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 like it could have been the basis for Woody’s Roundup in Toy Story 2. For all I know, Robert Hunter had never been within a thousand miles of Tennessee when he wrote the lyrics, but they work okay if you don’t think about them too hard.
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 is by Freddie Washington, and the silky smooth sax is by Gerald Albright. I don’t normally go in for this style of R&B sax, but that solo is too funky and on point to resist.
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 and sonatas on guitar. I can play these pieces slowly and badly, but I’m having a great time doing it. And I have learned a ton from remixing them:
I want to write about why Bach is so much more appealing to me than the other composers of his time and place. This story is as much about Bach’s reception history as it is about the notes on the page. Michael Markham has a good summary of that reception history in his essay, “Bach Anxiety: A Meditation on the Future of the Past”, from the 2021 book Rethinking Bach. If you don’t have university library access, Markham explores the same themes in this Los Angeles Review of Books essay, and also in this one. Let’s dig in! Continue reading “Bach Anxiety”
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 makes it so, um, noteworthy, you need some background. “When The Levee Breaks” is heavily adapted from a song of the same name by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. It tells the story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which left hundreds of thousands of mostly Black people in horrific refugee camps. Kansas Joe sings and plays rhythm guitar, and Minnie plays lead.
Led Zeppelin’s song is a word salad of the original over a different instrumental backing. The lyrics don’t make any particular sense, and they don’t try to; Robert Plant is going for more of a vibe. When I was a teenaged Zeppelin fan, I didn’t know what a levee was, and my understanding of Black history was vague at best. I certainly didn’t know anything about the Great Mississippi Flood. The same was probably true of Robert Plant when he wrote his lyrics. Continue reading “Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues”
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, Groove: an Aesthetic of Measured Time. But then I was disappointed to discover that it’s a work of critical theory more than musicology, and I gave up on my first attempt to read it. Now I’m trying again.
Abel makes a book-length rebuttal of Theodor Adorno’s polemics against dance music. But Abel does not want to abandon Adorno’s Marxist critical framework; instead, he hopes to use that framework to come to a different conclusion about dance music than Adorno did.
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 was directed by Michel Gondry, the first of many.
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 way lefties usually do, she just played a standard-strung guitar upside down. She had to learn her own idiosyncratic chord shapes, and she played them by alternating bass with her fingers and playing melody notes with her thumb. This must have required some dedication! But none of it is as important as her sound and her material.
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. But of course the thread also talks about Prince’s own music, including “I Wanna Be Your Lover”. This reminded me that it’s one of the best funk songs ever recorded, and that I should transcribe it.
Songfacts says that Prince wrote the song about Patrice Rushen, who did some synth programming on his first album. They never got together, though. As with so many of his classics, Prince wrote, performed and produced the track himself. The album version includes a longer jam at the end, and rightly so. It’s a killer funk instrumental in its own right. And it’s Prince jamming with himself!
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.
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 of musical time itself.
