it is, and it doesn’t need to; it works great as it is.
But with no shifts of mood, there isn’t much thrust or narrative to it. Remember these are both a way of describing a sense of a piece of music going somewhere. “Reset” doesn’t go anywhere. It ends because Meute decides it’s over.
Metaphor… there’s an interesting juxtaposition, which in a way is metaphorical, that of a marching band or a brass band onto electronic music. It busts a cliché open nicely—electronic music with no electronics. Which leads us to Character and Individuation. Brass bands aren’t that original; techno isn’t original or innovative anymore. But a brass band playing techno? That’s a new thing.
Technique. Amazing technique all over the place. The sousaphone player doing the bass line. What lung power! The precision of the horns, the pitch perfect harmonies. The locked down, unwavering groove. Meute is an amazing bunch of players. And the recording—quality like that pulled off live in a field in Portugal? Terrific.
Poor Boy
https://youtu.be/TLJFSj3b4q0?si=W9UND7nIOP03EHV5
This is Nick Drake off his second album, Bryter Layter. It’s a bit of a masterpiece. The album was recorded at Sound Techniques Studio in Chelsea in 1970, of course on a Sound Techniques console.
This particular track also settles into one dominant mood, sort of a Bossa Nova. Perhaps there’s something metaphoric about it. We could be in a jazz club. There’s a smokey, late-night flavor to it—an after hours jam session—with the improv heavy arrangement and the wet sax solos. The female choir seems outside of the nightclub, like it’s a memory of a choir in a church, reverberant and in its own space off to the right. A metaphoric element that also adds to the narrative of the production. It still isn’t really going anywhere. The character remains stuck in whatever the situation is, and the fade out gives us no clear resolution. The jam at the night club goes on all night.
One thing “Poor Boy” has a lot of is character, because Nick Drake was such a singular vocalist with an incredibly distinctive voice. His songs are also quite distinct, leaning towards folk but overlaid with a jazz-ish complexity and obtuse, oblique lyrics that are melancholy. No one has a good time in a Nick Drake song. He died of an overdose of antidepressants at age 26. Drake left three albums, all recorded at Sound Techniques, all beautiful and sad.
Son of Sam
https://youtu.be/B6sYRE65QIc?si=ogkwGMt24E_Q1kG0
A fabulous song by the late Elliott Smith. I chose it because it has a lot of similar elements to “Poor Boy”. Similar chord progression, similar location somewhere between folk, rock and jazz, and a similar vocal presence, that light, delicate voice.
“Son of Sam” has mood, but it shifts very deliberately, moving into a very aggressive bridge and solo section, before winding down and ending on a hushed note. “Son of Sam” has tons of thrust—this song is going somewhere like a train goes somewhere. When I write of mood shift as a means of generating thrust and narrative, “Son of Sam” is exactly what I’m talking about.
There’s a metaphoric element to the song. “Son of Sam” is a nod to serial killer David Berkowitz, who terrorized young couples in NYC in the late ’70s—I remember this era well; he was all over the news. The song isn’t about a serial killer per se, but the lyrics hint at a person at odds with the world, with themselves, and ready to lash out, which happens in the bridge/break. And then at the end, he saunters off, to explode again somewhere else.
It’s very easy for me to see the song in visual terms, as a movie or a play. I conceive of it as a song-and-dance number in a musical, Elliott Smith tap dancing with a bowler and a cane and a cigar. The bridge has a bunch of couples on stage, the choreography full of stabbings and strangling, and then out comes the leading man for the last chorus, ending the song with a flourish and a bow.
“Son of Sam” is on Smith’s 2000 album Figure 8. Recorded at Sunset Sound and Abbey Road, it has a Beatle-esque thing about it. Smith played everything on the record. For a record made of overdubs, it has a very live, band slamming through it in the studio feel.
Like Nick Drake, Elliott Smith died young, at 34. He too was fighting addiction and mental health issues—both struggled with depression.
This week, as you work on music, let your brain take it somewhere visual, and then try to “paint” the visual with audio production elements. How would you use reverb and panning? What can be added or subtracted to the mix to build it up or pull it down, to shift the mood and add some narrative and thrust to it? How do you highlight a unique instrument or voice?
Think movies. Think paintings. Think photographs. Think metaphor.
Warm regards,
Luke