“Judging” those Damien Rice contest entries was like reading through a bunch of peoples’ diary entries and coolly picking the “best.” How hard-hearted is that? In any case, it was almost impossible, and thanks for all the dozens of thoughtfully incisive entries. If you want some great reading, look them all over and appreciate the depth and the heartbreaking elegance of Damien’s writing. If Rice wasn’t a musician, he could be the greatest Irish poet and author in a long time.
Winner Because I Don’t Know Why (it just grabbed me the right way) BRETT writes: —————————————————————— “I haven’t heard the new one yet, so I’ll have to choose from ‘O’.
And I die when you mention his name And I lied, I should have kissed you when we were runnin’ in the rain
I die when he comes around to take you home I’m too shy, I should have kissed you when we were alone
- Cheers Darlin’
“Both of these really capture those ‘missed opportunities’ in life and love. Those rare moments that come along and you know you should follow your heart (and often your whole being) and capture them, but you dont. You hesitate, you waffle, you listen to that doubtful little voice in your head and then, its too late. All you can do is watch that magical moment – that possibility of true love – pass painfully by. All you can do is think of what could have been, if only youd had the ‘balls’ to step up and embrace that ephemeral spark. Its a lesson we could probably all learn from.” ——————————————————————
Brett’s entry spoke to a belief I have about embracing the moment when you can and while you can, and fully appreciating life. Plus he used the words “ephemeral spark,” and I loved that.
Runners Up (would be pretty much everybody else, who, as usual, get nothing but the satisfaction of leaving an excellent comment): Sorry I couldn’t give the print to Myk, who was hoping to give it to a lost love and win her back (!). Honey did me the awesome favor of sending me a link to the performance of her best song, “Insane.” I too love the lyric “Sometimes you’re breathing all over my skin…You always end up much closer than close…That’s where I give in.” R-O-Dub writes a novel, a literary dissertation on “The Professor” which was fantastic and would best be shared over a cuppa coffee, while Lucie just says that if someone quoted a certain lyric to her, she’d burst into tears. Succinct but perfect.
I appreciated what JBS from San Francisco State had to say about “Rat Within The Grain” because I love the aching honesty of those same lyrics (plus, he offered up a comparison with another song from a different artist; great foil). And two of you guys brought up the overlooked gem “I Remember” in all of its raging angst, drawing me back to this song I had kind of forgotten and renewing my desire to see Damien Rice live.
Every entry was great. Thank you to each person who took the time to add to the dialogue and respond.
When I used to work as a clerk-gal / shelf-stocker / sweep-if-they-need-it person at Longs’ Drug Store in San Jose, I remember that they used to play a lot of Duncan Sheik over the PA (along with Del Amitri and other soft-pop hits. Maybe “On The Wings Of Love” too). In fact, Sheik’s 1996 song “Barely Breathing” was apparently the most-played radio song that year. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that tune, but for me it just became background music.
All this to say, I didn’t realize the depth of Duncan Sheik’s talent in producing richly multifaceted music that has some serious quality behind it. In the last few years, I’ve opened my mind a little more and been exposed a few of his other tunes which underscore his ability to craft these gorgeous symphonic songs with penetrating lyrics. (His tribute song to Jeff Buckley is astounding, as is “In Between” from 1998′s Humming, among others). Perhaps you, like me, had erroneously dismissed Duncan Sheik as boring or overly-vanilla, and maybe you missed his contributions to the Repertoire Of Good Music?
From an early age, Sheik was schooled in piano by his grandmother, a Juilliard graduate. He continued in music through his school years, but graduated with a degree in Semiotics from Brown University (trivia fact, same program as Damian Kulash from OK Go). Semiotics is the study of language, communication, and semantics — so I think it leads to some dang good songwriting.
Recently when I was in California, I stumbled by chance upon a sort of “MTV Unplugged” lunchtime session with Sheik in the Fess Parker Theater at my university. This hour-long conversation was peppered with audience questions and several acoustic performances of songs that Sheik has penned for his current musical theater endeavor, Spring Awakening.
This musical was performed at Santa Clara University last year, hence the connection and the resulting (very interesting) appearance. It is a re-imagining of a controversial German expressionist play by the same name from Frank Wedekind, and Sheik worked on the musical score for the past eight years before it finally opened in New York’s Atlantic Theater this past August, and just arriving on Broadway this past weekend.
Here is a partial transcript of the “interview” portion with the audience. I related to much more of what he had to say than I thought I would, being from a completely NON-theatre background myself (except for that junior high stint in the Anne Of Green Gables play, which I totally rocked). I always find it fascinating to see how music can permeate so many aspects of life and culture.
DUNCAN SHEIK, “UNPLUGGED” October 20, 2006 Fess Parker Theater, Santa Clara University
Sheik opened with acoustic performances of two exceedingly lovely songs from the musical.
BLUE WIND
THE SONG OF PURPLE SUMMER
Q&A How has it been working in theatre, which is so much more collaborative than the individual songwriting model? I imagine it must be a struggle to find solitude sometimes.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I lock people out of my house all the time. We lock the director [Michael Mayer] out of the recording studio, he’ll be banging on the door (laughs).
But I do think that in the end, it’s really great to have people’s ideas in the process because left to our own devices, [lyricist] Steven [Sater] and I — the whole show would just sound like what you’ve just heard, it would just be completely sad and melancholy and tragic, and it would not be very exciting. Having other people to force us to give the songs more energy — in the end that’s very helpful.
How did you get into the theatrical process, and how do you think it changed your writing and the concept of what a song is to go from a world recording albums to the theater?
Initially it was very difficult for the reasons I was saying, where it was so much more collaborative. When I go into the studio, I have great people around me who all give really great ideas, but at the end of the day it’s still my record so I can make the call at the end. But in the theater scenario . . . you kind of have to be political and negotiate things all the time for what your agenda is versus their agenda.
I mean, the initial thing that was exciting about the project was that, normally, being on tour and playing with four or five musicians every night is a great thing, but there is some limitation to it. You know, five guys, on stage, playing some songs. That’s what happens when you go to a rock concert. For me, it was very exciting to think that there could be this really cool narrative that you’re telling over the course of the evening, and that within the context of this story, you’re using this music to up the emotional ante of that story.
So even though sometimes it was really painful and really difficult to hear these songs — you know, I’ll be really honest with you, we had some kids who were really very “Broadway” in the initial workshops, and even some of the kids who are in the show now, they’ve done Les Mis and Ragtime and things like that. So they sing in that way, and — it was torture for me. I had to kind of crack the whip with them, “You’re not Cosette, you’re Fiona Apple.” You know, “Pretend that you’re Thom Yorke. You’re a kid in your bedroom who wants to be a rockstar.”
So the concept was that the music would be completely contemporary and modern, and it was a difficult process to get to that place. And in the end I think it did end up as kind of a hybrid, because whenever you have eleven people singing a song on stage, there is an aspect of musical theatre around it, I mean — you can’t get away from it.
But I think in a way, I’ve kind of come around a little bit and started to embrace some aspects of [musical theatre]. We started working on this almost eight years ago, and since then I’ve come to appreciate the genre a lot more. For example, seeing things like Dancer In The Dark, the Bjork movie, seeing how music can function there. Laurie Anderson did a great musical piece about Moby Dick and — to see all these kinds of possibilities within the form that are really cool. So even though it was difficult and a lot of the times I just wanted to say “Ugh! I can’t do this!” in the end, to see it on the stage at The Atlantic, it was the best and most satisfying creative feeling I’ve had. Ever.
[My question]Do you think that the experiences working with Spring Awakening affected your writing on White Limousine at all?
Yeah, I think it definitely did. I think anytime you work on your process in a different way –like, say, working with eleven singers instead of one– it changes the way you think about harmony, vocals, what the possibilities are. And I think also lyrically, it changed a lot of the ways I think about writing songs. Steven [Sater] is a lot more of a poetic writer than I am — I can tend to get more heady in my own writing, and so I think it’s helped me move away from that intellectual writing zone and to just do something that’s more about feeling.
How was it working with this project which had existing themes and lyrics that you had to include in your songwriting, and integrating them with the melodies or chords in your mind?
Actually, I tend to write chords first almost always and then the melodies kind of reveal themselves from that. But that’s just my own personal thing, I’m not sure why that is. I’m not the kind of person that just walks about and a melody pops into my head, I’m definitely a person that hears structural things first and then the melodies kind of emerge. The lyrics do suggest a rhythmic thing no matter what, so that kind of gives you something to start with in this instance.
Do you see yourself continuing to work in musical theatre?
Yeah. Steven and I have a bunch of pieces coming up. We have a show called The Nightingale which is going to be done in La Jolla next fall, and it’s based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale about a Chinese emperor and this great bird . . . it’s actually a little bit more political, a piece about how the aristocracy within a given country can really ignore the needs of the common people. And then we also did a piece about Nero the emperor that was in the theatre a few months ago and we’ll probably do another version of that in New York next year as well.
And finally our next big crazy idea is to do a version of Frankenstein — but it would be not with the big green monster. Our idea is to have Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Byron, the three of them kind of sitting around telling stories on the shore of Lake Como, and the story of Frankenstein comes from their perspectives there. So lots of things in the works.
Johnny Depp has been rumored to play Sweeney Todd in a new movie musical — how would you feel about Spring Awakening being made into a movie?
Oh we definitely want to make a movie of it, for sure. It’s gonna be hard, as all of these things are. Between you and me, most musicals which are made into movies are not very successful — at least artistically I find them to be off-putting. But there are some things that are cool, so it can be done, if we get the right team of people to make this movie so that it doesn’t get too . . . Hollywood and too . . . stupid.
How has it been orchestrating your works for the musicians in the theatre? Has your process changed much from how you are used to doing it?
I made recordings of pretty much all of these songs before, so there were orchestral parts that I had written that existed on the recordings already. But I also collaborated with Simon Hale, who’s the string arranger that I work with a lot, he actually just got involved with the project and he did string arrangements for 14 of the 20 songs. We just recorded these 14 string arrangements at my studio this past Tuesday and Wednesday, and he’s amazing. I just sit there and I’m blown away by what he does. So Simon and I have kind of orchestrated it together, and it’s amazing to hear what he comes up with.
You seem to be at a really revolutionary point in musical theatre in terms of reaching out to new audiences, or younger audiences, or those who wouldn’t ordinarily be interested in musical theatre. How do you want to affect this change?
Steven and I have always –from the beginning– been interested in figuring out a way to do a piece of musical theatre and have younger people come to the show, but not just younger people, but people of all ages who kind of grew up in rock music, and yet make them feel like this kind of music is still completely relevant to them.
You know, musical theatre in the ’30s and ’40s, that was the popular music of the day, and then something happened in the ’50s and ’60s where these two genres diverged. It’s always been our goal to kind of bring these two musical forms back together again so that you’ll have a different set of people seeing it. In addition to the regular theatergoers, we’re also hoping to get a new set of people who won’t be estranged by the music because it’s their music, it’s what they’re used to hearing aesthetically.
When the kids are singing in Spring Awakening — even though it’s set in 1891, when they sing they become modern kids. And the conceit is that when they sing they’re never singing to each other, they’re not singing to the audience. It’s similar to Dancer In The Dark; when Bjork is singing she enters this fantasy world, her own kind of internal monologue is happening. So hopefully theatregoers don’t get that uncomfortable or alienating feeling of “Why is this person singing stuff that they should just be saying?“
I think that there’s been a kind of a modern tradition of that in musical theatre that’s always trying to get a foothold, whether it’s Tommy or Rent or Hedwig And The Angry Inch — there have been some successful attempts, but we’re just trying to be part of that trajectory and just get new people into the theatre, I think that’s really important.
***********************
Sheik closed with an acoustic version of the title track off his latest album, White Limousine:
Watch also for the new double-disc retrospective album called Brighter/Later that was just released (with a nod to Nick Drake) on Rhino Records.
LISTEN: At The Reservoir – A Live EP (1996 US 7-track promo-only CD featuring two non-album tracks)
I saw Stranger Than Fiction last night and absolutely loved it. It’s been a long time since I saw a film where I wouldn’t change a thing about it. I found the script and the meta-premise extremely clever, loved the literary turns and the intelligent plotline.
If you’ve seen the previews, you know that the film involves the (flawlessly cast) Will Ferrell as a colorless IRS agent Harold Crick, who lives a precisely organized life that one day changes when he begins to hear a woman’s voice narrating his life. He has become the main character in a new novel being written, in an odd intersection of life and fiction, and learns that in the book his “character” is to be killed off. Ah, gravitas.
It’s not just a silly comedy of a film, but instead engagingly raises some fascinating existential questions about the meaning of life, the greater good, the process of creating something wonderful, and living your life in the face of a possible impending doom. I appreciated the overexaggeration of the one-dimensionality of the characters, from Ferrell’s all-beige, sterile apartment of precise teeth-brushing and no fun, to the overstated colorful quirkiness of his female foil (Maggie Gyllenhaal) in her tattooed artistic world (which included her bakery with posters for Rogue Wave and The 22-20s stapled to the wall, which is apparently what anarchist bakers listen to).
Speaking of the music, there was a suitably punchy soundtrack which I thoroughly enjoyed. It is heavy on the Spoon, with Britt Daniels and Co. contributing several songs, as well as some new materials and scoring from Daniels in conjunction with Brian Reitzell (Lost In Translation, Marie Antoinette). Here’s what we loved about it:
The Book I Write (new version) – Spoon (plays over the closing credits) (This just begs me to listen to “Everyday I Write The Book.” Or maybe to just watch Wedding Singer again.)
That’s Entertainment (demo version) – The Jam (bus scene with Will Ferrell reading the manuscript of his life and potential death, perfect musical accompaniment)
Death or Glory – The Clash (playing in the background after Crick’s first encounter with the artsy baker Ana, while he yells at the invisible narrator)
Going Missing – Maximo Park (spot-on lyrics for Ferrell’s character, sung in that appealing British lilt)
And more goodness awaits in the official soundtrack CD. And go see the movie, it was the best I’ve seen in a long time, and it induced me to a fervent profession of love during the closing credits for the first-time writer Zach Helm. Someone buy that man a drink.
The single most requested re-up that I get these days is for some of the older live and unreleased Ray LaMontagne songs. I am happy to finally re-post some fantastic live unreleased stuff from him, in honor of me seeing Ray in Denver next Monday. These are mostly all courtesy of a fantastic girl named Jaimie who is relentless in collecting these, and I am appreciative for the goodness they have bestowed upon my ears.
They’re totally going all Bono one you: Just received word from Pearl Jam that they are playing the Make Poverty History concert tonight in Melbourne, Australia with JET and others. The concert website is not yet updated to include this information, but PJ says they’re in. There will be a live webcast here, one hour delayed.
Loosely correlated tune: I Got You (live) – Pearl Jam (Split Enz cover – okay, they’re from New Zealand but it’s the closest I could get this morning)
UPDATE: I LOVE THE INTERNET!
Bono joins Pearl Jam for “Rocking In The Free World”!! (the first hint that something was afoot was when Vedder introduced the song by saying, “It’s a beautiful day . . .”)
A reworking of classic Beatles songs by Sir George Martin from the Cirque du Soleil show, the new album Love will be released on Monday Nov 20th. If you are one of my British readers, you have a chance to hear the album before it is released, in the famous studio that it was originally recorded in.
I’ve just gotten word that the first 100 fans to turn up at 1pm tomorrow (Friday the 17th) at Abbey Road Studios will get a wristband to return later that evening (6:30pm) for an exclusive playback of the LOVE album in the legendary Studio 2.
Sounds like fun to me. Anyone seen the show yet? One friend of mine who saw it wrote me that, “It was truly a surrealistic experience with the best sound I have ever heard in my life. There were speakers in front of us, on the back of our chairs, and on the side. Highly recommended even for those who are not big Beatles fans.”
I’ve had the pleasure of listening to the album and here is a sample track:
(From the official description: This begins with John’s original demo before going into an early take of the song and then climaxing in a musical collage including the piano solo from “In My Life” and the harpsichord pattern from “Piggies”). It is indeed kind of fun tracing all the bits that are used in each song.
Here are a few excerpts that I related to in some way:
Jeremy Vine, Radio 2 presenter “Thunder Road and Born to Run are the best songs in rock and roll. They’re cinematographic – like a movie and music in tandem. They’ll still be playing those songs in a thousand years’ time. In fact, I bet they’re playing them on other planets right now.”
Favourite lyric – from ‘Hungry Heart’ (1980) Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack I went out for a ride and I never went back Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing I took a wrong turn and I just kept going
Billy Bragg, singer/songwriter “I saw him at Meadowlands in New Jersey, which is a huge sports arena, and he made it seem like a little local bar. “
Favourite lyric – from ‘Racing in The Street’ (1978) Tonight my baby and me, we’re gonna drive to the sea and wash these sins from our hands
Badly Drawn Boy, singer/songwriter “The way I discovered Springsteen was pretty special: it felt like serendipity. It was Christmas and I was 14, just flicking TV channels. Suddenly I saw him on The Old Grey Whistle Test – footage of him playing Thunder Road live at Madison Square Garden in 1979. Just hearing the piano and harmonica made me think, ‘Wow, what’s that song?’ The next day I bought the album, and then the rest of them in chronological order. I spent the next four years listening to nothing but Springsteen.
It was Springsteen who started me thinking about what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t know I had music in me.”
Favourite lyric – from ‘Thunder Road’ (1975) Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night You ain’t a beauty but, hey, you’re alright Oh, and that’s alright with me
There are five songs on this EP, which clocks in at a lengthy 31 minutes (thanks to songs like the ten-minute opus “Feel”). Four of the 5 songs were never re-recorded or released on any Verve album. It’s a must-have for Verve completists, or for those of us who could use some spacey psychedelic music every now and then.
It took some clicking around, but I finally found the 80 Bridge School Benefit performances from the last 20 years that were added to iTunes yesterday. Interesting choices, and no Trent Reznor. In fact, nothing that I can see from this year (but each track unfortunately doesn’t list the date of the performance). And they misspelled Thom Yorke’s name.
Some surprises: four from Ben Harper (who is luminous in concert — a man possessed), two great ones from Bright Eyes, forgotten gem “I’ve Been High” from R.E.M.’s 2001 Reveal album, and “The Nearness of You” by Norah Jones (which is my grandparents’ song, the same ones who used to ride around the mail truck together incognito). I hope these tracks sell well, as some of the proceeds go to support the work of the Bridge School, and mostly I hope there are more to come – just think of the thousands of cuts sitting in the archives, waiting…
Name: Heather Browne Location: Colorado, originally by way of California Giving context to the torrent since 2005.
"I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. It's the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part..."
—Nick Hornby, Songbook
"Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel." —Hunter S. Thompson
Mp3s are for sampling purposes, kinda like when they give you the cheese cube at Costco, knowing that you'll often go home with having bought the whole 7 lb. spiced Brie log. They are left up for a limited time. If you LIKE the music, go and support these artists, buy their schwag, go to their concerts, purchase their CDs/records and tell all your friends. Rock on.
I don’t know why I do this to myself.
Recently when I was in California, I stumbled by chance upon a sort of “MTV Unplugged” lunchtime session with Sheik in the Fess Parker Theater at my university. This hour-long conversation was peppered with audience questions and several acoustic performances of songs that Sheik has penned for his current musical theater endeavor, 
Name: Heather Browne
