July 4ths

Antipode: January 4ths 

7/4/1886

Thomas Sullivan Diary (AI-Generated)

Black-out lyric:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7/4/1969

(Beatles Studio Diary)            

Overdub onto the newly reduced Golden Slumbers and use of found recordings from the BBC Radio 2 broadcast of Britons and Jones winning The Wimbledon Ladies Tennis Championship beating Billie Jean King in a 71-minute three set.   

7/4/1998

Interesting that Springsteen’s Born In The USA was misconstrued by most (including Lee Iacocca and Ronald Reagan) as some type of patriotic anthem, which it wasn’t, but sounded that way. The lessons here are: 1) if you write a song that sounds like an anthem, that’s how it will be perceived, regardless of what the lyrics say, and 2) most people don’t listen to the lyrics anyway.

[7/4/2025: I still think this is mostly true. The sound washes over you first–tone and image are everything in pop music. But with AI, the words largely shape the music–both the lyrics and the prompts]. 

7/4/2010

Neighborhood Fireworks:

  

 7/4/2011

Trespass: 

7/4/2018

Wrote an arrangement of Francis Brett Young’s poem Lochanilaun, inspired by Danny Kirwan’s use of a Young poem Dust on the "Bare Trees". Very often poetry veers too far away from lyrics and shifts into art-song form, which I don't want.

[7/4/2025: What better day that Independence Day than to arrange a poem by an Englishman]

7/4/2024

Songday based on Inge Morath's diary entry for 7/4/1960. In a way, this is also a potential Music For Photographs piece. “All day is dedicated to the drive through the amazing landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It almost seems to be an accident that we are going on such a smooth road, things around are so untouched, trees and small wooden houses and the endless waves of blue hued mountain crests. There are still rhododendrons blossoming and marguerites and arnicas and flowers that look like windblown veils. The air smells of pines warmed by the sun.”

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