Dear Music

This weekend, I picked up a few albums I’ve been meaning to dig into for some time.  The latest Sufjan Stevens, the latest Dream Theater and a few in between.  As I walked through Carroll Gardens yesterday in the pleasant temporal nightmare that is Daylight Savings Time, I listened mostly (embarrassingly) to Dream Theater.  You know, I say embarrassingly but A dramatic Turn of Events is fucking out of this world.  Anyway, last night as I was going to bed, Sufjan.  This morning on the way to work, Panda Bear.  Now that I’m at work I've got the Chick Corea record that won a Grammy oozing out of my desk speakers.  The soundtrack of my life is varied and incredible and most importantly, always playing.

Picture a basic American Colonial house.  Got the shape?  Now paint it brown and scale it down to the size of a Happy Meal container.  Handle for a roof, six buttons on the second floor and a little plastic window right in the middle... what you’re picturing is my Cassette Player from the 1980s.  The most effective tool in my defense against the enemies of childhood: boredom, monsters and having to listen to my siblings.  Basically, if you took this image:

and photo shopped my Tape Player over the Teddy Bear, you’d get my nightly sleeping experience.

Like most parents, my folks would ground me now and then.  But it wasn’t about candy or phone-time or TV.  No, if they really wanted to punish me, my parents would take away my tape player for the night.  I’m not sure if they knew it was my Aragorn to the Boogeyman’s Voice of Sauron but they definitely knew I loved the thing.  And it had magical powers; a soul, even!  One night, while listening to the instrumental part of the Ghost Busters soundtrack, the curtains in my room blew open just a little during the creepiest section of the score.  I very nearly shat myself.  I don’t know if my tape player thought I’d enjoy the experience or if it was actually a sadistic anti-hero; a deranged defender sociopath who loved and hated me.  Whoa.

The first tape I owned was Pearl Jam’s Versus.  My older sister gave it to me and the first time I played it, I was terrified of the rock-awesomeness that exploded out of the single speaker.  I didn’t get it.  I didn’t like it.  I couldn’t stop listening to it.  Every night, I’d play it again and eventually realized I was in love with the album.  It took me fifteen years to fully embrace the lesson that sometimes you end up loving things you can’t stand on the first go around.

Eventually, I moved on to a “My First Sony”.  I couldn’t tell you what I listened to at night but Scott and Todd on 95.5 woke me up every morning.  The alarm could be set to one of four different sounds (including a coked-out woodpecker) or the radio.  Although I’m not a huge fan of morning radio DJs, WPLJ played a couple songs that always kick-started my morning (Jon Secada’s “Just Another Day”, All-4-One’s, “I Swear”, or Genesis’, “I Can’t Dance”).

Next up, a Sony Boom box, tons of CDs and leaving Top 40 radio for classic rock and jazz: Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin.  Then Phish, Miles' Kind of Blue & Coltrane's Blue Train... it’s amazing that the laser in the CD tray didn’t burn a hole through the discs I spun day in and day out.

Fast forward through CD players, iPods, a shower radio (really awesome) and I now have an iMac full of music, a Technics turntable and two boxes of LPs, a bunch of MFSL recordings, three pairs of headphones (Klipsch, Grado’s, and a pair of in-ear monitors) and an itching desire to snag a sweet pair of cabinet speakers for the living room.

I want to thank someone.  My sister Cate for that Pearl Jam album.  My sister Jen who taught me not to “kill a record” by overplaying it.  My dad for the time we listened to “Gimme Shelter” in the garage even though we were already home.  My mom for encouraging me to sing along to Tina Turner in the car.  Kyle & Congdon for writing music, Drew & Greg for playing music, the wind-up, Skidmore.  So many people gave me so much music that really, I want to thank Music itself.  Victor Wooten says Music is a woman and she's all about communication.  If that’s the case, she’s most incredible woman who’s ever walked the earth.  I want to thank her for letting me play and work and create and listen.

Meanwhile, back to work for me.  But not before queuing up LCD Soundsystem and turning the dial on my desk speakers a little further to the right.

Pop & Circumstances

Remind me to post some funny stories along the way.  Like the time I fell asleep on my drums while playing a musical.  Or the time I left my snare stand next to a strip club and had to "buy" it back the next day.  On a side note: it should also be known that my alma mater sent me a magnet-backed bottle opener enclosed in their semi-annual donation solicitation.  They want to get me drunk, then ask for money.  I'm getting off track...

Any good musician will have a hard time explaining pop music.  But like true love or a bad rash, they'll know when they've got it.  Pop music is contemporary music enjoyed by the masses.  Let's refer to it as now-music for short.  If you write the pop music you hear on the radio (or the iTunes store homepage), you'll get a perfect example of now-music.  But by the time you've written your now-music, it's become then-music and someone is making money while you're living at your parents.  So you must attempt to accurately predict and then write future-music.  That way, by the time you're through writing, it's become now-music.  This involves some guess work.  My roommate, a market analyst, will tell me all about what's happened so far.  He can then guess, with a certain degree of uncertainty, what's to come next.  But the bottom line is that no one knows.  Same with pop music.  How then do you write future-music?  The good news is that "Humanity doesn't do backward."  (Words of encouragement tossed at me by a friend last Saturday.)  As long as you be yourself, you'll be combining elements of everything you've ever heard thereby producing something totally new.  You will write future-music which will then become now-music.  But I almost forgot: if your music sucks, no one will want to listen to it.  And then you've failed at writing pop music.

Should we go for fame?  Perhaps post-mortem glory?  If you pen something "ahead of your time," it will eventually be recognized as great work, astounding work, genius work.  Nothing sounds quite as unfulfilling as laying in a box in the dirt, while everyone dances around above celebrating the music they didn't used to like.  It's not my fault they didn't like it.  I was just too future and not enough now.

I must be a good musician: explaining this was hard.