Sound Nation

My 2017 playlist, as in past years, is comprised of songs I like that were released this year.  Of course, I can’t proclaim them the best songs of the year, but I can say with certainty that they’re my favorites.  The rules I adhere to are easy:  only one song per artist and any genre is game.  They are as follows:

1.     Right On You-Benjamin Booker.  

2.     Don’t Lay Your Head Down-Stereo League

3.     Stranger’s Kiss-Alex Cameron (w/ Angel Olsen)

4.     Prom-Monk Parker

5.     When You Were Mine-Lambchop

6.     The World Is Falling Down-Jim James

7.     Totally in Love With You-The Delfonics

8.     Japanese Denim-Daniel Caesar

9.     Boomerang-Bootsy Collins

10.   Vitral-The Gift

11.   Sum-Loney Dear

12.   New York-Peter Silberman

13.   Doomed-Moses Sumney

14.   Duper-Hanne Hukkelberg

Some thoughts on the songs:  Booker’s song flat out screams to be played loud.  I realize by definition that doesn’t make it a basis for a favorite, but it does for me.  For me, at 59 years old, songs meant to be played loud immediately resonate.  Stereo League is my boy Alex’s project and I’m not professing objectivity by any measure, I just love the song.  Alex Cameron’s Stranger’s Kiss may be the alternative/pop song of the year.  However, I’m not qualified to make the determination.  I love it and the video is wicked good.  Monk Parker’s Prom is my favorite song of the year.  If it matters.  You’ll need to Google the lyrics, because the production effects of his Texas drawl and super-charged reverb make most of the words indecipherable.  It’s as if Sigur Ros made an alt/country record with a Theremin.

 Lambchop’s When You Were Mine is the first of two covers on this list.  Prince wrote and played it as a funk bopper. These guys dig in like they’re mining for the soul of it. You may listen and respond like I did after recently seeing Bob Dylan, “That was Blowin’ In The Wind??” Whatever. Jim James covers one of my favorite all time songs and it’s ethereal. I just Googled ethereal because I’m not sure what it means, it just sounded right and I found this: extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world. I’ll stay with that description. The Delfonics going back in the studio is cause enough to lend credence to whatever they come up with, but this track is beautiful. So beautiful. I knew nothing of Daniel Caesar until my boy Nate directed me there.  The album is superb and this track my favorite. Bootsy’s Boomerang is so infectious, it should be illegal.  It’s a funk, second line, marching band stomp.  

The obsessive search for new music has its benefits.  I set my own hours and I have no boss.  The negatives are you soon learn there is a tremendous amount of mediocre music in the streaming world.  You practically have every song ever recorded at your fingertips and soon learn that the so-so exponentially outweighs the exceptional.  But you listen on, with the hope that this rough of mediocrity will eventually expose a diamond.  

Natalia Lafourcade is a diamond.  She’s been on the scene of Latin pop music since 2002, so I’m late to the game.  However, at 33 years old, she appears to be hitting her stride.  I found her, by chance, from a Tiny Desk Concert link I subscribe to.  Her vocal range and ability challenge the best. Her band must all live in the same house given how tight and accomplished they are.  Her spirit is infectious.  The beauty of the melodies is wonderful.  When she finished her 3 Tiny Desk songs, I simply wanted to bring her home and cook her dinner.  Here’s the link to the NPR site:

https://www.npr.org/event/music/560175189/natalia-lafourcade-tiny-desk-concert 

Here’s my (revised) list of songs for 2016.  There is no devised theme to it.  It’s meant to be listened to in the order listed, but who am I to dictate how one listens to music, particularly in this age of streaming singles?  I originally didn’t pick a song of the year, but I’ve changed my mind.   The Erykah Badu/Nas song This Bitter Land is it, for what it’s worth.  If you like any of the songs listed here, delve deeper into the albums because many of them contain numerous solid tracks.  Enjoy and here’s wishing all of you a New Year of quiet solitude with headphones.  

Horizontal-Alejandro Escovedo

Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales (single version)-Car Seat Headrest.  

I Wish I Was Sober-Frightened Rabbit

Burn the Witch-Radiohead

Gradually-Ben Watt

Hot Little Hand-The Wave Pictures

Hag-Band of Horses

Doll House-Holy Esque

Aisles-Eagulls

The Dream Synopsis-The Last Shadow Puppets

Death is Not Enough-Pretenders

Or So I Thought-She Drew The Gun

Triumph ’73-The Felice Brothers

The Heart-Macy Gray

This Bitter Land-Nas, Erykah Badu

Come Down-Anderson .Paak

00000 Million-Bon Iver

Lazarus-David Bowie

https://open.spotify.com/user/121202430/playlist/0FwRj0shPfnLhFSVZRZ40m

Saw Lucinda Williams last night at the World Café.  Her backup band was Buick 6 and they were stellar.  Guitarist Stuart Mathis, former lead guitarist for the Wallflowers and who could have been a double for Donnie in the Big Lebowski, brought a weathered grind to their sound, employing various tones reminiscent of Santana, SRV, and Frisell.  He is a monster.  They played a set without Lucinda to start the evening and I’m so glad I made it to the opening of the show, where my usual routine is to time the headliner and arrive just before they go on.  Last night’s early arrival rewarded us with a blistering set of mostly instrumentals that never lapsed into jam band mediocrity.  

On the way to the show, I voiced my desire to hear Lucinda sing Metal Firecracker, my favorite of her earlier work.  Then, when she walked on stage and the band dropped into the first notes of the song, I felt that the night was destined to be a memorable event.  I wasn’t let down.  Her voice is transfixing, the notes lingering just long enough to practically drip into the next phrase.  The songs off her current album played well live, particularly the powerful Dust set to a poem authored by her recently deceased poet father.  Another highlight was when Amos Lee joined them for an otherworldly rendition of Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come.  As Lucinda stated, why isn’t Amos Lee more popular?  His voice is a perfect foil to Lucinda’s, with subtle fluctuations that ride along with her southern speckled phrasings.  

After the Sam Cooke cover, which started the encore, the band led Lucinda into rousing versions of Springsteen’s The Rising and Young’s Keep On Rockin’ in the Free World, as the crowd sang along with equal fervor.  

On the ride home, I tried to place her in the lexicon of performers I’ve seen in my lifetime, and I kept coming back to Nina Simone for some reason.  That voice, and a touch of performance diva, kept us enthralled and wanting more.  She walks a performance tightrope with the crowd not sure if she’s going to make it to the next song.  Whether it was the red wine she sipped throughout the set or just her general disposition, the effect was mesmerizing.  

Were I one to keep a bucket list, I could now check off seeing Lucinda live.  It was that good.  

As the brick and mortar record stores slowly disappear, so too will the genres relied upon by such establishments to guide purchasers to the kind of music they enjoy. Magazines, newspapers and online publications are filled with articles on the changing landscape of the music industry with the evolving development of streaming, file sharing, and DIY content releases.  No longer constrained by the cost and influence of record company producers, artists are increasingly free to create and distribute music adhering to their strict, personal, and artistic vision.  This individualization of content will effectively render the traditional genres (R & B, rock, jazz, hip hop, etc.) virtually obsolete.  This article does not attempt to comment on whether this is a good or a bad thing, but rather, that it is the current reality of music production.  This erasure of categories will not happen overnight, given the propensity for critics and reviewers to still label new music by its purported influence. Springsteen was the new Dylan, even though time has rendered that designation far from the truth.  Likewise, listeners are still prone to ask of new music, “who do they sound like?”  

Today, artists can record an entire song on their phone.  The sonic quality suffers, of course, but that will change and only get better.  For the time being, demos can be created on a phone or computer using programs such as GarageBand or consumer versions of Pro Tools and then the file can be mastered and finally uploaded to one of the popular streaming sites such as Bandcamp or SoundCloud.  This process takes place with absolutely no input from any outside creative forces. Moreover, there is no one telling the artist that his music won’t sell or that it has to be structured a certain way to ensure commercial success.  The artist remains the sole arbiter on every aspect of his musical creation.  

How is this significant? For starters, musicians are not being pigeonholed into a particular genre.  Since they control all aspects of creation, they can do what they want.  If they want to add Gregorian chants to a reverb guitar outro, then so be it.  Their creative palette is as vast as they are artistically capable of envisioning.  The result is a wholly original work of art. This concept does not preclude the influences that an artist may derive inspiration from, whether it be other musical creations, visual art, literature or any of the myriad of life’s experiences. However, the choice of inspiration remains with the artist alone and eliminates any input from record company producers, engineers and marketing executives.  

It must be noted that the act of self creation is not a new concept.  Bruce Springsteen recorded his entire Nebraska album on a four track deck in the living room of his house.  He thereafter took the cassette copy to his band mates and attempted to reproduce his musical ideas in a studio setting. After many failed attempts, he received the OK from his record label to put out the original recording as the final product.  However, this procedure was an anomaly in the early 1980’s and he still had to get the stamp of approval from the record company to release his DIY creation.  He also had to rely upon the company to manufacture and promote the album to the public.  As original as the final product was, Springsteen still had to adhere to the mandate of the record company to get it into the stores for sale to the public. This allegiance to the financial stakeholders is slowly disappearing.  Exposing one’s music to the world is now just a file upload away.  

So how will these current technological advances slowly erase the establishment’s need to characterize music?  It will happen on several fronts.  First, younger artists under the age of 30 have grown up listening through streaming services to anything they want to hear.  There have never been any boundaries for them.  It is true that they may gravitate to a certain style of music, but they are also free to expand their catalogue to anything that strikes their fancy.  My youngest son is a senior in high school and plays classical piano.  His room is across from my home office and on any day I can hear Kanye West, The Beatles, Chopin, Sigor Ros or the soundtrack to Les Miserables coming from his sanctum.  These are not artists that he has had to consciously go out and purchase, but rather simply click on a file through the streaming service he pays a small monthly fee to access.  He’s recently started to compose his own music and you can hear many of these influences in the songs he works on.  This, of course, is not a new concept in developing one’s own artistic sensibility. However, the ease of access enables the artist to sample diverse musical styles as they immediately pop into his head. Second, and most important to this concept of eliminating musical characterization, artists can imagine, create, produce and distribute their singular amalgamation of influences in the form of a song unique to them.  When several musicians do this they are simply called outliers and placed into their own genre.  But when millions of aspiring musicians follow this path, the influx of divergent styles will wreak havoc with the establishment’s desire for conformity.  

The change will not happen overnight.  Critics, streaming services and listeners uniformly rely on categorizing music in order to place it in the historical context of prior works.  Evidence of this refusal to let go is seen in the categories that have sprung up over the past several decades.  In addition to the traditional genres such as rock, blues, jazz, classical, hip hop, rap, and others, we now have post rock, atmospheric rock, shoe gaze, industrial, steam punk, post punk, chill wave, dub step, garage rock, trip hop, ambient, lo-fi and scores of others.  This continual process of creating sub-genres will eventually reach a saturation point and the artist (and listener) will be simply left with a unique, musical creation that defies categorization.  After the dust settles, whenever that occurs, artists will be left with a growing fan base purely drawn to their individual, artistic creations.

Were the Icelandic band Sigur Ros to make a country and western album, they would do well to listen first to Monk Parker’s solo debut, The Spark Loves The Tinder.  Feeling somewhat disenchanted over the breakup of his band The Low Lows, Parker took to expressing the melancholy with muted vocals reminiscent of Jimmy Dale Gilmore without the nasal peaks, all surrounded by the beauty of brass arrangements and Theremin.   The result is a wonderfully thoughtful set of songs that bleed one into the other, leaving the listener in a state of miserable bliss.  It’s a bit spooky and funereal at times, but the overall construct is one of acceptance and heartfelt resolve.  Recommended songs:  Sadly Yes, Wanna Be Forgotten, and The Great Fires.  

On Sunday, October 11, 2015, The Suffers played the Union Transfer.  A rhythm and blues big band out of Houston, Texas, they incorporate a mix of regional sounds, from RB to Cajun to Rock and Roll dance music.  It’s quite infectious music and I suppose, had I a ticket to attend, a very good live band. They have a four track EP entitled Make Some Room released in 2015.  It has a very clean production, perhaps a bit too shiny, but the groove is in the pocket throughout.  The lead singer, Kam Franklin, has dynamic pipes and a natural relationship with the beat. There is a retro sound to the arrangements, harkening back to the soul bands of the 70’s.    

The Jesus and Mary Chain, September 22, 2015, Union Transfer, Philadelphia