I was not expecting to write a post on here about Taylor Swift. I have nothing against her and wish her the best, I’m just not her target audience. But when you have kids, you find yourself in all kinds of new situations. Ever since my daughter started second grade, she has gone from mildly …
Tag Archives: blues
Moonage Daydream
Over the weekend I went with the family to see the newly remastered 1973 David Bowie concert film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I can’t recommend it highly enough. The picture and sound quality are uneven at best, but Bowie is such a spellbinding performer that it doesn’t matter. One of the high …
Little Simz and Ramsey Lewis
In 1973, the Ramsey Lewis Trio performed their arrangement of “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Crofts on German television. This performance has been viewed an astonishing 1.6 million times on YouTube. I learned that fact from Paul Thompson‘s analysis of the performance, which includes transcriptions of several of Cleveland Eaton’s basslines. Paul’s YouTube channel is one …
Baby, I Love You
I continue to be severely stressed out about the state of America and the world, and I continue to reach to Aretha Franklin for emotional support. This week I soothed myself by studying “Baby, I Love You” from her 1967 album Aretha Arrives. The song is by Ronnie Shannon, who also wrote “I Never Loved …
The saddest chord progression ever (revisited)
First, let’s get this out of the way: the title of this post is a joke. No chord progression has any inherent emotional quality. Musical sadness is a matter of cultural convention, and even within a culture or subculture, sadness is the result of harmony interacting with melody, rhythm, tempo, timbre, phrasing, articulation and other …
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Rock Steady
I need a lot of reassurance that things are going to be okay. This Aretha Franklin groove reliably does the job for me. I say “groove” and not “song”, because while “Rock Steady” does have a minimal song structure, it’s all in support of helping you dance. The musicians on this track represent the gold …
The final day of the Song Factory course
Last week we brought my first New School Song Factory class to its conclusion. I have taught songwriting many times before, but it was always as a means to learning something else: music theory, production, progressive pedagogical methods. This was my first opportunity to teach songwriting for the sake of songwriting. The final session ended …
The twelve bar blues
This week in the Song Factory, we begin talking about the conventions of the blues. One central convention is the twelve-bar form. It’s so closely associated with the blues generally that jazz musicians use the term “a blues” to mean any tune using the twelve-bar form. However, it is surprisingly difficult to define what the …
There Was A Time (I Got To Move)
Being a fan of James Brown can be a challenge, because his classic songs have all been recorded multiple times in different versions with different names on different labels. “I Got To Move” is a case in point. It was first released on In The Jungle Groove in 1986, but was recorded back in 1970. …
The Song Factory course
I have been teaching songwriting for a lot of years as a means to other ends: with my private guitar and production students, with my music tech students, with my music education students, with my music theory students. But this semester at The New School, I get to teach my first actual songwriting class whose …