April 25ths

Today's riff is derived from two entries, one going back to 2002 with the release of Mullholland Drive, one of my favorite films. Lynch reminds you that filmmaking is an art no different from making abstract paintings. The tune would be more of a "vintage" rocker. It's interesting that the girl in the diner is a "would-be" silhouette, suggesting that she could be a silhouetted figure in a Roger Brown painting. The nature of pop songs, in terms of how language is used, is that the rhythms are driving it--and either the rhythms are driving it, as it is here, or words are mapped over the existing rhythms. This forces a natural abstraction, as someone would abstract figuration in a painting. It allows you to play with ambiguity for a range of possible meanings, which is different than sitting down to write something specifically topical.

4/25/2002

Re-watched Mulholland Drive. On second viewing, I realize that one of the characters is dreaming, but I'm not quite sure who. I think it's the girl in the diner.

Done as Photographs For Music using Night Reeds from Ancient AI.

4/25/2010

Jazz always winds up being a vertical music. Pop music is horizontal.

4/25/2021

I was listening to a piece of music on YouTube and picked up my guitar and started to approximate it. This reminded me of the really early days playing along with the radio. When I started to get into composition and songwriting I would be drawing from those little inspirations. This one is interesting because "Some April" s coming together as a collage or assemblage–assembled from fragments, which I like. The first fragment was the chord changes which are in kind of a darkish C minor. The next input was the book by Rebecca Solnit, Field Guide For Getting Lost, specifically the chapters on the “blue of distance”. The first paragraph of the first chapter almost sounds like a poem, so I started to take elements from that and put them into a lyric. Yesterday I watched the film Spencer, a fictional (factional) depiction of Princess Diana in the early 1990s and I was taking elements from that as well. I love the process of pulling things from different areas. One of my composition strategies is “accretion”. Planets form from dust, which is a good metaphor. 

4/25/2022

Almost 6 weeks listening to track order on Frontiers and making teeny tweaks. Cover art is a similar tiresome process, but the Roger Brown works seem to work well. He has an amazing body of work with a strong signature style inspired mostly by current events. He wasn't a political artist per se, but to the extent that current events are 80% politics, he was political (small p). If you were to describe his work to someone, it would be "silhouettes".

 

4/25/2025

 Soul groove idea (a wordrum)

 

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Riff from the title/word "Carpetbagger". One word can drive the whole riff.