Here’s a photo of my kiddos’ dresser from a few years ago, when I realized it was basically a museum of technology. I almost typed “obsolete technology,” but these things all still work — the Casio and the Sony Dream Machine were both possessions from our own childhoods. I wrote about these items in a recent newsletter about the objects we love and live with.
A word from Steve Albini for the “you don’t need a vision” file:
I’ve lived my whole life without having goals, and I think that’s very valuable, because then I never am in a state of anxiety or dissatisfaction. I never feel I haven’t achieved something. I never feel there is something yet to be accomplished. I feel like goals are quite counterproductive. They give you a target, and until the moment you reach that target, you are stressed and unsatisfied, and at the moment you reach that specific target you are aimless and have lost the lodestar of your existence. I’ve always tried to see everything as a process. I want to do things in a certain way that I can be proud of that is sustainable and is fair and equitable to everybody that I interact with. If I can do that, then that’s a success, and success means that I get to do it again tomorrow.
Read more in last Friday’s newsletter.
The past two newsletters have been about likability and likeness. Last week I wrote about Courtney Love and how freeing it is to shed the desire to be liked:
“Being liked was never my thing,” Love says. At the same time, her ambition was enormous: She wanted to be a rock star in a big way. This capacity, this lack of desire to people please, like all energies, has enormous creative and destructive potential. (This fits in with some of the perfectionist stuff we talked about last week.) To be able to shed the desire to be liked and to be likable sets you free in your work.
It is never lost on me that the collages I fuss over are one thing, but the ones like the collage above, which are made by just sticking random tape scraps on my desk to the page, seem to have something much wilder and free in them. The more I listened to Love, the more the collages seemed to loosen up. (I have a beloved Wayne White painting in my house that says “UNFOLLOW,” but in the studio I have a tiny framed piece that says ”UNLIKE.”)
Last week I wrote about how looking at Ralph Steadman’s drawings of the Kentucky Derby made me want to draw my own and, again, how liberating it is not needing your drawings to be likable to their subjects:
While paging through Steadman’s drawings, I got the urge to draw. So I started to make some blind contour drawings of the TV without looking down at my pen and paper. I drew the bugler, the jockeys, the owners, and even a few horses. The whole time I was thinking about Steadman’s monstrous drawings, how liberating it is to be unafraid of flattering the subject of your drawing. A likeness is not what you’re going for, in fact, you’re going for a kind of unlikeness.
One of the reasons I didn’t connect with writer Nicholson Baker’s recent book about learning to draw, Finding a Likeness, is that he couldn’t seem to enjoy the process of drawing unless the drawing resulted in what he felt was visual accuracy. I remember watching him learn to draw on Twitter and Instagram and noticing a point at which he seemed to get much better, and saying so. Upon reading the book, I realized that point was when he started tracing photographs to begin his drawings. In the book, Baker draws like a kind of anti-Steadman — he gets photos of couples off of Reddit threads and tries to do right by them in his portraits — to find a likable likeness.
We have been living through a “please like me” era — “like us on Facebook!” — but I wonder if the tide will turn soon, and artists will find power in being unlikable again…
What kind of album would you get if you gave an 11-year-old Logic Pro and played him a steady diet of Kraftwerk and Daft Punk? The answer is TECH, the latest album from my son Owen Kleon.
I’ve read and conducted so many interviews with older, established artists. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to do an interview with an artist who is just starting out! So I asked Owen if I could interview him about it over iMessage. He said okay.
What was the first song you recorded for Tech?
“Typing.”
When did you know that this was going to be a concept album? How did you land on the idea of Tech?
At first I was just making songs about random stuff, but a little bit into recording it I noticed that all of the songs were about technology, so I just decided to make it a theme album.
Were you listening to any music during the recording of Tech that inspired you?
I was mostly inspired by Kraftwerk and Daft Punk.
How does a song begin for you? Do you start with a melody or a rhythm or lyrics? Where do you get your ideas for a song?
I like to just play around on the keyboard until I come up with a melody that sounds good, then I record that and add other stuff to it. Then I come up with a topic I want the song to be about and record lyrics on that topic.
You got Logic Pro for Christmas a few months before beginning this album — how did you learn Logic Pro so quickly? Previously, you’d recorded in GarageBand — did Logic Pro help expand the possibilities of what you were able to do on this album?
Logic Pro is pretty similar to GarageBand so I didn’t have to learn very much, but when I was confused I would just look up a YouTube tutorial on how to do something. Logic Pro did have more possibilities, mainly more sounds and a vocoder.
I almost think of the vocals on this album as another instrument, the way they blend in with the mix. How did you come up with the vocal sound?
So on Logic Pro there are some vocoder presets, and I play the vocals with each of those presets. When I find one that I like, I make the melody for the vocoder and add some EQ or a compressor if it makes it sound better.
One of the things I like about Tech is that there are songs about “cutting edge” technology, like “AI Buddy,” but there are also songs about older technology, like “Cards” or “Photos.” Do you ever make music with older technology, like acoustic instruments? Is there a difference between writing on something like the piano or in Logic Pro?
I don’t really make songs with older technology, however I do compose some of my songs on the piano. Yes, there is a difference between writing on the piano or Logic Pro, because usually when I record my songs I create the notes manually instead of playing them on the keyboard while recording. However, I do make exceptions sometimes—like on that line in “Television” or the entire melody of “Revolution.”
Tell me more about creating the notes manually — so you don’t play them on the keyboard? What does that look like in Logic Pro?
So I can open up a region and hold command to open up a pencil icon, where I can click to add notes. I can also drag the notes’ ends to change the length of them. Here’s a screenshot from “AI Buddy” demonstrating this:
That’s remarkable. Can you read normal musical notation?
I can read a bit of it, not very well though.
Have you taken music lessons or are you self-taught?
I’m self-taught. I took piano lessons one time long ago, for a week or two I think, but I don’t remember learning a lot from it.
For years I’ve said you should take piano lessons, but you’re obviously doing just fine on your own. What would you say to adults like me who think their kids need to take lessons before they make music?
Expose them to music a lot and play music with them, eventually they will learn. If they aren’t really making progress, maybe give them a bit of lessons. Honestly, I don’t really know.
You also compose music for video games. Is there a difference in your creative process when you’re composing for games versus writing songs?
I’d call them “unfinished attempts at making video games due to procrastination,” lol, all jokes aside, when I make that kind of music it’s kind of easier cause I don’t have to come up with lyrics, and I can make the song shorter because it would be looping [in the game].
You love to code and you love to make music. Do you see any similarities between the two?
Creativity and doing stuff with your hands.
If you didn’t have to go to school or do anything your parents told you to do, what would your perfect day look like?
I don’t know, I don’t really have a definition of a “perfect day.”
Fair enough. Alright, you finished up this album, which is excellent. What’s next for you? Are you going to do another album?
Definitely! Not sure if it’ll be an album or an EP though. It probably won’t be a theme album because it was hard coming up with song ideas for Tech.
Thanks for doing this. You okay with me sharing this on my blog?
Sure!
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You can listen to Tech in its entirety on Soundcloud.
I usually can’t write the Tuesday newsletter until I know the image it’s going to start with, but I often start Friday’s newsletter without any idea what’s going to go at the top. Eventually, a theme emerges, or I come across something that will work, like this image of a snail on a cactus in my neighborhood.
“I’m moving like a snail on a cactus” has become one of my “How you doing?” responses.
Others:
“I am riding in the bike lane on trash day.”
“I am feeling like a cheeseburger with no cheese.” (My son Owen made that one up.)
“I got squirrels in my owl box.”
It often seems to me that life is now just about the slow accumulation of these phrases until I die.
Anyways, you can read the newsletter here.
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