April 2nds

4/2/1980

Andy Warhol meets Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square.

[Uses the E-G#-D-F# tuning]  

 

4/2/2005

Pope John Paul II dies. Massive pilgrimage to Rome. His death now eclipses the Terri Schiavo case. (Terri who?) 

Dynaxiom: When you see the long view, it helps you decide whether you believe in God or not.  

4/2/2019

When I was in music school we'd ask each other what part of music we liked most--melody, harmony or rhythm. I always loved harmony, but came to use all of them. Over the years I came to like another one above the others and that was the conceptual, or art driven by ideas. More than anything, my work is driven by ideas, in which any or other elements can serve as tools to resolve the ideas. None are more important. To elevate one element makes the work inert in a “spiritual” sense. For example in music, if something is too harmonic, melody or rhythm may be overlooked. Important elements arise in hindsight when you discover the thing that makes it work.

4/2/2022

On the potential for live music in the Metaverse: In terms of the headspace of music, individual parts can be placed in a 360-degree environment within the stereo field. It’s interesting in the sense that the location of the sound can be disconnected from the source so that the listener sees the guitar player, but the sound is coming from some other direction, not unlike a guitar player using a sax sound, or melding it with a sax sound so you don’t know who’s playing what. Recordings have always had these illusions, but a visual representation of sound locations could be an extra dimension.

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Creativity works on that combinatorial process where you're taking things from various places  and assembling them. That's one of the things that I noticed about the McCartney lyrics is that there was an initial idea from somewhere, it incubates, and then other things get pulled in, sometimes at random, which contributes to the whole, even though all those things aren't necessarily connected. It's the artist who does that intimate connecting. 

4/2/2025

When you’re between projects, there’s a lot of groping around that you have to do to see what feels right. because you’re going to be spending 6 months to a year on a new project, and it has to mean something while you’re doing it. So what I do is I start pilot projects, and I run through them as I would as if I was actually doing them and see how I feel. Yesterday I was playing around with a new book idea of daily rhythms, and I was going through my songday diary and developing some of the ideas and writing some lyrics for them. And it felt right. But you can run other pilot projects where they don’t feel right, and that’s a good way of judging them. You don’t want the feeling of disconnection with the creative process.