Recording Diana Ross' "Love Hangover"

A great story from producer Hal Davis that mostly comes from the biography Diana. Best part:

"No one really liked disco here at Motown," producer Hal Davis said in J. Randy Taraborrelli's biography, Diana. "The company wasn't heavily into it, so I figured I'd take advantage of that. When I did the track for 'Love Hangover,' I knew it was a hot track. But when I played it for Diana, well, she wasn't too sure about it. She was used to singing more lush songs by producers like Michael Masser and the public sort of identified her with arrangements like "Touch Me In The Morning." She liked the lyric to 'Love Hangover,' but people thought I was a little off for even suggesting that Diana do this song."

Davis went on to describe the evening that Diana recorded the Pam Sawyer-Marilyn McLeod song. "It was a late session; we started at about nine o'clock at night. I had it all planned out because I know how Diana is about atmosphere in the studio.

So I told them to have some hot red lights put around and also a strobe light. Diana came in, took her shoes off, and got into it sort of slow. The song had two tempos, starting off kind of sultry, which was easy for her. But when we got to the disco part, I remember her laughing and saying, 'I can not do that!'

"So at that point, I had them turn the lights on and we had the place jumpin' like a disco. That's all she needed; she just took off after that. It turned out to be a lot of fun for her and she even improvised a little Billie Holiday in there that I didn't expect. There's even a part in there where she's laughing on the track. I didn't edit it because I wanted to keep that sense of spontaneity."

Diana is quoted by Taraborrelli on the session: "It was a spontaneous thing that we captured on record and if I had to go back in and do it again, I couldn't have. The music was me and I was the music. Things came out of my mouth that I didn't even expect."

From superseventies.

Studio Bass Legend Carol Kaye Multi-Part Video Interview 2013

A great series of interviews with Carol Kaye produced by Snapshots Music:

Harry Connick Jr. Schools American Idol Contestants on the Great American Songbook

Why Harry Connick Jr. Couldn't Sit Idle During 'Idol'
The star couldn't stand hearing young singers mangle the Great American Songbook

posted by John Stark, May 4, 2013

From the Daily Roadmap

Those of us who grew up in the 1950s and '60s got to constantly hear — on radio, TV and vinyl — the Great American Songbook sung by the likes of Bobby Darin, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé, Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald, Doris Day, Sarah Vaughan. ... The list goes on. These were singers who belonged to our parents more than to us. Still, they set a high bar for crooners, even if we didn’t fully appreciate it when we were kids. Besides having intonation, perfect pitch and beautiful voices, these artists respected a song, its melody and lyrics.

They made singing sound easy, which it isn’t.

My favorite singer as of this week is Harry Connick Jr., but not for his vocal talent. As a guest mentor on Wednesday's American Idol, he did something I’d never seen done on that show — and it was long overdue. He made it clear why, despite the impressive vocal abilities of the four finalists — Candice Glover, Angie Miller, Amber Holcomb and Kree Harrison — they probably will never be truly great singers in the mode of those who came before, like Dinah Washington, Peggy Lee, Vic Damone and Billy Eckstine. Again, the list goes on.

Idol's theme on Wednesday was “Then and Now.” Each contestant was asked in the first hour of the show to perform a current hit song. They chose newly released tunes by Pink, Bruno Mars, Rihanna and Carrie Underwood, who won American Idol in 2005. In the second half, they were asked to sing a classic from the Great American Songbook.

During the mentoring sessions, Connick would listen to the singers perform the songs they had chosen and advise them how to do it better. He was a kindly coach throughout the "Now" portion of the show, teasing, praising and hugging the contestants. But when it came to the “Then” segment, the joking stopped. His demeanor changed.

Songs of the past are an essential part of Connick's repertoire. He loves, respects and understands their exquisite craftsmanship. He knows how to make them sound “now” without losing what they were "then."

As Amber started to sing Rodgers & Hart’s “My Funny Valentine,” Connick stopped her. He asked her what the song is about. "What does it mean, 'Your looks are laughable?'" he asked her, or "'Is your figure less than Greek?'" Amber looked blank — she had no idea. She struggled for words. He told her to go do some research on the lyricist, Lorenz Hart, a physically diminutive, closeted homosexual who died of alcoholism at age 48. Before singing the song, Connick sternly told Amber, you need to understand what Hart was writing about.

Kree also got stopped shortly after she launched into Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather.” She was singing in a loose, bluesy manner, like she said she'd heard Etta James do the song. But for Kree to do those fancy runs, Connick said, were diluting the meaning of the lyrics. The woman in this song, he explained, is sad and depressed; she's lost her man. “You don’t sound depressed,” Connick observed. He wanted Kree to do it more like Lena Horne, who introduced the song in 1940. No frills needed.

Not one of the contestants took Connick's "Then" advice when they got on stage. Substance was thrown out the window for pyrotechnic vocal tricks. Angie sang Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” an ode to vulnerability, in full-power voice. She hardly came off as “a little lamb who’s lost in the wood,” as the lyric says. More like a John Deere tree cutter.

The judges loved Candice’s version of Billie Holiday’s “You’ve Changed,” giving her a standing O. Not Connick, whose tip to "Keep it simple" went completely over her head. “One of the worst things that can happen in a relationship is when the other person starts to drift away from you,” Connick told Candice. She needed to express that feeling. Her blaring version had no poignancy.

Connick squirmed in his front-row seat during the “Then” performances. I haven’t seen such facial contortions since Linda Blair got anointed with holy water in The Exorcist.

His breaking point came when Randy Jackson implied that Connick's advice had hindered Kree’s vacuous rendition of "Stormy Weather," which none of the judges liked. He thought she should have sung it more like Etta James, as she had wanted to do. As it turned out, her rendition was neither Etta nor Lena, nor even Kree. It lacked any personality or feeling. You could see Connick about to pop his cork. That's when Keith Urban went into the audience, took Connick by the hand and brought him to the judge’s table. Taking a seat, Connick proceeded to school a very defensive Jackson in the art of singing standards. The point Connick tried to make, which Jackson didn't want to hear, was that the show’s contestants didn't know these classic songs well enough to take liberties with their melodies and lyrics. In doing so, they were murdering the music.

To me this made an even bigger point. Since its debut in 2002, Idol has always put value on over-the-top vocal performances. Subtlety and intimacy gets you the boot. If minimalists like Peggy Lee or Billy Holiday were to compete on Idol today the judges would eat them alive.

I was friends with Hal Schaefer, a famous vocal coach who died last October. He’s credited with teaching Marilyn Monroe to sing. I once asked him what he thought of Barbra Streisand. “When she was a teenager she came to my apartment on Riverside Drive to see if I would give her vocal lessons,” said Schaefer, who was then living in New York. “I was blown away not just by her voice, but her knowledge. She knew who every composer and lyricist was. She knew the entire American songbook. I told her after she sang for me that I would not work with her. She didn’t need me. But I told her she had to promise me never to take vocal lessons from anyone, because what she did was completely right. Once in a while that kind of talent comes along.”

On a recent NPR interview Streisand talked about how, when interpreting a song, she never violates its melody or lyrics, even when putting her own distinct spin on it. That’s why she's so great. And that's why Connick got so frustrated with the Idol contestants.

He listened to them, but they wouldn't listen to him.

Emma Louise's "Boy" Live in Studio

Danbert Nobacon Reflects on Chumbawamba's song "Tubthumping"

Gonzo Tubthumping, Getting Knocked Down And Getting Up Again Danbert Nobacon Wednesday, February 27, 2013 BEN AFFLECK SAID while accepting his Oscar for Best Picture for Argo that: “… It doesn’t matter how you get knocked down in life. That’s gonna happen. All that matters is that you gotta get up.” He was talking about the resolve of artists, which we all encounter in the struggle to keep creating art. It is a testament to the spirit of human resilience in the face of sometimes overwhelming odds, which goes all the way back to our human core in the fact that homo sapiens even made it this far through the evolutionary maze. We feel it when we get the rejection letter but keep on writing or go on to do another show, or whatever it is our passion to do. We feel it in the small daily triumphs over the constraints imposed upon us by the capitalist business model. We feel it when we make the effort to go out instead of staying home. We feel it when our broken hearts begin to mend. We feel it in those moments when we transcend the pain and are fully present in the moment. We feel it when we stand up for what we believe in, and in a thousand different other ways. Chumbawamba once wrote a song called Tubthumping (and check this out for a flash mob) which unknowingly tapped into this quintessential strand of the human condition. It became a world-wide hit. It made us one-hit wonders despite us having eleven studio albums, some of which contained far better songs. It gave the eight people in the band, and still gives us, a modicum of financial security to subsist as working artists in increasingly varied fields. We got lucky, and for that and many other reasons, I still love that song. And as an artist I accept that sometimes your work rebels like a petulant teenager and goes off and has a life of its own over which you have no control. “The songs that inspire the troops on the road to Baghdad” This was a headline from the English Daily Telegraph when the invasion of Iraq was in full swing in early April 2003. The article was about DJ Jonathan Bennett, who was working for British Forces Broadcasting Services, Middle East, based in Kuwait. Because the US army had not set up their own locally based troops’ radio station, as they had done in the first Gulf War, Bennett had become a “GI’s favourite.” In addition to serving British troops, his show also reached and had a large listenership amongst US troops. Moreover, “improvements in mobile technology mean(t) that Bennett and his colleagues (were) broadcasting right to the front line.” “The guys can actually tune in while they are fighting, if they want,” Bennett was quoted as saying. The article went on, “Bennett has no doubt that the music he plays provides a vital emotional outlet for the troops. Indeed, some of the soldiers most popular requests, such as Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping (“I get knocked down, but I get up again / You never gonna keep me down”) sounded like rallying cries against not just the enemy in the desert, but the significant anti-war section of the British public.” I can only speculate, but to think a soldier may have a tune that one co-wrote running through his head as an earworm, in the moments before he kills or is killed is unsettling. That the song would be perceived as an anthem against anti-war sentiment is simply beyond. How sour the irony? It is one thing to have our taxes pay for wars we do not agree with — and this must surely be one of the most flagrantly abused shortcomings of our so-called democratic system. It is quite something else to have unwittingly provided part of the soundtrack for one of those wars as well. Whilst on reflection it did not come as a shock to us, as the authors of the song, that it would be used in this way, there was something shocking about the idea that part of ones’ art was being used to boost morale in fighting a war which we opposed with every bone in our collective political body. There are of course other cultural implications. The song had been popular for an eighteen-month period from summer 1997 into 1998. Having been an anarchist band for the previous fifteen years, inhabiting the underground or the distant fringes of the mainstream, it was in many ways a genuine, though not unpleasant, shock to us to have an international hit record. In so doing, through the mass mediums of daytime radio and TV, we reached a significantly younger audience than we would normally have done, not least in the United States. It meant that we were being heard by children, as well as older teenagers and beyond, and it began to show in the audiences at our live gigs. Quite suddenly we started seeing ten, eleven, twelve-year-olds down at the front of the stage, whilst in the back would be their sometimes hipster, sometimes bewildered, sometimes anxious-looking parents. Looking out into the crowd in Tempe in Arizona, in March 1998, during our song Big Mouth Strikes Again, where Alice Nutter comes on stage dressed as a cigarette-smoking, whiskey-drinking nun, we could see a worried parent stand up behind her daughter, putting her hands over the girl’s ears. That song was a tip of the hat, or should I say habit, to dead American comedian Lenny Bruce. Having had a hit record which did not necessarily reflect many of the other aspects of our work, not least the adaptation of Bruce’s exploration of profanity in the nun repeating the mantra “bullshit, motherf**ker, bullshit,” the parental reaction was hardly surprising. None of us in the band had children at the time, but we did perform that song late last year at the Chumbawamba farewell show in front of our own pre-teen children. ....... Read the full article HERE at the Weeklings.

Italian Pop Singer Rita Pavone 60s TV Appearances

Gira Gira is a cover of the Four Tops' "I'll Be There"

Donald Fagan talks about Steely Dan's "Peg"

Evolution of Western Dance Music (Animated Graphic)

A very cool animated time-lapse graphic HERE.

Funk legend Sly Stone now homeless and living out of a van in LA

NY Post says he's living in a van in Los Angeles;

Funk legend Sly Stone now homeless and living out of a van in LA

By WILLEM ALKEMA and REED TUCKER

Last Updated: 5:33 AM, September 25, 2011

Posted: 2:05 AM, September 25, 2011

In his heyday, he lived at 783 Bel Air Road, a four-bedroom, 5,432-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion that once belonged to John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas.

The Tudor-style house was tricked out in his signature funky black, white and red color scheme. Shag carpet. Tiffany lamps in every room. A round water bed in the master bedroom. There were parties where Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Miles Davis would drop by, where Etta James would break into “At Last” by the bar.

Just four years ago, he resided in a Napa Valley house so large it could only be described as a “compound,” with a vineyard out back and multiple cars in the driveway.

But those days are gone.

Today, Sly Stone -- one of the greatest figures in soul-music history -- is homeless, his fortune stolen by a lethal combination of excess, substance abuse and financial mismanagement. He lays his head inside a white camper van ironically stamped with the words “Pleasure Way” on the side. The van is parked on a residential street in Crenshaw, the rough Los Angeles neighborhood where “Boyz n the Hood” was set. A retired couple makes sure he eats once a day, and Stone showers at their house. The couple’s son serves as his assistant and driver.

Inside the van, the former mastermind of Sly & the Family Stone, now 68, continues to record music with the help of a laptop computer.

“I like my small camper,” he says, his voice raspy with age and years of hard living. “I just do not want to return to a fixed home. I cannot stand being in one place. I must keep moving.”

Stone has been difficult to pin down for years. In the last two decades, he’s become one of music’s most enigmatic figures, bordering on reclusive. You’d be forgiven for assuming he’s dead. He rarely appears in public, and just getting him in a room requires hours or years of detective work, middlemen and, of course, making peace with the likelihood that he just won’t show up.

There was a time when Sly was difficult to escape. Stone, whose real name is Sylvester Stewart, was one of the most visible, flamboyant figures of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The multiracial, multi-gender band that Stone assembled fused funk, soul and psychedelic rock and became one of the most influential acts ever. The San Fran-based group released a string of hits beginning with the 1968 album “Dance to the Music,” followed by “Everyday People,” “Family Affair,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and “Stand!”

The group’s costumes and showmanship were just as memorable. The members favored giant afros, flashy capes, Beatle boots, neon vests and leopard-print jumpsuits.

Read the full post HERE.

Burt Bacharach Story and Interview

SD-UT

Burt Bacharach's non-stop musical journey
Written by
George Varga
6 a.m., July 30, 2011
Updated 9:06 a.m.

Burt Bacharach is very likely the hippest and most eclectic 83-year-old legend in pop music, as befits a pioneering maverick whose collaborators in recent years include Elvis Costello, Jamie Cullum and Dr. Dre. Bacharach, who performs a Summer Pops concert here next Sunday with the San Diego Symphony, is likely also the most active 83-year-old legend in pop.

After completing a concert tour of Italy in July, he flew to Aspen to do two concerts. From there, he jetted to New York to resume work on “Some Lovers,” a Broadway-bound musical that teams him with Steven Sater (who in 2007 won two Tony Awards for writing the score and the book for “Spring Awakening”). “Some Lovers,” based on the O. Henry short story “The Gift of the Magi,” will make its world debut here as part the Old Globe Theatre’s 2011-2012 winter season.

Following his Summer Pops show, Bacharach will vacation with his family in Del Mar, where he used to own a home on the beach and still likes to spend at least part of his summer. Then it’s back to work on “Some Lovers” for this eight-time Grammy Award-winner, who has also won three Oscars.

“It may seem like I’m a workaholic, but I’m not,” said Bacharach from a tour stop in Catania, Sicily.

“I really benefit from working, and there’s a great pleasure in doing concerts. I don’t overlook what got me on stage in the first place, and it was the music I wrote. It wasn’t that I played (piano) very well, it’s what I wrote. So it’s important to keep writing, and I’m very excited about this new musical.”

Time allowing, he hopes to include one song from "Some Lovers" at his Summer Pops concert here next Sunday.

"It's always a race against the clock," he said, citing most American orchestra's two-halves-with-an-intermission concert format.

"I've come to realize a certain momentum gets lost when you do a first half, and then there's an intermission and people eat, talk and mingle. You have to regenerate (momentum) and re-start again. But I do hope we will get a song in (from 'Some Lovers'), that I'll tell you, from the show, absolutely.

"It's just about how much material you can get in (a concert). You compromise either way; you have to do some songs in medley form. Otherwise, you've done your program and left out a lot of songs that people might want to hear, even if its only 16 bars. It's not the best way. In Australia, they are not so stringent with symphony rules and you can stay out for two hours (on stage). That's fine for me. I think we probably did two hours at the Belly Up (in Solana Beach) for Valentine's Day, and that was a kick"

A lifelong jazz fan who played in a big band as a teenager, Bacharach studied music with such groundbreaking contemporary classical composers as Henry Cowell and Darius Milhaud. His love of bebop and classical music later helped him to craft some of the most intricate and original hits in pop, full of uniquely shifting melodies and harmonies, deft polyrhythms and impeccably textured nuances.

"I was torn," he recalled of his decision to move away from contemporary classical to pop-music. "I'd go to John Cage and Lou Harris concerts, and I thought that was the direction I wanted to go in. I went to Tanglewood, but there was also the draw for me of jazz. Once I heard what was going on at 52nd Street (in Manhattan) -- even though I was under age -- and listened to the (Count) Basie band at Birdland and Dizzy (Gillespie) at the Royal Roost, that music just blew me away.

“Was I really good enough to be a classical composer? I wasn’t sure. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend my life teaching at some university, to supplement my income as a composer.”

So pop music it was for Bacharach. Alas, he was fired after only three weeks from his first prominent job as the pianist and conductor for Vic Damone.

"I don't know why Vic fired me -- he fired a lot of people -- but maybe I wasn't good enough," Bacharach recalled of his short, bumpy tenure with Damone.

"I'd never conducted an orchestra before I'd gone to Las Vegas (with Damone). I didn't quite know what I was doing. But it's a good way to make a living. I got fired by Vic, then went with the Ames Brothers and then Polly Bergen. I ended up with Marlene Dietrich and traveled the world. I was never good at chasing my desire... I wasn't like one of these 'I'm going to get there at any cost' people. I was so far from that."

In 1962, working with the great lyricist Hal David, Bacharach’s career began to ignite. That year alone saw the pair co-write three major hits, Jerry Butler’s “Make It Easy on Yourself” and Gene Pitney’s “Only Love Can Break a Heart” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

The songwriting team also collaborated on "Waiting for Charlie to Come Home," the B-side of Etta James' combustible "Something's Got a Hold On Me." An urbane, intensely melancholic ballad with unexpected musical twists (albeit subtle ones), it sounded like nothing James had ever recorded. It still does.

"Thanks," Bacharach said. "I like the song and we do it in performance now. I like it a lot, or I wouldn't be doing it."

By the time “Alfie” came out in 1966, Bacharach and David had co-written classics for such diverse artists as Dionne Warwick, The Shirelles, Chuck Jackson, Lena Horne, Etta James, Manfred Mann and Tom Jones. Warwick scored a staggering 20 Top 10 hits with Bacharach/David-penned songs, including “Walk On By,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.”

But it wasn’t until “Alfie,” the title track to a 1966 film with Michael Caine and Shelley Winters, that Bacharach felt he was really on the right track.

“You write and write (songs), and have hits, and you still maybe have some doubts,” he said. “You wonder: ‘Are you shucking and jiving, and fooling people with what you are writing?’ Or are you — not stealing (from other songwriters) — but being in that proximity?

“Miles Davis said to me: ‘ “Alfie” — that’s a really good song.’ If Miles said that to me, well, that drove my self-esteem way up.”

Jazz artists have long been drawn to Bacharach and David's songs, even if they often dispense with David's lyrics to focus on Bacharach's ingenious melodies and challenging harmonic and rhythmic nooks and crannies.

As a lifelong fan of jazz, did he take particular pride when such greats as saxophonist Stan Getz and pianist McCoy Tyner recorded entire albums devoted to all-instrumental versions of his songs?

"I love McCoy Tyner and Stan Getz," Bacharach replied. "Do I think they were great albums? No. Tommy LiPuma’s production just restricted McCoy; it should have been more free (musically). You are always flattered when you hear a major artist is doing your material. I heard Stan Getz's recording of my music and it felt, to me, like they were just going through the motions. It could have been a great record, so it really dispirited me, because Stan was a great, great player."

Could the problem have been that, given how Bacharach's intricate songs are so carefully and meticulously crafted, they leave little room for the improvisational fervor that fuels great jazz?

"That's a very good observation. Maybe they are not ideal for jazz artists," he said. "I've heard some great renditions by other jazz artists, like (Art Blakey and) The Jazz Messengers. But I do think it's a little more restricting (to do my songs) and you've got to give them freedom. On McCoy’s album, he was strangled with the orchestrations. They choked him.

"I wanted those two albums to be heard and successful, because those are two artists I have huge respect for -- you can't do better than McCoy Tyner, and then you've got Stan Getz."

Bacharach’s songs have also been covered by a slew of rock artists from the Los Angeles band Love to White Stripes. His career ebbed in the late 1970s and ’80s, then surged anew in the 1990s, when he made an acclaimed album with Elvis Costello and appeared in “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” (and both its sequels). He was feted at a 1998 TNT TV tribute concert, which featured such admirers as Warwick, Costello, Luther Vandross, Chrissie Hynde and Sheryl Crow.

.........

read the full story HERE.

Techno Mashup of Adele and Robin S

NPR on the cost of making Rhianna's hit song

NPR

How Much Does It Cost To Make A Hit Song?

03:58 pm
June 30, 2011
by Zoe Chace

Getting a song on the pop charts takes big money.

Def Jam started paying for Rihanna's recent single, "Man Down," more than a year ago. In March of 2010, the label held a writing camp in L.A. to create the songs for Rihanna's album, Loud.

At a writing camp, a record label hires the best music writers in the country and drops them into the nicest recording studios in town for about two weeks. It's a temporary version of the old music-industry hit factories, where writers and producers cranked out pop songs.

"It's like an all-star game," says Ray Daniels, who was at the writing camp for Rihanna.

Daniels manages a songwriting team of two brothers, Timothy and Theron Thomas, who work under the name Rock City. "You got all the best people, you're gonna make the best records," he says.

The Cost of Rihanna's Man Down

Here's who shows up at a writing camp: songwriters with no music, and producers toting music tracks with no words.

The Thomas brothers knew producer Shama "Sham" Joseph, but they had never heard his Caribbean-flavored track that became "Man Down."

According to Daniels, the brothers listened to the track and said, "Let's give Rihanna a one-drop! Like, a response to 'I shot the sheriff!"

They wrote the lyrics to "Man Down" in about 12 minutes, Daniels says.

To get that twelve minutes of inspiration from a top songwriting team is expensive — even before you take into account the fee for the songwriters.

At a typical writing camp, the label might rent out 10 studios, at a total cost of about $25,000 a day, Daniels says.

The writing camp for Rihanna's album "had to cost at least 200 grand," Daniels says. "It was at least forty guys out there. I was shocked at how much money they were spending! But, guess what? They got the whole album out of that one camp."

A writing camp is like a reality show, where top chefs who have never met are forced to cook together. At the end, Rihanna shows up like the celebrity judge and picks her favorites.

>>>>

Listen to the story or read it HERE.

Bob Dylan's The times They Are a-Changin' on his 70th Birthday

Dylan composed and recorded this in 1963 when he was twenty-two years old. Some of his commentary on the song makes sound as if he was working on intuition, not really getting what it was about to some degree. It's simple musically, though I dig the rhyme scheme. But man, for all its stark simplicity Dylan instinctively nailed the sea change that was in the air and coming.



Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's naming.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

SLATE: Is Pop Bringing Back the Sax for Nostalgia's Sake?

Bringing Saxy Back
The sax solo returns to pop music.
By Jonah WeinerUpdated Monday, May 23, 2011, at 6:50 AM ET

For 36 years, Saturday Night Live has provided sanctuary to a species of musical wildlife that today sits on the endangered list: the saxophone solo. In 1975, jazz whiz David Sanborn's note-gobbling, register-vaulting altissimo ushered in the show's premiere episode, setting the brassy tone for every SNL opening sequence that followed. Since 1985, the SNL house band's lead saxophonist has been Lenny Pickett, who made his name in the venerable horn band Tower of Power. Over the course of Pickett's tenure on the show, the sax, once a pop-music staple, has fallen precipitously out of vogue—everywhere, that is, except SNL.

Last October, though, the show allowed some hunting in the preserve. In a digital short titled "The Curse," Andy Samberg, playing an arrogant businessman, is tormented by Jon Hamm, who—ponytailed, shirtless, and with biceps oiled to the point they're reflective—bursts through walls at inopportune moments and, sax in hand, lays into lustful torrents of lite-jazz honking. When the solos are done, Hamm whips his face toward the camera and, fiery-eyed with passion, intones his character's name: "Sergio!" You'd be tempted to call the joke one-note if it didn't involve such a preposterous number of notes: The sketch wrings four sublimely absurd minutes from the simple idea that blistering saxophone solos have come to sound not merely dated but ridiculous, and not merely ridiculous but hilarious.

I can't help but picture Sergio when I listen to Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)," a song from her 2010 album Teenage Dream. For the most part, the song chugs along pleasantly and, in the context of state-of-the-art pop-rock, unremarkably: crisp beat; summery guitars; big chorus about remembering, and hoping to re-create, a fun night of skinny dipping and table dancing. But just before the 3-minute mark, a saxophone bursts unexpectedly into the mix, Sergio-style, for a flurry of ecstatic screeches. The first time I heard the song, the sax took me entirely by surprise. It was ingenious. Perry's lyrics celebrate a goofy blast from the past, so what better musical corollary to that theme than a sax solo, as goofy as blasts from the past get? The "T.G.I.F." sax part, it turns out, was performed by Lenny Pickett. The caretaker had emerged from the sanctuary to release one of his beasts back into the wild.

With the release of Lady Gaga's new album, Born This Way, what was an anomaly officially becomes a pop trend: The saxophone is repopulating. Two of Born This Way's songs, "Hair" and "Edge of Glory," feature sax playing courtesy of the E Street Band's own Clarence Clemons. "It was wild. I was so excited," Clemons told Rolling Stone in a detailed report on the collaboration. "I'm a Gaga-ite." What unites Gaga's sax songs with Perry's is that both use the instrument as a nostalgia button. Gaga has said she wanted to give the song a "Bruce Springsteen vibe," adding, of "Hair," "it's really interesting, because it's putting saxophone on this really huge electronic record." (In this respect, Perry's and Gaga's sax solos are of a piece with the Black Eyed Peas' hit "The Time," a another bittersweet song that drops a chunk of undigested '80s cheese—an interpolation of Dirty Dancing's "The Time of My Life"—into an otherwise contemporary-sounding track.)
.....
The the full story in SLATE.

Rising narcissism in popular song lyrics?

NYT
April 25, 2011
A Generation’s Vanity, Heard Through Lyrics
By JOHN TIERNEY

A couple of years ago, as his fellow psychologists debated whether narcissism was increasing, Nathan DeWall heard Rivers Cuomo singing to a familiar 19th-century melody. Mr. Cuomo, the lead singer and guitarist for the rock band Weezer, billed the song as “Variations on a Shaker Hymn.”

Where 19th-century Shakers had sung “ ’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,” Mr. Cuomo offered his own lyrics: “I’m the meanest in the place, step up, I’ll mess with your face.” Instead of the Shaker message of love and humility, Mr. Cuomo sang over and over, “I’m the greatest man that ever lived.”

The refrain got Dr. DeWall wondering: “Who would actually sing that aloud?” Mr. Cuomo may have been parodying the grandiosity of other singers — but then, why was there so much grandiosity to parody? Did the change from “Simple Gifts” to “Greatest Man That Ever Lived” exemplify a broader trend?

Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” and the expression of positive emotions.

“Late adolescents and college students love themselves more today than ever before,” Dr. DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, says. His study covered song lyrics from 1980 to 2007 and controlled for genre to prevent the results from being skewed by the growing popularity of, say, rap and hip-hop.

Defining the personality of a generation with song lyrics may seem a bit of a reach, but Dr. DeWall points to research done by his co-authors that showed people of the same age scoring higher in measures of narcissism on some personality tests. The extent and meaning of this trend have been hotly debated by psychologists, some of whom question the tests’ usefulness and say that young people today aren’t any more self-centered than those of earlier generations. The new study of song lyrics certainly won’t end the debate, but it does offer another way to gauge self-absorption: the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Read the full story HERE in the NYT.

Six Songs That Were Decades Ahead of Their Time (Cracked)

Cracked has a nice post with some recording oddities and links of stuff that sounds like grunge, hip-hop, and electronica years or decades before those styles became possible. Check them out here at Cracked.

A few years back I posted one of them, Love Without Sound by British composer Delia Derbyshire. This 1969 cut sounds like electronica thirty years before electronica:

Cover of the Month: 1979 Colombian Vinyl--cumbia + Bee Gees = Cumbia Alivianada

James Blake's The Wilhelm Scream (+chords)

James Blake has had a good year, releasing an EP in fall and an eponymous debut album earlier this year. He's got a fresh sound, very sparse, lean, kind of dubstep, kind of grimy, kind of retro-fi, and a touch of pure pop ballad, and he's getting a lot of well deserved attention. His tunes are very simple but heartfelt, and his arranging of noise and atmospheric sounds are what makes them interesting. On his debut album probably my initial favorite was "The Wilhelm Scream," which is no more than ten measures of one melody, two lyrics over and over in an increasingly noisy and dense atmosphere. I like it.

I haven't figured out exactly what he's doing under the noise, and I haven't really seen the chord progression anywhere, so for some more beginner musicians out there who might enjoy playing this tune I'll just toss up a quick guess:

Intro: CMaj7 - - - Em - - - CMaj7 - - - G - - -
                                                     [pick up] I don't know about my

CMaj 7 - - - Em - - -
Dreams......     I don't know about my
CMaj7 - - -                  G
dreaming anymore, All that I know is I'm

G - F,        F - Em, Em - D,   D - C - - - - -                         G - - - - - - -
Fal-ling, fal-ling, fal-ling, fal-ling...might as well fall

Then the progression is repeated with the second line. The interesting thing is that the melody is so simple that Blake can change the chords underneath it, and what makes it really interesting is that he begins to do this as the texture gets noisier.
At some point the G chord for two bars at the end becomes one bar of G then a GMaj7 for the second bar. Later still the second bar becomes two beats each of GMa7 and G7 (which leads nicely to a CMaj7). Sometimes instead of ending on the G he moves to either Em or something else, and at some point he changes the progression to G - - - GMa7/F# - - - Em - - - G/D - - - CMaj - - - D [and then holds it past the normal resolution spot; from here you could go to the Em or G]

I wish I had more time to really figure it out. Below is the official video and then a really nice live version, which has different alterations of the chords; listening to it now as I type I can hear that he doesn't resolve to the G at the end of the line but goes to Em, then to D (with a possible finish on GMaj7-G7). I'd like to figure more out but I have to get back to work, but I thought I'd throw this out there for whomever...

Earth, Wind & Fire in the late 1970s

Bought this photo back in the day, I am assuming it was in San Diego in the late 1970s. Verdine White (L) is the reason i eventually became a bassist, and I cannot count the hours of joy Maurice White's (C) music has given me. Guitarist Al McKay (R) played some mean rock and rhythm, but he was replaced in the early 80s. If I had to guess I would say this was 1978 or so. Can't say enough about the powerhouse that this band was.

Adya & Geisha Do Mozart Aria Europop Style

Cherubino's Aria - Non So Piu Cosa Son Cosa Faccio; From the Opera "Le Nozze di Figaro" (The Marriage of Figaro) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It's a tribute to the tune itself that it can survive the Europop treatment.