August 22nds

8/22/2004

Poetry is in the ear of the beholder. The most successful lyricists understand that while music on its own can be powerful, music married to emotionally charged images and phraseology can have a more lasting impact. But more often it is the trialectic with milestone events in your life that gives power to music, as they more indelibly encode in memory.

This makes me think again of the “music of language”. You can say nothing, but say it very well if you put music in the voice. You have to be careful and not just listen to the notes (the surface elements), but to hear the music as well (the entire context).

8/22/2019 

Morning Night--ominous storm clouds--Trump Tower:

8/22/2024

AI is still very much in its talking head phase where people don’t know exactly how to use it in an interesting way. What’s interesting to me now is the possibility of creating different artist characters and matching them with styles of music—a character for ambient music, or a character for folk music, and so on. I like the idea of AI music being more of a conceptual art project rather than just music. I can start in various different ways, such as starting with text derived from the diaries, which will create a result that I can use as a background for other things, for example, writing a string quartet against it. This way I can operate on all creative levels.

[8/22/2025: Even after just 1 year, AI is in the flow of what we do, the same trajectory of computers circa 1993 and the internet 1999. I think it's an interesting way to work. Pop music is easy, and always was, so perhaps we can let AI do the easy "hook" material and get on with more rigorous things]. 

Harris acceptance speech evokes the same emotional power as Obama’s 2008 victory speech...I then watched a video of James Taylor’s Going To Carolina which fit right in with the “heartland” theme. Then I realized it was posted 11 years ago. 

Goldberg+Mies