The Grateful Dead always had a folkie/Americana aspect, but in the early 1970s they leaned hard into country music, and it suited them. I found this song to be pretty cringe as a teenaged Deadhead in New York City, but it grew on me. The tune is named for a 1940s radio Western, which sounds …
Author Archives: Ethan
Patrice Rushen’s memory songs
White people do not generally grow up listening to Patrice Rushen; we have to seek her out. I only got hip to her when I heard her speak at the 2018 Ableton Loop conference in Los Angeles. I quickly learned that she co-wrote and produced one of the bangingest bangers in history. The devastating bassline …
Bach Anxiety
Someday I want to write something long about Bach. (Maybe I’ll call it Bach to the Future, ha ha.) I have been slowly building toward it by doing a lot of Bach analysis here on the blog. My pandemic project has been learning movements from the D minor, G minor and E major violin partitas …
Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues
There is a fascinating moment in “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin where Robert Plant plays a very flat ninth on the harmonica. I love this note, because there is so much music theory and history encoded within it. Listen at 0:41. Before we can get into the details of this note and what …
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Groove: an aesthetic of measured time
As I work toward my future book on the theory of groove-based music, I’m reading up on the existing literature. There is not a whole lot of it! Most of the scholarly work about groove is about the social side rather than the music side. That’s why I was excited to find Mark Abel’s book, …
Human Behaviour
Here’s a Björk song that is both maddeningly catchy and relentlessly weird. That’s true of so many of them! This was the first single on Björk’s first solo album (as an adult.) It was a bold choice! It’s not the weirdest song on the album, but it is far from the most conventional. The video …
Elizabeth Cotten’s fingerstyle ragtime
Dust-to-digital posted this lovely performance of “Washington Blues” by Elizabeth Cotten. It reminded me that she is the greatest and that I should write more about her. If you are a guitarist, you might notice that there is something strange about her technique. She was left-handed, but rather than stringing a guitar in reverse the …
I Wanna Be Your Lover
In addition to drumming with the Roots, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is a brilliant DJ, and he wrote a Twitter thread about his top ten most reliable dance floor fillers. Prince figures heavily in the thread, first because he once tipped Quest $100 for having the audacity to slip Miles Davis’ “Milestones” into a DJ set. …
Betty Davis and the blues sus4
I heard this Betty Davis song while I was doing a shift at the Park Slope Food Coop and the guitar riff grabbed my ears. In this post, I explain why, and what the riff can tell us about blues harmony. First of all: is this music blues? You might argue that it’s a funk …
Warp factor
In this post, I dig into a profound and under-appreciated expressive feature of Ableton Live: warp markers, the “handles” that enable you to grab hold of audio and stretch it precisely. Warp markers have practical applications for getting your grooves sounding the way you want, but they also open up unexpected windows into the nature …