May 11ths

Today's Songday is based on lines from two entries:

5/11/1898, Berlin

(Harry Kessler Diary) 

Kessler has a visit with Novelist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He hates Berlin and the idea that “there are people with lots of money and little intellect.” 

5/11/1967

Beatles at Olympic Sound Studios 9.00 pm-3.00 am, ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’.     

 

 

Derived from the entry: 5/11/2022, Why do we still believe in magic when we know the facts?

5/11/1995

(Eno Diary)

“To Stewart [Brand]: Records made ‘at one sitting’ sound so fresh now - because the rate of discovery and the emotional tempo match those of the listener. What’s infuriating, though, is how fragile those fabrics are. I’ve noticed that, trying to work on improvisations that have ‘something’, they very quickly dissolve into nothing the more attention they get.

[5/11/2025: When I’ve attempted to re-create AI music sometimes there’s not much there, or it’s impossible to play or sing them at the same tempo, particularly the guitar parts. Usually the chord changes are uninteresting when played on a real guitar. When Bowie’s Outside album came out in 1995 I was wondering how they'd re-produce it live, and they actually did and it worked. The songs themselves have to be good enough to play them on a guitar. Electronic improvisations don’t rearrange well, as AI music doesn’t. If you keep translating them back and forth between “languages” the "meaning" changes.]   

5/11/2005

Interesting: Storm Thorgerson—the artist who did the album covers for Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, others: “...not only do I try to be intriguing, I try to be ambiguous…”

[5/11/2025: One of my mottoes (Dynaxioms) is that ambiguity is the most interesting thing in art. Art can be interesting for aesthetics alone of course, but if something has several possible meanings it enriches the experience. I like putting ambiguities in lyrics through wordplay for the duck/rabbit effect with alternating views].

5/11/2016

May can be the "fog" month in Chicago. It's also the cover of Some May.

 

5/11/2023

It’s been interesting to watch the cover songs of Gordon Lightfoot. One of them was by Billy Joel of Sundown. I hate to say it but the covers of Lightfoot don’t do justice to the originals. What might be happening is that the recording itself makes the song. Some people intimately identify with recordings, which is one of the primary reasons that people like to hear cover music as close to the recording as possible. It’s the recording that echoes in our heads, not the song itself being performed with just the voice and accompaniment. It’s the emotion in the sounds draped around the musical framework of the song. Personally, I like radical re-arrangements and interpretations of music that express the core of the music, but even then, the songwriters might see it as inappropriate because they were there with the muse when they got the idea.
            
What’s interesting about the evolution of ideas into recorded versions is that it is kind of a “confabulation”, not unlike the re-telling of a dream, where you have some small fragments that get spun out over time, with one recording becoming its only manifestation—which is the one that gets covered—when in fact, if the artist re-recorded it, it might be something completely different. I like making different versions of new songs to see what they might be capable of and they can be vastly different from the original idea—like 10cc’s I’m Not In Love, which originally had a bossa nova feel, then became a huge studio production, and is the one that plays in our heads. The song is good enough to be played with just an acoustic guitar or piano, but it seems odd given that the “big boys don’t cry” bit is a sonic artifact that has no real musical equivalent. If you were to arrange that bit for a small ensemble, how would you do it? Does the vocalist, who might be a male, whisper the lyric, or is it “scored” and played by an instrument?
            
There was another cover (not Lightfoot) that I watched recently, which was Harry Styles’ cover of Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi. Musically it seemed off-kilter because her music is so personal based on her unique guitar technique arising from alternate tunings, in combination with unique phrasing which can’t be easily covered. But his cover of Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer is even better than Gabriel’s because it captures its youth.
            
What’s going to be interesting over the next decade is that guys like Billy Joel are going to be passing away and people will be covering him. It might also be the case where popular covers will be covered as a double-cover, and possibly deep-faked which will be the new kind of “Cover”. #riff

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5/11/2078, Brooklyn

(Anthony Townes Diary) 

For the past month the city has been preparing for the total solar eclipse. Throngs of people are heading to the coast for the event, with the total eclipse occurring mid-afternoon. It is an almost perfectly clear day with just a few puffy clouds. The light is already dimming, with maximum in another hour.

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