About two years, I wrote about the very young chanteuse Nikki Yanofsky. Commenters rightfully pointed out at the time that she was an impressive if non-amazing singer.
I was reminded of Ms. Yanofsky recently, so I thought I’d see what progress she’d made in the last two years. Here’s an MSNBC profile that suggests her fame is increasing (hilariously, you can hear her ask her mother “why does Daddy have Twitter?”):
I’m lousy at predictions, but I could definitely see her fitting into the Norah Jones (here’s Ms. Yanofsky covering Jones’s “Don’t Know Why”) and Diana Krall easy-listening vein. Maybe she doesn’t achieve the same level of fame, but it’s worth noting that both of those singers are easy on the eyes, and Ms. Yanofsky is also pretty (he says, trying to sound as non-creepy as possible). There are no doubt hundreds of as good or better teenage singers in Canada, but few probably have the same savvy parental support and good looks.
For reasons I don’t remember, the other day I was looking up the song “Book of Love” by The Magnetic Fields. While poking around YouTube, I found this delightful cover by one Nataly Dawn:
She’s got a whole fagile-voiced Regina Spektor-Feist thing going on that, given my taste for female singer-songwriters, appeals. She has an album out, and I gather she’s a bit of a YouTube star. You can learn more about her on her MySpace page.
I’m kind of fascinated by the split-screen, deconstructed style of the video. It’s a classic example of turning a constraint–no band or recording studio–into a virtue.
Heading down the Internet rabbit hole, I also discovered that Ms. Dawn is one half of Pomplamoose. They’ve got a bunch of tunes on YouTube, and they’re mostly videos shot and edited in this same style. It must be pretty time-consuming to cut together, say, this version of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”:
I know it’s January 4, and I should have pounded out this list back on December 21 or so, but what’re you going to do?
Given that the 2000’s were a decade of rap, hip hop and beat-driven pop, my favourites don’t really reflect popular taste. As usual, female singer-songwriters feature prominently.
I assembled this list by skimming through the top-rated songs in my iTunes library. Links go to YouTube (some ‘videos’ are decidedly unofficial) or elsewhere on the web where you can hear the song. In chronological order, then:
“Wichita Lineman” - Cassandra Wilson (2002) - A cover of an old Jimmy Webb song. Ms. Wilson specializes in great, barely recognizable covers. I saw her play at the Chan Centre about five years ago. I’ve never seen more proficient musicians, or a more natural singer on-stage.
“Hockey Skates” - Kathleen Edwards (2003) - There are great turns of phrase in Ms. Edwards’ lyrics. She sings about a bar so familiar that “I don’t have to order anymore”. In the chorus, she’s just “tired of playing defense, and I don’t even own hockey skates”.
“Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” - Stars (2004) - Just a terrific song, with a sprawling sound that feels distinctly Canadian.
“Ring Them Bells” - Sufjan Stevens (2007) - A cover of a Bob Dylan tune for the biopic I’m Not There. It’s full of Biblical allusions, so it’s appropriate that Stevens, an overt if seemingly troubled Christian, covers it. Another sprawling, rich orchestration, full of tempo changes and, to my untrained ear, about fifteen instruments.
“Adventures In Solitude” - The New Pornographers (2007) - Last year I said it was “a gorgeous, surreal ballad by The New Pornographers. The song creeps along at first, all piano and mandolin, with A.C. Newman on lead vocals. At about the halfway point, the pace picks up. And there’s the incomparable Neko Case, her voice sweet as Saturday morning sex. She sings poetry that seems both nonsensical and poignant.”
“Night Windows” - Weakerthans (2007) - There are a bunch of clever, straight ahead rock songs from the Weakerthans that I could put on this list. My gateway song for them was the awesome “Plea From a Cat Named Virtute” (never has a song channeled a cat’s psyche so well), but it’s this song that stuck with me. I learned to play the guitar parts, and the section under the verse is almost the exact reverse of the Beatles’ “Blackbird”.
“Get Better” - Mates of State (2008) - Their songs sound messy and anthemic at the same time, and the chorus of this song is terrific: “Everything’s gonna get lighter, even if it never gets better”.
“People Got a Lotta Nerve” - Neko Case (2009) - One of a number of great songs off Ms. Case’s Middle Cyclone. A twangy ditty about Orcas and elephants. The video is delightful.
The eight songs that didn’t make my top ten list are, in no particular order:
Each year, each of the Georgia Straight’s music critics writes a list of their top ten favourite albums of the year. I usually skim these lists, and I’m overjoyed if I recognize more than three or four bands. This year, in my ongoing battle against total musical fossilization, I decided to examine the list in some detail, and to listen to any band that I thought might strike my fancy.
I ended up with four new bands that I liked. They are:
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - How can you not like a band with a name like that? Like a lot of the bands I checked out, they seem to be influenced by the music of the eighties.
Mirah - Her full name is Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, so it’s no wonder that she shortened it. Straight reviewer Mike Usinger writes “Think Cat Power before she started making music for Yaletown dinner parties.” Ouch, I kind of like Cat Power.
Pink Mountaintops - Wikipedia calls them a “shoegaze psychedelic rock band from Vancouver”. They’re a kind of side project featuring many of the same musicians in Black Mountain.
Lightning Dust - This band specifically identifies themselves as being from ‘East Van’ on their MySpace page. It turns out they’re another side project of some of the musicians in the aforementioned Black Mountain. They’re my favourite of the four bands I’ve listed here.
I was pleased to recognize a few more of the bands on the list than I usually do. Of those bands, I’d recommend The Hidden Cameras, M. Ward and The Low Anthem.
There’s only so much one can say about Remembrance Day. The ceremony is pretty much the same from year to year–this year I attended the one in front of the Legislature here in Victoria. I’ve written a lot about this day in the past: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008.
This year I was thinking back to the Remembrance Day assemblies in elementary and high school. One year, I have a clear memory of a video being shown, featuring a song, I think, by Bryan Adams. I even remember some of the lyrics:
The guns will be silent - on Remembrance Day
There’ll be no more fighting - on Remembrance Day
This wasn’t the video, but here’s the song. It’s hardly In Flanders Fields, but it’s what I was thinking about today.
Andy linked to this delightful alternative time line for the last forty years of popular music. It imagines what might have happened if the Beatles stayed together:
February 11th, 1978. Eventually is released simultaneously in the American and British markets. Some critics find significance in the fact that the first single off the album, “Blow Away,” is not a Lennon/McCartney collaboration but instead a George Harrison song; others find themselves underwhelmed and suggest that the Lennon/McCartney “Free As A Bird” should have been the first single instead. (”Free As A Bird” is released as the second single six weeks later.) Harrison, for his part, says that “Blow Away” was “a lot less of a rocker” before Lennon suggested an increase in tempo and “letting Ringo go nuts.” No music videos are produced for the album: Lennon says “no, that would be too much bother. We want to have fun with this. Work’s for our own stuff.”
I’m sure these have been done before, but there are a number of creative projects that extend naturally from this kind of ‘what if’ exercise. A book-length version, maybe, or writing songs that the still-together Beatles might have written.
Lately I’ve been listening to the original version of Cream’s “Crossroads” a lot. I first heard that song in 1988 or so, as it was on one of the first CDs my family ever bought. It was on an Eric Clapton four CD box set by the same name. As you might imagine, I listened to those CDs a ton in my teenage years.
As an aside: the version of “Crossroads” I’m talking about is a live recording. As the band finishes, you hear applause and then somebody says “Eric Clapton [something] on vocals”. I’ve always wondered who says that? Bassist Jack Bruce, maybe?
“Crossroads” is track three on disc two (unquestionably the best of the four CDs). It’s followed by a mid-tempo Cream tune called “Badge”, which starts with a nice rolling baseline and some crunchy chords.
Every time I hear the end of “Crossroads”, I expect to hear the start of “Badge”. This is true even though I probably haven’t heard that particular combination of songs for ten or fifteen years. I’ve probably heard “Crossroads” followed by other songs at least 50 or 100 times since then. And yet I still have that aural expectation embedded in my brain. The pattern doesn’t seem to get broken. Odd, eh?
Another example is that my family’s LP of “Sticky Fingers” had a scratch on it, so I always expect to hear a little glitch or skip in the second chorus of the Stones’ “Brown Sugar”. I’m sure everybody has such formative listening patterns. What are yours?
Also, will the iTunes and MP3 generation–people under the age of, say, fourteen–be free from the Next Song Syndrome? They may never have bought a CD, so they may not acquire the same sort of listening patterns.
Over the summer, I read a great article in The New Yorker about TicketMaster, Live Nation and the history of rock concert promotions. It was unavailable online until somebody kindly added it to this Reddit discussion thread in which I was involved. You can view a PDF of the article here, or I’ve also uploaded it here.
It’s a pretty fascinating article, and reveals some surprising (to me, at least) facts about the concert business. One is that TicketMaster and Live Nation have struggled, financially, and lose huge chunks of revenue due to scalping. Another is that, of course, many concert tickets are radically under-priced. From the article:
The phenomenon of below-market value tickets has inspired a cottage industry of economists seeking to explain seemingly illogical pricing in the rock-concert business. Alan Krueger…an economist…is one. “There is still an element of rock concerts that is more like a party than a commodities market,” Kruger told me. A ticket to a rock show, he said, bears elements of a “gift exchange,” in which intangible benefits accrue for the seller. Cheap tickets increase the possibility of a sellout, which augments merchandise and concession sales. Sellouts make the concert experience better for the musicians and audience alike. And, one might add, a cheap ticket is the price the music industry pays to preserve the illusion that the sixties never ended. “In some fashion, I help people hold on to their own humanity–if I’m doing my job right,” Springsteen once said, of his performances. At least, he helps people hold on to their savings.
That’s kind of a provocative idea, isn’t it? While we (myself included) complain about the high cost of concert tickets, they’re actually priced well below market value. This applies much more for the Springsteens and the Madonnas than local bands, obviously, but the former is where TicketMaster and Live Nation make all their money.
I don’t in any way mean to be an apologist for TicketMaster. Their business model is built on controlling the marketplace and delivering shockingly little added value to their customers. It’s only getting easier for venues to handle their own ticket sales. So, it’s my hope that TicketMaster may die off with the generation of rock and rollers they depended upon for their revenue.
Via a recent Slate Culturefest episode, I learned about L Magazine’s five-part series of video essays on the evolution of the modern blockbuster. They’re a terrific middle-brow exploration of the blockbuster movies and related pop-culture of two years: 1984 and 1989. Here’s the first in the series:
I was ten years old in 1984, and I’m surprised how many of the movies I recognize from that year. I saw some of them in the cinema, certainly, but I must have watched a lot more on video. I wonder, did we have our Betamax VCR by then, or were we still, hilariously, renting one from the video store?
Having clumsily experimented with it myself recently, I’m quite fond of this essay-as-narrated-video treatment. When writing about the medium of moving pictures, it feels like the right format.
She writes (or co-writes) all her songs, plays guitar, answers to no Svengali, and doesn’t rely on a high-priced corps of studio musicians and producers. She records for an independent label and speaks to a devoted audience in an eccentric, sui generis voice that mixes high-Nashville earnestness with the Esperanto of the foodcourt and the chatroom.
It was that voice that resonated at Madison Square Garden. The concert was a high-tech extravaganza, with video montages and backup dancers, costume changes and an onstage rainstorm. But the music cut through the spectacle. Swift’s vocals have occasionally been wobbly, but at the Garden she sang with punch and confidence. What really shone, though, were the songs themselves—the rigorous architecture of hits like “You Belong with Me,” “Should Have Said No,” and “Love Story,” whose melodies arc inexorably towards the payoff of huge sing-along choruses.
Thanks to iLike, I occasionally encounter Swift’s very video-bloggy clips in my news reader. They may be carefully crafted marketing pieces, but they come off as ad hoc and quite genuine. The latest one, for example, shows the singer’s flopping-on-the-bed, girlish excitement about her Country Music Award nominations.
