New Monday #56
Happy Monday, all!
Headphones recommended! I highlighted some things you can listen for.
The opening is meticulously constructed:
Some slowed-down guitar whammy noise on the right, then two backward thumps on the left.
Three guitars - an acoustic and two electrics?
A bass note - the bass part overall is omnipresent yet unnoticeable.
What sounds like a backward strum on the left turns into a normal acoustic guitar part on the right, as the drums and the main riff kick in.
Sonar ping - like from an old war movie. Dead center. It happens around the 4 of each measure, slightly after it. I can’t exactly count it. Woodblock? A voice?
Drums
Very dry, very tucked — a sharp contrast to “the snare must be heard at all costs!” mentality of contemporary recordings. I think there are multiple overdubs. There’s a ride and snare kind of center to right, a floor tom to the left. Verse and chorus are almost the same thing, but at the turnaround, there’s a snare-floor tom-rack-tom fill (right to left to center) distinctly slowing the tempo for a moment. Love this change-up in feel. Don’t think this was cut to a click track.
Vocals
Very straightforward in the verses. Wet and pulled back a bit. An occasional double. The chorus is at least three tracks, with a phased sounding delay/reverb swooshing thing pulling to the sides - left then right?
Guitars
Graham Coxon is a very underrated player. 2nd verse is like a punk/modern take on Little Wing. The solo is three guitars. He cut the parts sitting on his amp, hence feedback. Coxon was into grunge and you can really hear it here. The solo could be off a Soundgarden album.
The Chorus
Oh my! Rich and swirling! A total uplift! Vocals! Cymbals! Guitar lead lines, an organ, a mellotron!
A Break after the solo. ...but then things come back in distinctly out of time.
Vamp Out
It’s a chorus that’s slightly abbreviated. They repeat it twice and then there’s a very audible edit at 4:33 - on the word “find.” My guess is they repeated the vamp a bunch and then decided to cut it down. I can’t be sure, but it sounds like they edited the master and didn’t quite nail it — the F of “Find” sounds cut off - “ind” not “find.” I love hearing stuff like this.
In the fade, not a boat motor, but a Hammond organ. The pitch drops right as the song ends. Did someone just press stop on the deck?
Gorgeous production by Stephen Street, who did The Smiths, The Cranberries, and of course, Blur. Interview with him here.
Forget the production for a moment. What does this song mean? What does it mean to you? What’s it about?
For me, it is about the loneliness and sadness of starting over. But there’s hope. Yes, this is a low point in your life, but you’ll get through it.
It came out thirty years ago. I found it interesting but too Britpop. It didn’t fit in with the heavier stuff I was producing at the time, so I didn’t find it too useful or inspirational. Radiohead’s The Bends knocked me out. Blur, not so much.
In 2025, this song wipes me out. I tear up when I hear it.
Obviously, I’ve changed, because the music hasn’t.
This is a Low
This is a Low was the standout track on Blur’s 1994 album Parklife. Parklife is a high point in Britpop, and certainly one of the great albums of the decade.
Parklife was cut at Maison Rouge, a studio established by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. It was a major place throughout the 80s and 90s. A lot of great music was made at Maison Rouge. The Internet Wayback Machine found this. Maison Rouge closed in 2000 and the building was razed.
This is a Low sat for weeks, basically complete, including the layered guitar solo, but without lyrics or vocals. Singer Damon Albarn was exhausted and had no ideas. Time was tight, the whole album was mixed, their record label, Food, was being typically difficult and pushing them, Albarn had to have hernia surgery... less than propitious circumstances.
But Albarn found inspiration: he’d been gifted a handkerchief with a weather map printed on it by Blur bassist Alex Jones. The map, more specifically, was of weather zones around the British Isles, the zones coinciding with a British radio program called The Shipping Forecast, which is exactly what it seems to be: weather reports for ships traveling the English Channel, the Irish Sea, etc. It turns out the band had a soft spot for The Shipping Forecast — they listened to it during an awful early tour of the United States. It made them feel less homesick. Albarn knocked out the lyrics, then the vocal, then went off to hospital to get his hernia fixed.
The lyrics are inspired by shipping zones — Dogger Bank, Cramity, etc. — with goofy rhymes and “Veddy English” wordplay.
Hit traffic on the Dogger bank
Up the Thames to find a taxi rank
Sail on by with the tide and go to sleep
And the radio says
And there’s a wonderful chorus:
This is a low
But it won't hurt you
When you are alone
It will be there with you
Finding ways to stay solo
This is a Low refers to a low-pressure zone, not some deep emotional state. You’ve all heard weather presenters saying, “This low-pressure zone is coming in from the north...”
Any of you ever get choked up from a weather report?
What is Meaning?
One of the central issues artists have with Ai music and Ai generated art in general, is that since Ai has only a statistical view of life, and can’t bring any sort of true emotional perspective to what it makes, the products it outputs are cold and sterile, and devoid of something human.
But as we can see from This Is a Low, it doesn’t matter what the meaning actually is, or what the intention or impulse was that gave birth to a thing. What matters is that a listener has some sort of receptor site inside for it. I made big life changes a year ago and now I’ve got a receptor site. Thirty years ago, This Is a Low meant nothing to me. In 2025 I can tear up over a song that’s about a weather map.
If people have the itch, they'll find something to scratch it.
Can Ai create output that people find moving? Yes. It can poop out love poetry without ever being in love. It can dump out songs, and in the next few years, some couple will get married and “their song” will be some well-chewed and digested, statistical mash of Just the Way You Are, Tonight I Celebrate My Love, All of Me and whatever else was snogged up. The couple will concoct it with Ai and then try to sell it on Spotify.
The lyrics might be like this: Until I die, let me hold you if you cry. Whether it rains or pours, I'm all yours.
Statistical Cliché
Sounds like the lyrics to an Ai wedding song, right? Fooled ya! It’s Coldplay, and they claim the song, ALL MY LOVE, will be their last single. A threat or a promise? By the way, officially, it’s ALL CAPS. They don’t want it confused with the Led Zeppelin tune from In Through the Out Door?
I associate Coldplay with numbers: in this case, seven songwriters and a further seven producers. It seems the more writers and producers involved, the more statistical and vanilla the song. Kinda explains Ai.
On the bright side, there’s this video, featuring just Chris Martin from the wading pool of writers and producers that is Coldplay, and Dick Van Dyke! It’s highly redemptive. The whole statistical potpourri is forgivable and elevated by a personage of such character and presence, humanity and individuality. He’s 99 hundred years old and he still has it. What charisma! You can’t not watch him when he’s in the frame. Extra points for film and still clips from Mr. Van Dyke’s glorious career. Heck, turn the sound down and just watch the video.
The Point
Like microwave cooking, Ai will only get better, faster, cheaper. It's unlikely to be strictly regulated (that might not be a bad thing). It can mimic human voices, play every instrument and convince people it understands what’s inside them. Heck, it makes porn — what more evidence is needed as to its power?
What Ai can’t do yet, and perhaps never, is take a weather map and a radio show heard while depressed on a tour bus and, in a flash, turn it into a song. It takes human intuition to make that leap, or to decide to cut three guitar parts and blend them for the solo, or decide to keep that organ in during the fade. Or to wait until the very last moment, trusting for some inspiration.
I think the point is you must trust, and double down on your humanity. More on this later.
David Johansen
David Johanson, the flamboyant singer of those glam punk boys of the 70s, The New York Dolls, and better known in the 80s as the Amaretto-sipping Buster Poindexter, died. I found the New York Dolls and Buster Poindexter frivolous and fun and forgettable.
But I saw Mr Johansen on Saturday Night Live in the late 80s, and he laid down a gorgeous performance of a song he wrote, Heart of Gold. It clobbered me: I was going through an awful breakup and I remember crying during it. Always, the meaning we find is what we bring.
I searched and searched... and turned up this clip of it on TikTok. Thanks to Huggy SNL for keeping this alive.
https://www.tiktok.com/@huggyattack/video/7477059970047937823
Warm regards,
Luke