nprfreshair:

Emmylou Harris tells Terry Gross about learning to sing by harmonizing

When you sing harmony you’re not thinking about yourself. You’re just paying attention to the other voice and that other melody and it also requires — I’m using this word “restraint” again — but I think that’s a really important part of country music and I think as a singer you must ultimately respect the melody first and then you can go on from there, but it just seemed like I concentrated on the words, the lyrics, the melody and you get outside of yourself somehow and you just enter a different place.

Video of Emmylou Harris and Barry Tashian dueting on the Townes Van Zandt song “If I Needed You.”

This song jumped back out at me today. Such a great contrast in the melancholy of the first half and the jubilation of the outro.

“But in all those enterprises only a vanishingly small number of people ever get to do them professionally, and if that’s the only way you can appreciate music then you’re not a musician, you’re a wannabe fantasy case and you need to get out.”

austinkleon:

While revisiting this Steve Albini “ask me anything” Reddit thread, I came across a GREAT back-and-forth between him and J Mark Inman, a guy who sang a terrible version of Radiohead’s “Creep” on X-Factor.

Inman doesn’t beat around the bush — he starts out asking Albini if he’ll produce his next record and help him get signed and mentions he was that guy on X-Factor. Albini’s response:

I’m not going to listen to that. By telling me you were on X Factor you’ve outed yourself as a vain douchebag who wanted to leapfrog into showbusiness stardom, and there’s nothing I can do to help you in that regard. Continue singing in front of your mirror holding a hairbrush with my best wishes for continued success.

That would be enough to shut me up forever, but Inman says that Albini doesn’t know him and how hard he’s worked, to which Albini responds (all emphasis mine):

I was being rude but your grasping aspirations are an affront to the millions of dedicated musicians who ply their art without crying about it. You tried a shortcut and it didn’t work. They rarely do. Now you get to have the selfsame experience you tried to avoid, that being building a following by actually working on your music, then putting yourself in front of audiences and performing. You say you have no industry support. Boo hoo. Neither does anybody else. There’s no industry.

Do what everybody else does, get a job and work on your music in your spare time. Work on music you’re passionate about and want to make for its own sake. If your music resonates with other people then your music will eventually earn you something, but if not you’re still doing something you enjoy.

Singing is like dancing or playing chess or fishing or tennis. If you love it you’ll feel rewarded just by the act of doing it, and bully for you. That’s an awesome thing, to do something you love. But in all those enterprises only a vanishingly small number of people ever get to do them professionally, and if that’s the only way you can appreciate music then you’re not a musician, you’re a wannabe fantasy case and you need to get out.

Inman still won’t given up — he goes into a lengthy explanation of his history and claims that his trouble is that he doesn’t have “connections.” Albini:

Connections don’t mean shit. I’ve never had any connections that weren’t a natural outgrowth of doing things I was doing anyway. Additionally, the people you might make connections with who work in the industry and value connections themselves, all those people are clueless assholes with no clout anyhow. You can tell because they think they can get somewhere with connections and spend their energy trying to make connections rather than being good at things, and being good at things is the only thing that earns you clout or connections.

It’s a myth that you can get anywhere in music through connections. The guy on the other end of the connection has to be into what you’re doing, and if you’re doing it publicly and he’s receptive, he probably hears about it on his own.

Don’t worry about anything but making music you like. Everything else is bullshit.

Inman continues, and finally, Alibi responds:

Oh for fuck’s sake. I give up.

And there you have it — so many times in these situations aspiring artists are looking for some kind of magic formula or secret handshake for success, and the truth is what they know, but don’t want to believe: you’re just not good enough yet. You still need to work and work and work, and even then, you still might not be good enough.

cf. Steve Martin, Trent Reznor

This video has kind of been making the rounds, but it is simply ruining me today so I couldn’t NOT be the 1,000th person to post it.

Two of my all-time favorites, Elliott Smith and Jon Brion, tackling songs in the moment. This made me remember just how brilliant of a songwriter and musician that Elliott was— such beautiful, deceptively simple melodies over smart, sometimes complex chord changes. I miss the guy something awful.

Right around the the 16:50 mark, Elliott says something to Jon that really burned into my brain, “I don’t think the point is to make no mistakes, you know. It’s just not the point.”

One excerpt, about the band’s set at SXSW:

“We wrote down on pieces of paper in Sharpie just the word ‘Quiet’ in all caps just to remind ourselves that we aren’t a bar band, we aren’t a rock band,” says Porterfield. “The idea is to handle the songs honestly in that moment and to try to convey a mood. And those quiet signs around the stage helped us remember that.”

So far that strategy has worked. Each band member now brings a crumpled up paper in with their gear with this word to each of their shows.

“That’s a really important part of what we sound like and who we are, which is that we don’t go for anything easy,” says Porterfield. “We want quietness to end up being the thing that ends up winning the night. It’s the struggle to translate that at any given show that makes us who we are.”

immutableinscrutable:

In the wake of recent future-of-music discussions—Louis CK’s direct-ticketing move, which may indeed revolutionize touring for artists with that large of an audience, and the Emily White/All Songs Considered/David Lowery thing—I’ve been having arguments about record labels and money.

I was kind…

nprfreshair:

Ken Tucker reviews Fiona Apple’s new album: ” I mean it as a compliment to say that Apple is working in the literary tradition of “the difficult woman,” closing in on Virginia Woolf and already superior to Sylvia Plath. Apple’s achievement is to both indulge in melodrama and to isolate the hard truths behind her extravagant emotions.”

(via Fiona Apple’s ‘Wheel’ Of Extravagant Emotions : NPR)

My friend Scott commented, talking about this new album and how it– to him- feels really challenging to the listener, “Her last album was held up by the label because it was not commercial enough. And it was way more accessible than this one!” 

I love the new album, knowing full well that it’s not as hooky or accessible. My cousin Mark, again talking about the album and how challenging it is for the listener (a theme is developing: either “i talk about this album a lot” or “my friends think this is a challenging album” or both), remarked that this album feels like a true artistic statement, that Fiona Apple is doing what other artists all aim for: expressing as closely as you can what is inside. And what seems to be inside of Fiona Apple is a lot of uneasiness, unsettling emotion, rawness, introspectiveness, with moments of blaring clarity. She’s a true artist and she’s getting it out there in a way that is really only her way of doing so.