Day #17 of the 30 Day Music Meme
Aug. 20th, 2020 06:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. ) Before, I get into the music meme. On Day #16, some of the responders/players chose interpret favorite classic song as a linchpin song by a linchpin artist because most everybody has one. And stated "most people" have one. Which...I wondered about. Because I do not. I can't think of a song or an artist that I'd state introduced me to a broader world of music or a specific artist.
Can you? I'd hate to think I'm alone in this.
So, curious, I asked the music experts in my family - my brother and his wife. His wife is close friends with various music producers, such as Dr. Luke.
My brother told me right off the bat - "Brian Eno" - a major music producer who produced David Bowie, Talking Heads,Peter Gabriel, U2, and King Crimson.
There's apparently a really good documentary on Hulu about Brian Eno - if anyone is interested.
While his wife picked Prince and J. Dilla (who was a major producer of Hip-Hop).
Then I posted this question on FB, and got some interesting responses there too.
My cousin who is an accomplished singer - stated: "Not sure I would call it a linchpin, but I've always been blown away by musicians who create music (or at least noise) with new instruments or using an existing one in new ways. So early rock & roll such as Chuck Berry, using the electric guitar for the 1st time that way. Jimmy Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner mainly from electric guitar feedback. The X-Files theme song, using all sorts of random sounds like marbles dropped on piano strings. Things like that. Show me a new sound (not synthesized but using an actual instrument, even a created one), & I'll be impressed."
And my Aunt stated: "It was FM radio for me. When everyone was listening to AM bubblegum top 40 stuff in the late '60s early '70s, FM played more interesting groups and cuts that I fell in love with. It gave me a choice to listen to what I liked not what they wanted me to hear. It also didn't hurt to have so many big names of rock running around my hometown introducing me to their sounds. One never knew who you would run into."
If I were to hazard a guess? I'd say I have a lot of different influences. Woody Guthrie's Songbook, which I only vaguely remember - it was a battered thing I carried about with me in college and high school. I used it to teach myself acoustic guitar (badly). Definitely Prince - Prince opened up the world of how music worked and changed how I saw music in the 1980s, as did David Bowie, and I'd agree Brian Eno influenced me a lot. Joanie Mitchell and Judy Collins both did as did Joan Baez and Barbara Striesand. Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, U2, The Beatles, the Stones, Peter Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkle and so many others.
But so did my brother - my brother actually opened up music to me more than anyone else in my life. Various boy-friends and friends tried, but my brother beat them to it. He always did. (My brother kind of is an expert in music.) Also my brother's taste was varied.
However, I taught myself to play the acoustic guitar (badly) with Woody Guthrie's Song Book - an old battered blue song book with guitar chords listed in it, it had folk songs and various things written by Woody. Woody taught me that songs didn't have to be about love lost or navel gazing or own's personal life - but about something broader. They could be used to bring people together to protest and change things.
I think being a poet - I thought of music more in lyrics than sounds. Or the sounds words made put together. I remember being excited about Rush's Tom Sawyer - it blew me away and introduced me to whole new type of music in the 9th grade. It was the lyrics that blew me away not the sound - I was reading the lyrics on the back of the album. I wrote lyrics and songs in high school. I played with U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday.
It's why - if a song doesn't have a cadence or a rhythm to it - if it can't work as a poem, I get annoyed. I was listening to the Roches today and I really don't like their songs - they do not work rhythmically. The rhyme scheme is off. They have nice voices, but it's discordant. While I loved Cowboy Junkies songs - they worked, the play with metaphor and rhyme schemes. I lived in a house in college with a bunch of singer-song-writers, and we all wrote poetry and songs, and played with rhyme schemes. So it bugs me if it is off in a way it may not bug someone else?
Day #17 of the 30 Day Music Meme - A Song You'd Sing a Duet with Someone on Karaoke.
I don't know about this one. I am not a singer. Karaoke duet? Not happening.
Hmmm. What is a song that you can sing badly and no one will care?
This Land is Your Land (because Woody is a great song-writer but not a great singer).
And...
Because let's face it, Sonny can't sing to save his life. I could do Sonny's part. We kind of sound similar.
I sang Karaoke in Law School - but I can't remember what I sang. It was over twenty years ago, all I remember is doing it, badly.
Can you? I'd hate to think I'm alone in this.
So, curious, I asked the music experts in my family - my brother and his wife. His wife is close friends with various music producers, such as Dr. Luke.
My brother told me right off the bat - "Brian Eno" - a major music producer who produced David Bowie, Talking Heads,Peter Gabriel, U2, and King Crimson.
There's apparently a really good documentary on Hulu about Brian Eno - if anyone is interested.
While his wife picked Prince and J. Dilla (who was a major producer of Hip-Hop).
Then I posted this question on FB, and got some interesting responses there too.
My cousin who is an accomplished singer - stated: "Not sure I would call it a linchpin, but I've always been blown away by musicians who create music (or at least noise) with new instruments or using an existing one in new ways. So early rock & roll such as Chuck Berry, using the electric guitar for the 1st time that way. Jimmy Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner mainly from electric guitar feedback. The X-Files theme song, using all sorts of random sounds like marbles dropped on piano strings. Things like that. Show me a new sound (not synthesized but using an actual instrument, even a created one), & I'll be impressed."
And my Aunt stated: "It was FM radio for me. When everyone was listening to AM bubblegum top 40 stuff in the late '60s early '70s, FM played more interesting groups and cuts that I fell in love with. It gave me a choice to listen to what I liked not what they wanted me to hear. It also didn't hurt to have so many big names of rock running around my hometown introducing me to their sounds. One never knew who you would run into."
If I were to hazard a guess? I'd say I have a lot of different influences. Woody Guthrie's Songbook, which I only vaguely remember - it was a battered thing I carried about with me in college and high school. I used it to teach myself acoustic guitar (badly). Definitely Prince - Prince opened up the world of how music worked and changed how I saw music in the 1980s, as did David Bowie, and I'd agree Brian Eno influenced me a lot. Joanie Mitchell and Judy Collins both did as did Joan Baez and Barbara Striesand. Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, U2, The Beatles, the Stones, Peter Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkle and so many others.
But so did my brother - my brother actually opened up music to me more than anyone else in my life. Various boy-friends and friends tried, but my brother beat them to it. He always did. (My brother kind of is an expert in music.) Also my brother's taste was varied.
However, I taught myself to play the acoustic guitar (badly) with Woody Guthrie's Song Book - an old battered blue song book with guitar chords listed in it, it had folk songs and various things written by Woody. Woody taught me that songs didn't have to be about love lost or navel gazing or own's personal life - but about something broader. They could be used to bring people together to protest and change things.
I think being a poet - I thought of music more in lyrics than sounds. Or the sounds words made put together. I remember being excited about Rush's Tom Sawyer - it blew me away and introduced me to whole new type of music in the 9th grade. It was the lyrics that blew me away not the sound - I was reading the lyrics on the back of the album. I wrote lyrics and songs in high school. I played with U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday.
It's why - if a song doesn't have a cadence or a rhythm to it - if it can't work as a poem, I get annoyed. I was listening to the Roches today and I really don't like their songs - they do not work rhythmically. The rhyme scheme is off. They have nice voices, but it's discordant. While I loved Cowboy Junkies songs - they worked, the play with metaphor and rhyme schemes. I lived in a house in college with a bunch of singer-song-writers, and we all wrote poetry and songs, and played with rhyme schemes. So it bugs me if it is off in a way it may not bug someone else?
Day #17 of the 30 Day Music Meme - A Song You'd Sing a Duet with Someone on Karaoke.
I don't know about this one. I am not a singer. Karaoke duet? Not happening.
Hmmm. What is a song that you can sing badly and no one will care?
This Land is Your Land (because Woody is a great song-writer but not a great singer).
And...
Because let's face it, Sonny can't sing to save his life. I could do Sonny's part. We kind of sound similar.
I sang Karaoke in Law School - but I can't remember what I sang. It was over twenty years ago, all I remember is doing it, badly.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-21 12:11 am (UTC)Bing Crosby and David Bowie, "Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth"
Bowie agreed to do the special because his mother always loved Bing. But he wasn't all that hot about "Little Drummer Boy"; so Bing had some of his staff write material that Bowie could sing as counterpoint. The duet worked so well that it was released as a single in 1982, and has become an honest-to-goodness Christmas perennial.
https://youtu.be/n9kfdEyV3RQ
(I could take either the Crosby or the Bowie part. Or both. I'm not very good, but I think the novelty would sell it.)
P.S.: Tell uour brother I completely agree with him about Eno. An Eno-produced track is coming to this space in two days...
no subject
Date: 2020-08-21 02:21 am (UTC)Although, Bing and Bowie are impossible to sing well.