RE: The Hardest Part of Making Music
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I miss CDs. I miss getting the CD, and taking out the cover art, unfolding the booklet, and sitting down and listening to all the lyrics as I read them. I still do this when I'm hyper-fixating on a record, or an album... and I have a few posts coming down the pipe in that style, where I try to unpack the incredibly dense substance that lyric writing is.
It isn't just the lyrics, though. It is the keys and chords used in the background. It is the flow. The tension and the resolution, and all those other musical things that a little less than a year's worth of piano lessons taught me about the structure of music, after a life time of trying to appreciate it.
It is incredible how little the "lay people" know about "music". They bop to a hit, but I am (hopelessly) and (constantly) fascinated by the structure and the intentional choices that are made in the presentation. Whether the breath between words is heard, or concealed. It adds human-ness to the equation.
It elevates it.
Anyway, I'm rambling.
I wrote a lot of poetry in my younger years. I always hoped they could be songs one day. Now, with the years and everything they've taught me, I know they're probably not those things. They're somewhere on the chain. I'd have to search for them, or search an archive of where I've downloaded them, because the originals are compost somewhere.
Surprisingly CD’s are still a thing in Japan, not with the majority but with anyone who listens to local or underground music. It’s seen as a good way to support the artist and most people here are collectors so they want a nice music collection to show off or just look at and feel good about. And Records if you have the space and like older music.
I love when words come to me and I look at them after I wrote them and thing “what!?!? That came out of me!?”
Oh man, I bought a guitar and a Japanese textbook and changed the course of my life from an album. I was digging into different countries music and came across Shiina Ringo’s Karuki Zaamen Kuri no Hana. By the middle of the first track I was smiling uncontrollably with tears in my eyes and rage at the fact that I was so far behind as an artist. I’m generally allergic to a lot of pop but if it’s done with art placed above profit by someone who has high standards for themselves it can be as incredible as anyone else. Funnily enough it was her worst selling album, and highest ranking.
What are you listening to now?
I've had that feeling with authors and books. Ted Chiang, for instance. Incredible. Makes me feel illiterate at how smooth the prose is and how effortless the storytelling (and reading of it) is.
On the musical front, even though I'm normally a metal head, I've been going back through a Florence and the Machine phase. Its popular, but like your example, my favourite songs are the least played.
I'll have some long rambling posts reviewing each album in the coming days, because I'm an evergreen rambler.
All I know is that I like the progression of A / D / E, and so many songs on those albums use it.