July 21sts

7/21/1998

Lyrics for “Spooky”, now “Saved by the Sunrise”. Used an idea snippet from list of lyric fragments. Somehow I hear Cesaria Evora singing this. 

[7/21/2025: Some AI Spins. This is an instance where compared to my demo version, AI is terrible, even against my terrible provisional demo. The interpretations careen all over the place. So music is a matter of choosing all the right mood words? I suspect it’s working off words in the lyric, and it’s all wrong. I chose a flute as an instrument and you get recorders, Irish flutes, and “minstrel music”. This tune also needs mallets and brushes on the drums to make it work and AI is incapable of that kind of specificity. A good example of how human creativity is different from choosing items off a menu. As I said in The Music of Language, "There’s nothing more earthy than to sit down with an existing poem and set it to music while strumming a guitar.". One could make the conclusion in 2025 that AI music, while fascinating in some ways, can't compare to real composition, even if every element was reduced to software options].

- 

7/21/2015

Moonlight Cafe

 

7/21/2022

It is true that jazz is more “intellectual” as much as I want to avoid making it pejorative. But like the “Mozart Effect” it won’t make you smarter just by listening to it as a form of hypnosis. Perhaps there is something in the harmonic density that makes it sound smarter than other things. But it’s just plain old harmony. Culture has a way of over-complicating things that are otherwise prosaic. 

7/21/2024

When I sit down to write a piece of music usually I’m using a guitar or some kind of a keyboard, and I sketch it out as one would sketch out a new painting. In the next phase, you have to produce it, which is a different animal–an un-caged animal–in the sense that it’s hard to control. It starts to go down its own paths, and once you’re far along the path, you have to continue on with it, or abandon it, and return to square one. I’m beginning to hate music production because once you’ve caged the un-caged animal, you might not like the cage that it’s in, and you’re in that cage as well.