Songs for Drella

Tuesday, October 4, 2022

In today’s newsletter I wrote about Lou Reed and John Cale’s tribute to their mentor, Andy Warhol.

A story about Twitter and the Delfonics

Thursday, July 21, 2022

RIP William Hart, lead singer of the soul trio The Delfonics.

I told a story about him and his last album in my book Show Your Work!

The music producer Adrian Younge was hanging out on Twitter one day and tweeted, “Who is better: The Dramatics or The Delfonics?” As his followers erupted in a debate over the two soul groups, one follower mentioned that the lead singer of The Delfonics, William Hart, was a friend of his dad’s and that Hart just happened to be a fan of Younge’s music. The follower suggested that the two should collaborate. “To make a long story short,” Younge says, “a day later, I’m on the phone with William Hart and we’re speaking for like two hours … we hit it off in a way that was just cosmic.” Younge then produced a brand-new record with Hart, Adrian Younge Presents The Delfonics.

That story is great for two reasons. One, it’s the only story of an album I know of whose existence can be traced to a single tweet. Two, it shows what happens when a musician interacts with his fans on the level of a fan himself.

If you’d like to see The Delfonics do their thing in a rich context, I recommend this vintage episode of Soul!

DJing on the hedonic treadmill

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the “hedonic treadmill,” the idea that being the resilient and adaptable creatures that we are, we can get used to almost anything.

To simplify: We chase after the things that we think will make us happy, and once we get those things, we realize we’re not that much happier than we were before, but we see other things that we think will make us happy this time, so we chase after them, etc., etc. (See also: Arbitrary stupid goals.)

One way to deal with this is to just jump off the treadmill and be grateful for what you have.

Another solution might be found in this wisdom from composer Tom Holkenborg I found in Blood, Sweat, and Chrome, the book about making Mad Max: Fury Road.

On the problem of how to “continuously build on that anticipation of what comes next,” Holkenborg brings up a lesson he learned from being an electronic musician doing live shows:

Every time the DJ drops a new track, it feels louder than anything else that you’ve heard before, which is actually not the case! What happens is you drop a new track, and then over the course of three to five minutes, you make it ever so slightly quieter. And then the new track comes in and it’s back at the level where the original one started, and then everything feels so loud.

This seems to me a valuable tip for art and life.

Holkenborg also talks about how much his hobby, cooking, influences his work. He thinks about his soundtracks like building a 10-course meal: putting a taste in one course that begs for another in the next. (Like DJing with food. I suspect Questlove would have much to say about this.)

Juxtapositions from a sequence of experiences are overlooked as a source of creativity.

We tend to think a lot about what we do, but we rarely think about the order in which we do it.

I have found this especially true in one’s self-education: the order in which you come into contact with things is almost as important as the things themselves. (See: Melville not reading Shakespeare until he was 30.)

Adjust the volume, shuffle the sequence…

Songs as shelters in time

Friday, January 7, 2022

“I could wrap myself in the warm cocoon of a song and go anywhere. I was invincible.”
— Johnny Cash

It was the late singer/songwriter David Berman’s birthday this week. I have been listening to his last record, Purple Mountains, over and over. It seems to me a plague album the way Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a 9/11 album: both feel like prophesies, when really, like many works of science fiction, they were the products of sensitive souls describing our pre-existing conditions.

Friends in NYC and the northeast were posting photos of snow on Instagram while I was listening to “Snow is Falling on Manhattan”:

Songs build little rooms in time
And housed within the song’s design
Is the ghost the host has left behind
To greet and sweep the guest inside
Stoke the fire and sing his lines

“Songs build little rooms in time” reminded me of John Berger’s “Some Notes about Song,” collected in his last collection, Confabulations. (You can also hear Berger read the essay in this BBC radio feature.)

A song, when being sung and played, acquires a body. And it does this by taking over and briefly possessing existent bodies….

A song, as distinct from the bodies it takes over, is unfixed in time and place. A song narrates a past experience. When it is being sung it fills the present. Stories do the same. But songs have another dimension which is uniquely theirs. A song while filling the present hopes to reach a listening ear in some future somewhere. It leans forward, further and further. Without the persistence of this hope, songs, I believe, would not exist. Songs lean forward.

The tempo, the beat, the loops, the repetitions of a song construct a shelter from the flow of linear time: a shelter in which future, present and past can console, provoke, ironize and inspire one another.

Berger thought of songs as being forms of possession: they are hauntings, in a way. “In every song there is a distance,” he writes, and also an absence. “Absence is what inspired them and it’s what they address.”

Flamenco performers often talk about el duende. Duende is a quality, a resonance which makes a performance unforgettable. It occurs when a performer is possessed, inhabited, by a force or a set of compulsions coming from outside her or his own self. Duende is a ghost from the past. And it’s unforgettable because it visits the present in order to address the future.

(Here I’m reminded of a line from Longfellow: “And at last we hardly distinguish / Between the ghosts and the guests”)

Elsewhere in the essay, Berger wrote, “Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor.”

Berman had the vocabulary. He wrote us these songs. He built us these temporary shelters to step inside.