the madison arm

[madisonarm]

How To Be A Band For Years & Years And Still Find Something New In Your Songs. OR How To Unplug Without Just Trying To Do All The Same Things You'd Do If You Were Plugged In. Video by Wilco: "Wilco: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert"

[madisonarm]

Live in Concert: Wilco at Red Butte Garden in Salt Lake City, UT (8/30) Looking to make it lucky #13...

[madisonarm]

[A sacred place] is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen…. [O]ur life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it. Get a phonograph and put on the music that you really love, even if it’s corny music that nobody else respects.

Joseph Campbell (via austinkleon today)

I agree with this on all levels—carving out time, space, "the claims of the moment."

[austinkleon]

Art is a hustle. Before the Eurythmics recorded the Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) album, they were out of money and without a recording contract. Here’s the story from Annie Lennox and David Stewart in their 1983 Musician magazine interview:

"I dressed up like a businessman - I…

[madisonarm]

Jeff Tweedy talks to Steven Hyden

“The way I see it is that I was always pretty comfortable with being vulnerable, but not particularly confident,” Tweedy said. “I feel like I’m a lot more confident, but I still embrace the fact that I am pretty vulnerable, if that makes any sense. I don’t have to be somebody else. I don’t have to be as good as somebody else, I just have to keep making stuff that I am excited by. That is one of the only things I have had control over. I am more aware of it — I am more aware of the things that I have control over.”

[madisonarm]

(Reposting because the audio didn't work on the previous post)

The background vocals from this song by The Flamingos are otherworldly, a little alien hook drenched in interplanetary reverb. I have always loved and been mystified by them. Today I looked it up and found a little history, by Terry Johnson who arranged the vocals:

"…so I was laying down in my room with the guitar on my chest, playing around with the chords, but no matter what I tried it just didn’t fit. Finally, it was about 12 or one in the morning, and I was so tired that I fell asleep, and in my dream I heard ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ just the way it came out on our record. I heard the ‘doo-bop sh-bop’ [backing vocals], I heard the way the harmony would sound — I heard the harmony so clear, and I heard the structure of the chords. As soon as I woke up, I grabbed the guitar off my chest and it was like God put my fingers just where they were supposed to be. I played those chords and I heard the harmonies, and so I called the guys. I woke them all up and I said, ‘Come over to my room right now! I’ve got ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’!’

“They were like, ‘Are you crazy? It’s almost four o’clock!’ and I said, ‘I need you all now, otherwise I may not be able to remember.’ So they came to my room, all of them grumbling, and when they heard me do it they looked at me like, ‘What the hell is this?’ They laughed at me: ‘What’s “doo-bop sh-bop, goo-bop sh-bop, boo-bop sh-bop, loo-bop sh-bop, shoo-bop sh-bop”?’ You see, although in my dream it was ‘doo-bop sh-bop’, I had everybody doing a different thing, changing things around to make sure no one could really pick out what we were saying.

[madisonarm]

Super interesting. Prince is up there and Cash isn't as "alone at the bottom" as I thought he might be.

[pickledelephant]

Cameron Crowe while filming Almost Famous (2000)

[madisonarm]

An all-time favorite. The shot of the three Camerons is great and almost gets me as much as seeing Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs.

[austinkleon]

Along with her TED talk, a must-read.

Perhaps The Most Singular feature about Tom Waits as an artist- the thing that makes him the anti-Picasso- is the way he has braided his creative life into his home life with such wit and grace. This whole idea runs contrary to our every stereotype about how geniuses need to work- about their explosive interpersonal relationships, about the lives (particularly the women’s lives) they must consume in order to feed their inspiration, about all the painful destruction they leave in the wake of invention. But this is not Tom Waits. A collaborator at heart, he has never had to make the difficult choice between creativity and procreativity. At the Waits house, it’s all thrown in there together- spilling out of the kitchen, which is also the office, which is also where the dog is disciplined, where the kids are raised, where the songs are written and where the coffee is poured for the wandering preachers. All of it somehow influences the rest. The kids were certainly never a deterrent to the creativity- just further inspiration for it. He remembers the time his daughter helped him write a song. “We were on a bus coming to L.A. And it was really cold outside. There was this transgender person, to be politically correct, standing on a corner wearing a short little top with a lot of midriff showing, a lot of heavy eye makeup and dyed hair and a really short skirt. And this guy, or girl, was dancing all by himself. And my little girl saw it and said, “It must be really hard to dance like that when you’re so cold and there’s no music.’” Waits took his daughter’s exquisite observation and worked into a ballad called “Hold On”- a song of unspeakably aching hopefulness that was nominated for a Grammy and became the cornerstone of his album Mule Variations. “Children make up the best songs, anyway,” he says. “Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.” This openness is what every artist needs. Be ready to receive the inspiration when it comes; be ready to let it go when it vanishes. He believes that if a song “really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.” “Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes “is trying to trap birds.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground.” Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table.” Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ‘em to catch other songs.” Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you “like dreams taken through a straw.’ In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful.

Read the rest →

[madisonarm]

Tom Waits' indivisible creative/home life is inspiring.

[harrattanparhar]

Visit Original Link

2 good

[madisonarm]

Oh man. This is just ridiculous. A demo by Michael Jackson, outlining his ideas for Beat It.

The discourse about his personal life is sad. But the MUSIC. And this was, to me, the top of his game.

[coencast]

Anton Chigurh

[madisonarm]

These illustrations are killing me.

[madisonarm]

Jon Brion makes a distinction between a great song (great songwriting) and a great performance (stellar production/musicianship). I love Led Zeppelin as much as the next guy, so it feels a little too reductive to say they were primarily a performance band (because there are some good songs in there). But I do agree that a lot of what you get with Zeppelin is great performances that knock you over.  Brion's tendency to sit at the piano to gauge how a song will survive in its stripped-down form is something I try (and fail) to do with my own songs. But it is the true litmus test. How does the combination of the melody and chords stand up when you strip away Danger Mouse or Brian Eno or Pharrell or, for that matter, JON BRION? Could I love the guy any more? (Hint: NEVER.)

[madisonarm]

My time is hard to come by now since I have two small kids so I do my writing in short chunks while a babysitter watches the kids. I try to do it on a schedule for a few hours three times a week. I can usually write a song in about an hour, sometimes two. I write many, many more than I keep (usually about 60-70 per album cycle, about 10-12 of which I keep.) I love finishing things so I always finish my songs. I suspend judgement until later which allows me to get my ideas out there. The whole thing is a complete mystery that continues to hold my attention — how to get the good songs? How to explain and capture what I’m feeling in a way that feels meaningful, true and relatable to others? It’s such a deep challenge and so hard to do well.

Laura Veirs, speaking to me in my newfound world of fewer chunks of time.

[madisonarm]

Joey Ryan (Milk Carton Kids) talks Coens and the concept of leaving room for the reader/listener

(to CMTEdge.com)

And even when they’re making fun of their characters, the Coens always seem to identify with them and how their struggles make them sympathetic.

They’re like novelists. I’ve watched them do interviews or Q&A’s after a screening, and they don’t like to talk about the symbolism in their movies. Somebody asked them in New York about the cat in Inside Llewyn Davis. “What is the purpose of the cat? What does it mean?”

I think Ethan said, “We had this character and we realized that nothing really happens to him, so we figured we better give him a cat.” That’s his answer. The cat, of course, can symbolize any number of things and adds an incredible layer of depth to the movie. But the Coens just want to leave that to us. You can ruin it by talking too much about it.

I think assigning a specific meaning to something like that does a movie a considerable disservice. It can only mean that one thing and nothing else.

One of the purposes of writing in any form is to get at things that are impossible to get at with language, so you just have to talk around it. You have to use suggestive imagery and metaphor and allegory to make people feel something. The minute you tell somebody what something means, you’re removing all the power of the literary tool that was meant to say something that is not sayable in language.

(THIS IS ME TALKING NOW) I've had more than one songwriting mentor talk about the importance of "leaving the circle open" to allow listeners in and to allow them to put their own meaning and own story into it. You don't want to tell them how to feel or put the proverbial period on everything. Storytelling requires leaving some windows and doors open for listeners to come and go. You can't spell it all out. I was in a songwriting contest once and one of the judges, talking about my song "Time", wrote that basically she loved the feeling the song gave her and thought it was lovely poetry, but didn't know what it was about or what she was supposed to take away from it. At the time, I took it very personally, believing that I needed to write more "story songs" rather than the deliberately evocative/impressionistic style of "Time." But, looking back, I actually see her concern as a compliment. I never wrote "Time" to tell a linear story or to get people to feel any one thing. It's not about any one thing for me. It's about a gut feeling; in fact, it's about a collision of many different feelings. If you feel something when I sing it and even if it raises questions in you, then I'd call that mission accomplished.

[karavanderbijl-deactivated20160]

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

The Writing Life, Annie Dillard

(via karavanderbijl)

[madisonarm]

One Veteran's Day In Nebraska

A few years ago, on Veteran's Day, I rolled into the town of McCook, Nebraska with my friends Sarah Sample and Ryan Tanner, on what I believe was our first three-headed tour. The owner of the venue (which was an incredible bakery by day with the best fritters anyone has ever eaten anywhere) had asked us beforehand if we'd mind, in the afternoon, playing a song for a program they'd put together for the town's veterans. We pulled into town, parked the car, and hurried inside from the windy cold. What we saw inside was a small-but-noble group of veterans, all seated at the Bieroc's tables, telling stories and singing old songs from maybe the 30s or 40s. Normally, when asked to sing at an event of some kind, I have to selfishly and sheepishly admit that I think, "what will they think of me?" and even sometimes, "how can I wow them?" (we all know the answer to that: COVERS, but that's another story) But those inward-facing concerns and self-centered nerves melted away as I looked at these veterans who had sacrificed so much for us. The only question that mattered then was, "how can we honor them?" We sang one of Sarah's songs about being apart from loved ones. I hope, in our little passing-through-town way, we were able to honor them, even just for a moment.

[madisonarm]

There's one thing you can absolutely, 100 percent rely on, which is that if you show five different people the same thing, they're all going to have a different complaint or compliment. Each is going to have a different response, and you'd better know what you're gonna do, otherwise you're going to get confused... [H]ow much good can come from putting any time into studying how people are responding to your movies? The best case scenario is that it makes you feel flattered for a certain period of time, which doesn't really buy you much, in life: and inevitably, it's not going to just be the best-case scenario, so learn to spare yourself that experience, I'd say.

Wes Anderson to Matt Zoller Seitz, on reading your own press/reviews

I thought it had a lot in common with the importance of finding your own voice, holding to it, trusting in it.