September 3rds

 

9/3/2010

On Geddy Lee: Aside from his strident vocal style, Lee’s real talent may be how he can fuse the complex prosody in Peart’s lyrics with a contrapuntal bass line, something that does not come automatically or naturally without practice. Singing against a busy bass line can be a bit more tricky than singing and strumming a guitar. Performing the two parts together forces the negotiation of words, phrases, narrative and meaning with the bar line. If the lyrics are too wordy, all the words need to be packed into sometimes jerky metric schemes. This may be the reason that Rush uses odd meters so naturally, as it allows the rhythm of the language to flow naturally—in a kind of rock recitative. I don’t suspect much of their music was written at a piano or with an acoustic guitar—I think it was Lee singing against a bass as an accompaniment instrument. Some people can’t conceive of writing songs on a bass, but I suspect he did.    

[9/3/2025: Lyric “packing” seems to be what music LLMs do–forcing lines to fit with riffs. This is why I think lyric writing for AI music has to be very economical–even at the expense of it becoming more cryptic. Pop lyrics want to be cryptic in many ways because they are more percussive in nature. AI vocals also don’t have to be concerned about the whole vocal apparatus and having to breathe and actually say the words without tongue-twisting].

9/3/2024

When does the songwriter sound like a songwriter? Once a song idea reaches the production stage, the sky is the limit on how the song is going to sound. I always thought that Sting songs always sounded like Sting songs because he used certain chords that no other songwriters were using at the time, and was a major influence for many songwriters in the 1980s and 1990s. Now songwriters don’t really sound like that any longer. They sound like what the production sounds like. So it’s a matter of the songwriters sounding like a producer. And producers very often call themselves songwriters. Again, is sound a song?    

If I generate a song with artificial intelligence in some random style, how is it that I can personally “own” it? The things that we create under our own name are things that we probably have to own. So the question becomes what is the best thing to own? This goes back to the idea of also owning the instruments that you play. People never thought that I could own playing an electric bass. I recall Linda McCartney being taken aback when she saw Paul playing an electric guitar for the first time. Is that “you”?

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 This morning I was watching some concert footage of the Clash in the 1980s and I said to myself, Why am I watching this and why am I so captivated by it? In the 1980s I was in music school studying classical and jazz, but at the same time I was into stuff like The Clash. There were my favorite radio stations in Chicago, the primary one WXRT, which was formative in my musical upbringing. So I question why I’m watching these kinds of things at my age, and whether it’s too much of a contrast with the things that I’m “supposed to be doing”. 

A friend of mine a while back said that I should write some music like Edward Elgar, and I thought, I haven’t listened to Elgar since the 1980s and has no place in my music, although The Clash still does. I come up with ideas even now that are very much from that era–all the New Wave music from the late 70s into the 1980s is still a part of my style. But I wonder whether I should be still doing that–that I’m not acting my age.