February 26ths

2/26/1998

Did remix of Ice Moons and remix of Splat, a short 2-minute piece. Could possibly be fleshed out. 

George Bernard Shaw: There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire, the other is to get it. 

Phil Glass on Sessions at West 54th. I don’t completely see the point of having humans play like machines, or vice versa, but Glass found his voice and became successful at it.

[2/26/2026: Playing like a machine is actually a form of meditation as it becomes a kind of “mantra”.]

2/26/1999

This is the age of recycling ideas rather than inventing them. The invention is the way in which ideas are recycled and what their effect is. But I'm sort of suspicious of how merely creating collages of things can ultimately be that interesting.

Everyone seems to want to be somewhere other than where they are.

A friend showed me the mp3.com site. I'm skeptical because I think the sheer amount of things to listen to will trivialize music. We're overstuffed on music just like we're overstuffed on movies, food, and gadgets. But on the other hand, I think the website is exciting from a global perspective. This way we can hear new music coming from all points of the globe.

[2/26/2025: The age of Remix has now moved on to what I call “Restyle”, specifically with AI. Any songwriter can now restyle their songs. It’s still very crude at the moment, but will become more sophisticated. It is a recycling, which puts even more content into the art/music ecosystem. I still stand by my prediction that we’ll be able to generate music spontaneously, and it will all be something we never heard before. But given how we need a certain amount of saturation before we like something, even algorithms won’t be able to provide that, because you’ll never really know that you like something until you’ve heard it at least three times. This is because we judge everything at the get-go. It's also remarkable that mp3.com no longer exists. 25 years from now things we think will exist forever won't exist. Everything has been written on the wind since 1999, but LLMs seem to be a way of permanent capture, but also recycling. Data will be there, but it won't be the same data or the original ideas].

2/26/2004

Browsed through the Tower Records store on Wabash. I hadn't been there in years. Pathetic, and a sad commentary on the state of the music business. It looked more like a seedy Dollar Store: a 4-pack of blank videotapes $1, blank cassette tapes with weeks (perhaps years) of dust. They moved all the rock and pop upstairs and put classical and jazz on the third floor. Thought perhaps I'd buy the new Bowie CD, Reality $18.99!!!

[2/26/2025: Now an America's Best eyewear shop. On the third was a guitar repair shop].

2/26/2022

I was thinking back to the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was a young musician studying jazz, then started writing lyrics and songs as a result of the fall of the wall and the world generally convulsing. I was cynical about it all, and it was too good to be true.            

In your 30s you start having your own opinions about things, especially history and philosophy. You develop a gravitas about the world. Lyrics are a way to voice opinions, whereas jazz has no vehicle for it really. I particularly liked what Sting was doing post-Police, interestingly in a jazz context. For artists this bleeds into the work. Generally speaking, artists tend to go through those kinds of periods, which became off-and-on, but never faded completely.
 

2/26/2025

An AI-generated track from my lyrics. These hooks are actually pretty good... 

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Out-takes: