#it had a few demo songs to show off the different synth sounds on it and i really liked the one that was like. a midi of scarborough fair | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kindahoping4forever · 3 years

Text

Feedback // Ashton Irwin

I've been sitting on this fic for a minute so thank you to everyone who's patiently waited for me to post it (shoutout to Sly)! This story was really just me getting inspired and clowning after Ashton's "Down To Earth" IG stream back in April. As always, thanks to @cal-puddies for the invaluable guidance as I tried to pare my writing style down into a pwp format (try being the operative word, 3500 words is still the best we could do lmao).

Warnings: Distracted Boyfriend!Ash, oral sex on a male, moderately rough unprotected sex (on the red leather couch) including mild dirty talk, brief choking and a spank or two.

Word Count: 3535

Masterlist // Ko-Fi and New 2021 Taglist linked above

Let me know what you think!

"Baby! I didn't know you were home!"

You turn around to see Ashton in the doorway of the bedroom, voice as cheerful as the yellow beanie covering his head.

"Didn't hear you come in," he comments, walking over to you.

You slide your arms around your boyfriend’s neck with a sigh. "Rushed up here, phone was about two seconds from shutting off," you explain, greeting him with a tender kiss.

He watches as you kick off your shoes and yank your bra off under your shirt, tossing everything haphazardly in the direction of the closet before flinging yourself on the bed. "Tough day?"

You groan, dragging your hands over your face before extending your arms, encouraging him to join you. “Eh, not great and very long,” you report, giving a satisfied sigh when Ash climbs on the bed and immediately pulls you on top of him, wrapping his arms around you tightly. You do the same and the both of you lay quietly in this prone embrace for several peaceful moments before you break the silence. “How about you, how was your day?”

You feel him shrug under your body. “Can’t complain,” is his simple reply.

“Make anything cool?” You prompt, knowing he’s being low-key because he thinks you need to chill out, not realizing nothing relaxes you more than listening to him talk about his passions.

“Hmm… anything cool...” Ash giggles, hugging you closer. “I dunno, got a good start goin’ on this one track that could be pretty cool, got a nice vibe.”

You raise your head up to look at him and scratch your fingers across his beard, you’re so glad he decided to let it grow again. “Yeah? Tell me more.”

He hums as you continue to rub his face. “Only been at it for a couple hours, ‘s just a track for now, we’ll see what I can do with it,” he breezes, moving your hand from his face to his mouth so he can kiss it.

“Well, whenever you feel like you need a fresh pair of ears, I’d love to hear it,” you enthuse, moving to lay at his side.

He turns to give you a bright grin. “Yeah? A little in-house focus group?” He teases, leaning in for a sweet kiss that starts to get needy the longer it goes on.

You pull off his hat, running your fingers through his long hair as he moves to kiss along your neck. “Don’t know if you know this but I’m a big fan of your work,” you tease back.

He kisses your lips again, biting a bit as he pulls away to quip, “We talking ‘bout my music or something else?”

You giggle, deciding that indulging this frisky mood is exactly how you would like to unwind tonight. You inch closer, pulling him back into a kiss and he responds eagerly, hand coming up to massage at the base of your neck like it always does. For the next few minutes, the only thoughts in your mind revolve around Ashton, how he feels, how he tastes and where you need his mouth or hands on you next.

When you let out a moan at the way his fingers are gripping your skin under your shirt and he doesn’t press himself against you in response, you can tell he’s gotten distracted. You laugh knowingly against his lips, “You’re back to thinking about that song now, aren’t you?”

He looks at you with a sheepish smile. “I was actually still workin’ and came up here just to grab a hoodie when I found you.”

You playfully push him off of you, shaking your head. “Dude, you should’ve told me! You know I’m not one to fuck with The Process,” you admonish, scrunching your nose up at the trail of kisses he pecks over your face as he sits up.

“Nah, my brain needed a break and my girl needed me, it worked out perfectly,” he insists, rubbing your arm affectionately before getting off the bed.

He quickly fishes his desired sweatshirt out of the closet and pulls it on over his t-shirt, mussing his hair even more than you already had. He walks back over, ready to kiss you goodbye when you sit up on your knees to stop him. “I was serious about giving it a listen if ya want,” you say, smoothing his hair down before resting your hands on top of his inside his hoodie pocket. “If you’re not ready that’s fine but just FYI I‘m interested.”

Ash grins at you, squeezing your hands before using them to pull you to your feet. “Aww, you know you’re my fave audience, baby,” he gushes, reaching to grab his hat off the bed. “Let’s go give it a spin.”

“Well. As much as you can ‘spin’ a computer file,” you mutter, trying to annoy him just because it’s fun.

As you head for the door, you hear him snort behind you a split second before he grabs you, sliding his beanie on your head far enough to cover your eyes; you burst into giggles as he playfully bumps into you, passing you in the hallway. “Smart ass,” he grumbles, voice still smiling.

Ash makes it down to the basement first and starts clicking on files and flicking switches, excited to play his work for you. You stop at the foot of the stairs and survey the room with wonder. Multiple guitars - electric, acoustic, bass, 12-string - are strewn across the room, cables run from his computer to the adjacent room where he houses his drums, food delivery containers line the coffee table; he’s clearly been down here since you left this morning.

While he sets up, you make yourself useful, setting the guitars back in their racks, stacking the food trash; when you’re done, you start to drag a chair over to the computer when you notice he’s staring at you like you’ve grown an extra head.

“What are ya mad at me or somethin’?” He scoffs, patting his legs and looking at you expectantly.

You smirk and take a seat in his lap, watching closely as his long fingers fly over the keyboard, hand adeptly working the mouse, making a few final adjustments to the track. You hear a quiet “there we go” under his breath and then he’s settling in, pulling you back against him and rubbing over your thighs as you wait for the song to begin.

It’s a simple demo so far - layered background vocals, drum and bass, some synth, a little guitar line here and there - but he’s right, it’s definitely a vibe. You’re pleased that his reflection is visible in the computer screen, you love seeing him grooving behind you, pursing his lips and nodding his head along to the beat as you feel his fingers tapping along on your waist while he holds you close.

The track is short and before he can even ask your opinion, you tell him to play it again; his face lights up at your request and he proudly complies. When it finishes this time, you shift to look at him and smile. “That’s wild you did that all yourself and in such a short amount of time,” you marvel. “See, I was right, you did do something cool.”

Ashton laughs, kissing the side of your head as he leans forward to reach the keyboard. “You think so? Well, what’s really cool is this…” He starts clicking around again, isolating the different elements and revealing which sounds are electronic and which are live instruments, which section he thinks he’ll write lyrics over tomorrow, where he’s thinking of pasting in more guitar.

You respond when appropriate but mostly you just listen intently, watching fondly as he animatedly details his thought process; this is why you offered to come down here with him, this is the best part about being his “fave audience.” You love his music but more than that, you love how much he loves his music.

He stops mid-explanation of a section to tinker with it, clearly having a brainstorm right in front of you. You curl into his chest, observing quietly as he cycles through effects and begins stacking tracks. He chews his lip, deep in thought as he lets the song play again and you can't help but press a few kisses to his jaw.

Ash continues his work and you continue yours, moving from his jaw to his neck; your kisses eventually become more heated, with you adding tongue and even teeth to the equation. You suck his earlobe into your mouth, wiggling his earring with the tip of your tongue and finally he pulls away, chuckling, "Baby, come on."

You shrug, playing with his hair. "I just love watching you work."

He laughs, "Then goddamn, baby, let me work!" He growls as you nip at his throat and you smile to yourself because you can tell he's already rethinking his request.

"Seems like you shoulda thought about this before you invited a girl down to your basement to listen to some dreamy space pop alien makeout jam," you tease, relishing the feeling of his laughter vibrating his throat under your tongue.

"Can I get you to leave that review when this goes up on iTunes?" He cracks, finally turning his attention to you.

"I might be persuaded," you flirt, humming with victory as he pulls you into a hungry kiss.

Ashton wastes no time returning the affection you showed him, lips devouring yours, hands quickly making their way under your shirt to lazily massage your tits. You’re mid-moan, his fingers just about to make it inside your waistband when suddenly he’s pulling away.

It takes you a beat to realize what’s happened, your body confused by the sudden absence of his touch. You open your eyes to see him busy at the computer again and it’s so absurd to you, you have to laugh.

“Two minutes,” he says half-apologetically, half-distracted, squeezing your thigh but not taking his eyes off the screen.

You smirk to yourself, immediately aware of what your next move is. “Take as long as you need, baby. When genius strikes, you gotta go for it,” you state ominously, not that he notices. Nor does he notice you sliding yourself off his lap and onto the floor between his legs.

You run your hands up and down his thick thighs before letting your touch wander to the front of his jeans, palming over his crotch, happy to find that at least part of him was interested in your makeout session. You can’t decide if you’re more amused or annoyed by his focus but it’s not until your hand is on his cock, freeing him from his pants that he tears himself away from his project.

“Excuse me, ma’am, can I help you with something?”

You lock eyes with him as you stick your tongue out and dramatically lick your hand, coating your palm with saliva before giving his cock a tight squeeze and beginning to stroke him steadily. “I also had a genius idea I was just following through on,” you shrug. “Might take a little longer than two minutes, though, I’m a bit out of practice… my boyfriend’s been pretty busy.”

Ash giggles wildly, both at your joke and your audacity. “You’re crazy, I’m literally about to be done with… fuck…” His retort is interrupted by you, eyes still trained on his, licking long stripes up the sides of his cock, sucking gently at the head before licking your way back down.

“Go ahead and finish your work, baby, I’ll just keep busy until you’re done,” you insist, mischief in your eyes as you look up one last time before taking him into your mouth.

You hear a sharp inhale, a softly chuckled “fuckin’ ridiculous” and then finally, mouse clicks as he attempts to get back to it. You do your best to distract him, bobbing up and down enthusiastically, sucking loudly, humming around him, making sure he knows how much you’re enjoying your task.

It only takes a minute or so for him to get sidetracked by your efforts. “This is a shitty home demo I’ve spent all of 90 minutes on, there’s no way it’s so good you just had to have my cock right here and now,” he insists, struggling to keep his voice steady, not wanting you to hear how affected he is.

You pop off, gingerly playing with his balls as you zing back, “I dunno babe, you guys had plenty of shitty songs on your first album and from what I’ve heard, you did more than alright in the pussy department.”

Ashton’s laughter quickly turns to a strained moan as you slide back down on him, letting him hit the back of your throat. “My bad, didn’t realize I’d shacked up with a groupie,” he jokes. You silently congratulate yourself as you notice him flexing his hand into a fist, knowing he’s trying to keep himself from pressing down on your head.

You pull off him again, making sure to let the spit cascade from your mouth as you smugly reply, “Like I said before: big fan.” Before he can even think about responding, your mouth is back on him.

You’re not surprised he attempts to resume working again; you’re both stubborn, it’s a wonder anything ever gets resolved in your relationship. You can tell he’s trying his best to stay on task but the whispered curses under his breath give him away. As a last resort, he turns the volume on his speaker up a few more notches, hoping the track will drown out the exaggerated choking sounds you’re intent on making.

A few moments later, he reaches down and yanks his beanie off your head. “Fuckin’ bright yellow bouncing over my crotch is hard to ignore,” he grumbles. “All I see is my hat, looks like I’m suckin’ my own dick for all I know.”

You can’t resist continuing to rib him. “How is that not your greatest fantasy? Your favorite person giving you your favorite pleasure?”

He snorts, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, did you want to blow me or roast me?”

You give him your brightest smile and reply, “Unlike you, I’m pretty good at multi-tasking.”

A brief cackle and a clipped “alright” are all you hear before you’re being hoisted up off the ground, thrown over Ash’s shoulder and carried over to the couch across the room. You squeal with surprise and delight as he unceremoniously dumps you on it, briskly strips you both of your clothes and promptly bends you over the red leather.

He nudges your knees further apart, pressing you against the back of the couch. “Of course you’re this fuckin’ wet already,” he teases, breath hot on your neck as he runs himself through your folds. “You think that’s from my cock down your throat or from you winding me up so much?”

Whatever clever comeback you’d thought up dies on the tip of your tongue because suddenly he’s sliding his cock inside you and now that’s all you can care about. You whine as he quickly establishes a vigorous pace, one hand bracing himself against the couch, the other reaching around you, down your torso to reach your clit. “How’s this for multi-tasking?”

A few breathless cries of his name are the best you can manage as he relentlessly plays with you, somehow in perfect rhythm with his rough thrusts, sending your whole body into sensory overload.

“Or how ‘bout this?” He growls, moving his hand from between your legs to your throat, fingers offering just the slightest amount of pressure, knowing it’ll drive you crazy wondering if and when he’ll add more. “Don’t got any more funny jokes for me, baby?”

You moan at his taunting, placing a hand on top of his on your neck, trying to get him to squeeze harder; he refuses and his denial makes you moan even louder. "Jesus, Ash," you pant, pushing back against him to egg him on. “Feels so fucking good.”

You're so caught up that you don't even notice his song is still playing over the speakers until a few moments later when Ashton suddenly pulls out of you, muttering to himself as he grabs the remote from the coffee table and shuts the music off.

Confused, you look back and see him amusedly shaking his head. "Yes, I was still producing that in my head, don’t start," he giggles.

You fall back on the couch, laughing in disbelief. “We’ve gotta get you some hobbies, buddy, that’s insane.”

He snickers, laying you on your back and settling on the couch behind you, pulling your leg over his hip. “I don’t think fucking you counts as a hobby,” he jokes, gripping his cock and slipping it back inside you.

“Not with that attitude,” you quip, a little more breathlessly than you meant to but with how slowly Ash is rocking into you, you can’t help it.

You tilt towards him, angling yourself to pull his mouth down to yours; you’re feeling overwhelmed and you need him close. His tongue traces over your lips, his kiss the familiar reassurance you need in this moment. “Ash…” You whimper quietly, closing your eyes and savoring the feel of his beard grazing your skin.

“I know, baby, me too,” he soothes, cradling you tighter against him. His hips begin to pick up speed and his hand moves to knead your breasts and tug at your nipples before travelling further down.

Ashton rubs slow, tight circles on your clit, stopping to give your thigh a light smack when you start raising your hips a little too eagerly, bucking up in an attempt to get him to move at a speed more to your liking. You moan first at the realization that he’s going to keep teasing you like this and then again, louder, at the sharp slap of his palm that once again comes down on your skin.

“You’ve got a nice tone tonight, baby, I should get you to lay down some vocals for this track,” he jokes, choking back a moan of his own when your surprised laughter causes you to clench around his length.

You chuckle smugly at him, “Not so funny all of a sudden, huh?”

You feel yourself getting closer so you start rolling your hips along with his, murmuring at the feeling of him deep inside you; you grind against his hand playing between your legs and as he finally amps up the pace, your release becomes closer and closer to reality. Your breathing syncs with his in a needy, staccato rhythm that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in his song.

“Is this what you wanted?” He huffs out. Typically when he asks you that while he’s buried in you, there’s a tone of arrogance or punishment behind it but right now as he holds you, your sounds continuing to meld together, it couldn’t feel farther from that.

“Yes, Ash, god yes…” you breathe, reaching to hold onto him as your orgasm overtakes you.

Ashton keeps driving his cock inside you, whining slightly at the feeling of you pulsing around him. You cry out, not realizing how loud or long your moans are until you hear his voice in your ear, gently lulling you back down.

He’s still moving inside you, hips beginning to stutter and when you hear his breath catch, you know he’s there. You tuck yourself into him, cooing, “Come on, Ash... fill me up, babe.” Three strokes later and he’s pumping his cum inside you, gasping your name. He slows his movements, heavy breath underscored by a contented hum as you caress his bearded cheek.

He leans in and kisses you passionately, completely enveloping you, possibly your favorite feeling in the world. He exhales loudly and keeps holding you, kissing over your face tenderly.

You giggle as he indulges for a moment before reluctantly pulling away, reaching for the takeout napkins on the coffee table; he attentively cleans you up and quickly settles back onto the couch, pulling you on top of him.

You lay together, blissed out, while you play with the necklace hanging down on his chest and he strokes over your hair.

“Hey, sorry I gave you such a hard time,” you smile. “Didn’t realize how much I wanted your attention until I didn’t have it anymore.”

He looks at you, amused. “Honestly didn’t notice you acting any differently.”

You jab his side. “Also sorry I talked shit about your first album, I do actually like it quite a bit.”

Ash cackles, tracing designs on your back. “Oh good, I was worried that was going to be what finally drives us apart,” he cracks.

You snicker, nuzzling your head into his chest. You enjoy a few quiet moments together before he begins softly humming an unfamiliar melody and you smile, knowing his creative wheels are turning again.

You lift your head up again to offer one last apology. “I’m sorry I once again disrupted The Process.”

Ashton laughs mischievously, running his hands down your body. “I mean… overall I’d say this was some pretty valuable feedback.”

————-

Thank you to everyone who has signed up for the taglist, both for the support and the lovely (occasionally hilarious) feedback! If you haven’t signed up yet, the form is linked above! (If you signed up and your name is crossed out or not listed, I was unable to tag you, please check your blog settings and either re-sign up or send me a message letting me know you allow mentions now) @notinthesameguey @cxddlyash @2fangirl4u @cashtonasfuck @talkfastromance4 @itjustkindahappenedreally @saywhatnow07 @mymindwide @suchalonelysunflower @pxrxmoore @findingliam-o @fedorable-killjoys @trix-arent-for-kids @olivia-foster-irwin @saphseoul @calmsweetcreature @onthecliffside-mgc @feliznavidaddycal @himbohood @maggiesupertramp @wiiildflowerrr @karajaynetoday @ashtonangst @sunshineeashton @aladyofalbion @youngblood199456 @xsongbirdx @loveroflrh @fairytrice @calumrose @irwindoll @polycashton @in-superbloom

#5sos smut #5 seconds of summer smut #ashton irwin smut #ashton irwin fic #ashton smut #kindahoping4forever #Feedback #kh4f fic #smut #thank you for reading!#feedback is appreciated #reblogs are gold and reblogs with tags makes you yourself golden #idk why that's a preexisting tag but I'm going with it lmao the point is let me know what you think pls!#this is the last fic I have banked so hopefully my health will chill so I can finish up at least one of those WIPs I've been hyping #also um hello we really don't talk enough about the fact that Ash produced a fucking song live on IG & then just dropped it on Twitter lol #like wtf how blessed were we #and looking like that as well #big sigh

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rapeculturerealities · 5 years

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Dee Rees was waiting outside a discreet home on a quiet street in Los Angeles on a warm day in June, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Arrest the President.” She led the way past her fragrant jasmine bushes, past a kidney-shaped pool, past a Great Dane the size of a tween into an intimate guesthouse that had been converted into a music studio. The walls were painted dark blue and nearly every spare inch of wall and floor held equipment: Fender guitars, synths, amps, speakers and keyboards. The floor was covered by so many power cords that they resembled an area rug. A recording of an off-key voice earnestly singing was playing loudly on a loop. Rees shot me a pained look. “I’m not a singer,” she said.

Nearby, standing at a microphone, the singer Santigold was humming along to Ree’s voice and mimicking the undulations until she knew them by heart. The musician Ray Brady, sitting at a computer nearby, cycled through a series of drum-machine sounds until they heard one they all liked, and Santigold started singing over it. The air-conditioner was off — it interfered with the quality of the recordings — and the air was dense with humidity that no one seemed bothered by.

Rees and Santigold were recording a series of demos for a big-screen futuristic opera titled “The Kyd’s Exquisite Follies.” The screenplay, which Rees had been working on for about a year, describes the journey of a young, black androgynous musician living in a small town who sets off for “It City” in search of stardom. “An outsized, sequin-spangled, sunglassed Cosmic Being leans into frame,” reads the description for the first scene. “It is Bootsy Collins if Bootsy was simultaneously tripping on acid, André 3000 and CBD Frosted Flakes with extra sugar.” Her mood board for the project features images from the cultural festival Afropunk and a dream cast of Erykah Badu, Beyoncé, Janelle Monáe and the R&B singer Syd. The whole thing almost sounded like a fantasy incubated deep in a Twitter thread, but Rees later told me that she was inspired to combine the cultural legacy of “The Wiz” with the grandeur of the “Star Wars” franchise to create a kid-friendly movie as canonical as her reference points. “I was like, ‘Where’s “The Wiz” for us, for our kids, for queer kids?’ ” she said.

Rees has been working toward this moment for nearly 10 years, assuredly moving from indie films into blockbuster cinema with the hope of establishing a creative freedom few directors attain. She is placing a thick spread of bets, in the hope that she will soon be able to play as boldly as she wants. Legacy, she told me, is her ultimate goal: “I want to create work that matters and lasts.”

At 43, Rees has already had the type of success that will outlast her. In 2011, she released her first feature film, “Pariah,” a lush coming-of-age drama about a young black woman named Alike grappling with both her sexuality and the world’s response to it. The movie won more than a dozen awards, including, most notably, the N.A.A.C.P. Image Award for Outstanding Motion Picture. Last year, the movie was included on IndieWire’s list of best films of the past decade, along with “Moonlight,” “Carol,” and “Call Me by Your Name” — movies that also feature queer narratives, though it’s worth noting that “Pariah” came out years before them. In 2017, she released her next feature film, “Mudbound,” a drama about the lives of a black family and a white family working the same plot of land in Mississippi in the 1940s. It garnered four Oscar nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay, making her the first black woman to be nominated in the category. Her latest project, opening on Feb. 14 before streaming on Netflix, is her most Hollywood yet: Starring Anne Hathaway, Willem Dafoe and Ben Affleck, “The Last Thing He Wanted” is an adaptation of the 1996 Joan Didion novel about an American journalist investigating illicit arms sales to Central America during the Reagan administration. It is Rees’s attempt to demonstrate her range across scale, genre and star power.

But here in Los Angeles, her deepest professional desire was underway. Rees had already secured a producer for “Follies” in her longtime collaborator, Cassian Elwes, as well as a costume designer. Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic had signed on to create the visual effects. The next stage of the process was to produce a music sample that could be played for potential financiers, studio partners and distributors, to generate excitement for the project.

The main song she and Santigold were working on that afternoon was a duet between the hero, the Kyd, and an unseen entity offering support from afar. “The intention here is that the Universe is accompanying her, and she doesn’t realize it,” Rees informed the room, using her hands to show two entities orbiting around each other, the smaller one oblivious to the larger one. She described the song as a ballet, with choreography. The Universe is not a metaphor, she explained; it’s an actual character, a guiding light and love interest, which she imagined being played by Erykah Badu. The song lyrics included melancholic lines like “It was easier when no one was looking” and “People see you as they need you to be.”

Santi, as everyone in the room called her, finished singing one part and began recording another, in a lower intonation to indicate a different voice. She and Rees were building out the bones of a pivotal point in the narrative: The Kyd is reflecting on the isolation, loneliness and self-doubt that accompany a rise to stardom — feelings that Rees teased out from her own life experiences as a young director. They worked intently for nearly an hour this way, playing keyboard, looping drums, recording Santigold as she sang both parts, then pausing to get feedback. When Rees wasn’t feeling something, it was obvious: She remained silent but shook her head “no.” When she liked something, she bounced in her seat and offered affirmations like “that’s hot.”

Watching the two women work, I realized that Rees didn’t just have an idea for music, she had created an entire universe, writing all the songs, arranging the melodies and constructing a 3-D model in her head of the sets and landscape. To her, composing compelling songs and comedy numbers while grabbing milk at the bodega comes as effortlessly as directing some of the biggest actors working in Hollywood. Despite that, the biggest question about her career now is whether Hollywood will allow her the longevity she craves.

“I know this character,” Rees said at one point about the Kyd, though she might have been talking about her own journey as an artist so far. “That feeling of being trapped, wanting to be an artist, knowing the odds are against you and doing it anyway.”

A few weeks later, Rees was sitting in a small coffee shop in Harlem, not far from where she lives with her wife, the author Sarah M. Broom, who recently won a National Book Award for her memoir, “The Yellow House.” Rees had been stationed there for a while, talking to other regulars, reading the short-story collection “Heads of the Colored People,” by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and working on her laptop. Rees is a minimalist: Everything about her has an understated elegance, from the twists in her hair to the black and camo Jordans that she likes to wear. That day, she was dressed in a tailored white-and-pink-dotted button-down shirt and carrying a backpack.

Rees told me that people often describe her success in the film industry as overnight, which feels dismissive of the years she spent hustling for “Pariah” and glosses over the years that she struggled to sell pilots and feature films since then. “I’ve spent 12 years slugging away,” she said. She’s quick to point out that most of her work has not made it to market.

Rees said her strategy is to work on “five things at once and see which one sticks.” Each time we talked, she was working on a new project. Once it was a television show about a black police officer in the South, set in the 1970s. Another time it was a potential collaboration with a black playwright. This is both a survival tactic designed to navigate the ever-changing tides of a mercurial entertainment industry and perhaps also a defense mechanism: better not to get too attached to a project that doesn’t get picked up. The gap years after “Pariah” taught her to be strategic.

“For me, everything still comes with a grain of salt,” she said. “I never trust if it’s going to happen until you see a grip truck pulling up.” Many black women who make a compelling, noteworthy debut never manage to make a second feature — think of Julie Dash or Leslie Harris, whose names you might not know but who are responsible for, respectively, the indie films “Daughters of the Dust” and “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.” “It seemed like people wondered if that was a fluke,” she said about “Pariah.” After “Mudbound,” she felt that question of her directorial ability has been answered. “Now it’s just about, How much do I get to do?”

From Rees’s vantage, this is the time to be working as quickly and furiously as she possibly can to get all of her dream projects off the ground — not just “Follies” but also a lesbian horror film she plans to write with her wife and a sci-fi graphic novel that she can eventually adapt for the screen. “It’s a creator’s market,” she told me. “There are more canvases, and not just feature films. You can work online, you can make different kinds of TV. You can make your thing, and they’ll come to you.”

Rees was referring, in part, to streaming services, specifically Netflix, which financed and is distributing “The Last Thing He Wanted.” Over the past five years, Netflix has done the same for hundreds of original shows and movies, many of which are critically acclaimed and attract as much attention and accolades than the offerings from traditional movie studios. In 2019, Netflix released 60 films, and analysts estimate the company spends more than $8 billion on original content a year. “We’re not a 100-year-old studio or own intellectual property like Disney does,” Scott Stuber, the head of films at Netflix, told me. “We don’t have an archive or a library, so it’s very important strategically to get in business with filmmakers like Dee, Alfonso Cuarón, Martin Scorsese, and that is our differentiator.” Netflix’s elbowing into Hollywood has propelled other companies to follow suit, including Disney, Hulu, Apple and Amazon, all of which now produce exclusive streaming content. Netflix’s dominance is likely to be challenged in the coming years, but the company has already reshaped consumer standards, including the expectation that people can watch high-quality, Oscar-worthy first-run entertainment from the comfort of their couch.

To stay competitive, traditional studios now have to pay attention to what those services are doing and try to beat them at their own game. Many of the directors making the best material are coming from the indie world, Rees reminded me: Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, Barry Jenkins. “And it’s not because of altruistic reasons but because of moneymaking reasons,” she said. “Studios are realizing it’s profitable to keep their eyes open. Netflix forced the rest of the industry to take more risks. The advantage for filmmakers is that they’re making it impossible for the rest of the industry to be dismissive or willfully ignorant, and they make the industry consider films and filmmakers that they might not have considered.”

Rees also pointed out the desire for content aimed specifically at black consumers, noting that studio heads and industry leaders were finally paying attention to the black appetite: “We’re the consumers and we’re the producers. And we’re saying: No more ‘Green Book.’ We’re not interested in that.” Though Rees tends to avoid social media and the internet, she sees them as levers for this radical change. “The gatekeepers can still modulate production, but they can’t modulate awareness in the same way,” she told me. “With that awareness comes a hunger, and it sustains a stable of artists.”

In the 1970s, Rees’s parents bought a home in a largely white neighborhood in Nashville. Her father was a police officer; her mother, a scientist at Vanderbilt University. When I first asked Rees to describe her childhood, she told me it was a “typical, boring suburban experience.” She was an only child who liked to lose herself in video games, “Garfield” comics and Choose Your Own Adventure books. The family was solidly middle class. “At the grocery store, it was my job to hold the calculator and calculate the grocery bill as we went along,” Rees recalled fondly.

But Rees’s “typical” childhood also included anecdotes about growing up adjacent to white people who questioned her family’s presence in their midst. Neighbors hung Confederate flags as curtains. Kids toilet papered their trees, prank rang the doorbell, ripped up the roses that her mother planted in a wagon wheel. People regularly tossed garbage in their yard as they drove or walked by. “It was my job to pick up that trash,” Rees said. “They always seemed to be looking at us like, ‘How can you be here, how can you have more than us?’ ” Rees’s father often parked his police car outside their home to “let people know not to [expletive] with us,” Rees said. “You were constantly bracing for it, preparing for it and trying not to let it provoke you, as it was meant to do.” These incidents, and the questions about belonging they raised, can be felt in all her films.

Rees graduated in 2000 from Florida A&M University with a master’s degree in business administration and worked in marketing for a series of health and beauty companies. Rees envisioned herself as Marcus Graham, one of the young black advertising professionals in the movie “Boomerang.” “I really thought I’d be working with people like Strangé,” she said, referring to the eccentric Grace Jones character who gives birth to a perfume bottle in a cosmetics commercial. None of the jobs lasted more than a year, but the detour was productive: She went on a commercial shoot for a client, Dr. Scholl’s, and followed the production assistant around out of curiosity. She was energized watching the work, prompting her to reconsider her career trajectory. She was accepted to New York University’s graduate film program in 2003.

Rees had never been to art school or even touched a camera. “I had no idea what I was doing,” she said. She struggled with the assignments, which often consisted of making short film experiments. “I failed and I failed hard,” she recalled. Her professors seemed to pay more attention to the better students. “It felt like an instant divestment of interest.” By the second semester, she was considering dropping out. “On the first day, they told us that ‘only two of you will make it,’ ” she said. “And I was not the one who seemed like they were going to make it. I was like, ‘This is a waste, it’s so expensive, I shouldn’t do this.’ ” At 27, she worried that she was too old to start a new career.

Rees confessed all her fears and insecurities to her girlfriend at the time, who told her: “O.K., so there’s only going to be two of you. That means you and who else?” The pep talk helped, as did the support from a few professors, including Spike Lee, who has served as the film program’s artistic director for nearly two decades. Lee was impressed by Rees’s storytelling abilities and her eye, which already felt uniquely her own — rare for anyone, but especially students. “In my experience, very few people have a style right off the jump,” he told me recently. “It’s something that you develop over time, and she had it. I never had any doubts about her being successful. I could see that she was going to do what she had to do to get where she wanted to get.”

She felt her work began to click when the assignments moved into documentary. “That is when I found myself and found my voice,” she told me. She took a trip to Liberia with her grandmother and the budding cinematographer Bradford Young. “It just felt like no one was looking, and I felt confident and was able to make the doc.” That film, “Eventual Salvation,” tells the story of her 80-year-old grandmother, Earnestine Smith, as she travels to Monrovia, where she lived for decades, and confronts the aftermath of a devastating civil war.

She loved imagining herself into the shoes of her subjects. “It helped me be a better director, because I could see that ‘Oh, if I’d gotten this shot, it would be a better dynamic, better storytelling through body language.’ ” Rees’s graduate thesis was a short film called “Pariah,” and the strength of the script landed her at Sundance Labs to incubate the short into a feature. Lee offered guidance, and Young, still unknown, drenched the film in the shimmering, richly colored patinas that he would later use in movies like “Arrival” and “Selma.”

While at N.Y.U., Rees shortened her name from Diandréa to Dee. She was establishing a boundary between herself and the world that to this day feels as if it safeguards her personal life. She was coming out as a lesbian, which at first, her parents chalked up to an “art-school thing,” Rees said. But once they realized she was truly in love with a woman, they imploded. Her mother came to New York to try to stage an intervention. Her father was embarrassed. “Nashville is superconservative and small, and I guess word was getting around,” Rees said. Neither parent spoke to her for some time, but both came to see a screening of “Pariah” in New York in 2011. The support in the room eased their worries, as did the affiliation with Sundance. “My life wasn’t a wreck, which somehow made it more acceptable for them,” Rees said.

A common theme threading through Rees’s projects is the way the world places limits on people and whether that destroys or liberates them. The moments in her movies at which her characters confront that existential dilemma are often extremely subtle, but powerful nonetheless. In “Bessie,” the 2015 HBO movie Rees made about the blues singer Bessie Smith, we see how Smith rebels against societal expectations in her sexual fluidity, hard drinking and even in her confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan at one of her shows. But the moment that is most revealing is Smith, played by Queen Latifah, sitting fully nude at a vanity, her body shining with oil, seeing herself surrounded by the trappings of fame but ultimately alone and aging. She’s facing the choices she has made and seemingly deciding whether she’ll make different ones tomorrow. In “Pariah,” it’s the spark of possibilities reflected in young Alike’s eyes as she watches a dancer slide down a pole to Khia’s pleasure anthem “My Neck, My Back” in a gay nightclub.

What is striking about Rees’s work is that even though none of her movies are explicitly autobiographical, she still finds ways to channel her life experiences into them. Embedded in “Mudbound,” for example, is the experience of her great-grandparents, who picked cotton, but it also reflects the amorality of racial violence and how a country can fight against it in a war, while still perpetuating it at home. At the center of “The Last Thing He Wanted” is a father-daughter relationship complicated by guilt and obligation, but it’s also a thriller whose main character is determined to expose government corruption.

Rees realized early in her career that as a female director working in Hollywood, she wouldn’t have the same liberty as, say, Richard Linklater or Noah Baumbach to explore the details of her life onscreen. Rees made compromises so that she could still work on the themes that interested her most. “When I first started out, I was like, ‘I’m not going to do adaptations,’ ” she told me. “I only want to do my own stuff, but I quickly realized that I couldn’t survive because of the time it takes to get people to want to do your original thing.”

In 2014, Cassian Elwes, a longtime Hollywood veteran who has produced such films as “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” and “Dallas Buyers Club,” found himself horrified after reading about the extreme gender imbalance prevalent in Hollywood movie making. Dr. Stacy L. Smith, a communications professor at the University of Southern California at Annenberg, has found that less than 5 percent of major Hollywood movies were directed by women. People of color were also dramatically underrepresented. (Those numbers have not fluctuated significantly in the years since.) Elwes was similarly shocked to read that most young white male directors make their sophomore projects not long after their first; most women of color take years. Many of them, unable to support themselves during that gap, give up.

Around this time, two young producers brought Elwes the script for “Mudbound.” He fell in love with it, and his mind drifted to “Pariah,” which he’d seen at Sundance. Elwes sent Rees the script. A few years earlier, Rees had wanted to adapt the novel “Home,” by Toni Morrison, to explore the paradox of freedom for black Americans returning home from overseas; now she realized she could inject that desire into “Mudbound.”

“He was the first producer who was just like, ‘It’s yours,’ ” Rees recalled. “It wasn’t exploitative or like you should be grateful. He was like, ‘Whatever you want to do, let’s work it out.’ He’s believed more in me than some producers of color.”

A movie like “Mudbound” could easily be saturated with simplistic Hollywood narratives about the resilience of black people and the restorative power of interracial friendships. But Rees was not afraid to show a world where some white people are evil and none will save the black characters. Rees first impression of the script was that it was “a little too sweet.” It featured music as the balm easing tension between the two families. Rees wrote more scenes explicitly featuring the Jackson family, including one around a dinner table where they discuss their dreams of purchasing their own parcel of land, only to be interrupted by the white landowner, who demands they come unload his truck. The film finds its own emphatic language for the spectral horror of white violence in America through quiet vignettes: The tight face of a well-dressed black man, riding in the back of a white man’s dusty pickup truck. The wet and swollen face of a white woman sobbing into the arms of a black matriarch, whose resignation and fatigue can be read in the set of her mouth.

Rachel Morrison, the film’s cinematographer, who received an Oscar nomination for the film, said she was drawn to Rees’s ability to “put the audience squarely in the main character,” she told me. For example, when filming Laura, a woman at a loss for who she is in the world, the shots feature her petite, wiry body dwarfed by the soggy terrain and gaping blue sky. Rees was “uncompromising in only the best ways,” Morrison said, in a tone rich with admiration. She recalled an instance where Rees wanted a shot looking through a screen door, from the outside world into a dark home. “It was a ton of work, balancing the bright sun and dark shadows, but I was like, ‘If it’s worth it to you, I’ll do it.’ ” It was worth it to Rees. Morrison spent close to an hour manipulating the set to capture what would amount to seconds of screen time. When Morrison saw the final cut, she realized the elegance of the shot and how beautifully it articulated the difference between the two families and the worlds they inhabit. “It’s one of my favorite shots in the film,” she said.

After they finished “Mudbound,” Rees told Elwes that she wanted to adapt the Joan Didion novel. He knew Didion’s agent and was able to option “The Last Thing He Wanted.” “We took it around to all the studios, and no one would deal with it,” she said. “Netflix jumped in and saved it. But it was hard in that way. You think because it’s Joan Didion, like, of course — but nope.”

Rees struggles not to take the studios’ lack of interest in her work personally. When I asked her how she rationalized their indifference, she took her time answering, clearly weighing how much of her inner thoughts about Hollywood she wanted to air in public, staring into her coffee all the while. “When stuff doesn’t make logical sense, to me, I go to a place where there’s only one thing that can explain this. You know what I mean?” She paused again, fiddling with her latte. “It feels like a double standard, and the double standard to me is race.”

I asked her how she coped with being so demonstrably talented as a filmmaker and yet feeling thwarted in her efforts at the same time. “The only refuge I have is to do more work, to be relentless and keep making and making, and hopefully, eventually I won’t have to continue to prove that I have the capabilities.” She felt this deeply when “Mudbound” was passed over by major studios, even though it resembled a Birney Imes photograph come to life and featured mesmerizing performances by Carey Mulligan and Rob Morgan. It eventually sold to Netflix, reportedly for $12.5 million, the largest deal to come out of Sundance in 2017. “I’ve learned to go where the love is and work with who wants to work with you,” she told me. “The thing you’re up against is not new. Since first grade, the moment you enter school, you’re up against racism. But it’s still stunning sometimes.”

What remains striking about Rees is that these challenges haven’t muted her ambition. Elwes repeatedly highlighted it. “It’s gigantic,” he said, marveling. “She could be knocking out independent movies all day long if she wanted to.” But instead, with something like “Follies,” she is trying to create a pop-cultural empire. “She’s building a world, and right now in Hollywood, most people are just making another version of a comic book or a sequel or a remake,” Elwes said. Her fearlessness and talent are why he immediately agreed to help her produce and finance her sci-fi opera after she floated the idea by him in a text message. He has been hustling to raise the $80 million or so that she needs to pull it off. “It’s not a slam dunk,” he said, “but whoever takes the risk will get the reward.”

Toward the end of our meeting at the coffee shop, Rees told me shyly — a rare mode for her — that her biggest dream is to work on a major feature-film trilogy, something even more audacious than “Follies.” “I want to have a world with a black woman at the center of it, who ends up leading a rebellion,” she said. “I want to create a whole new world rather than color in somebody else’s.” The trilogy Rees wants to build takes place in a dystopic time, a hellscape devastated by climate change and out-of-control social media where people have to meet a minimum “credit” rating in order to have a decent quality of life.

Rees hopes that “The Last Thing” will be a bridge between her past work and her larger ambitions. Unlike her previous films, “The Last Thing” is a fast-paced political thriller with car chases, shootouts and body counts that includes tight close-ups and impressionistic landscape shots. The effect is claustrophobic and dizzying — a departure from Rees’s previous, more linear work — and yet the audience remains, as Morrison reflected, squarely in the perspective of Elena McMahon, the journalist at the center of it, played by Anne Hathaway. As McMahon loses her moral compass, the viewer becomes disoriented, too, and unable to keep up with the revelations, which, at Sundance, caused many critics to pan the movie.

When I spoke with Rees by phone from Sundance, right after the first reviews came in, she sounded sanguine. Her film had been “trashed,” she said, “but I still believe in it.” Then her voice perked up as she proceeded to tell me the details of a few still unannounced deals she had inked since we last saw each other. From her perspective, it seemed, the critical response was a blip in what she plans to be a long career.

Rosie Perez, who portrays a photojournalist in “The Last Thing,” told me that the day she arrived on location in Puerto Rico to shoot the film, she immediately noticed Rees’s sharp intelligence but found her aloof. “I wasn’t sure if I was going to connect with her,” she said. When it came time to work, Rees was meticulous but hands off. She set up the scene, positioning the camera with her own hands at times, and then stepped away. “It freed us up to just act,” Perez said. “She lets you do your thing. But you have to trust that she’s doing hers, too.”

Once, after a scene, Rees called cut, and Perez asked Rees if she was sure they got the shot. “She looked at me and said, deadpan: ‘I wouldn’t have moved on if we didn’t.’ ” Perez, deep in recollection, let loose that famous laugh from deep in her nasal cavity. “I was like: ‘Got it. Let me shut the [expletive] up.’ ” Her admiration for Rees was cemented in that moment.

But that wasn’t all she got from Rees, Perez told me, recalling a scene in which she and her co-star, Anne Hathaway, are running to catch a plane, dodging gunfire. “Anne is running like Catwoman, sprinting toward the plane,” Perez said. “I felt like the older lady trying to keep up.” She mentioned this to Rees, who replied, “Well, that’s your character, isn’t it?” At first, Perez’s ego was bruised. But later, Rees told her, “I hired you because you’re a kick-ass actress and also because you have the courage to look like a grown-ass woman.” At the time, Perez was splitting her time on the set of the second season of Spike Lee’s “She’s Gotta Have It,” where she was guest-starring as Mars Blackmon’s mother. Lee didn’t want Perez to wear a lot of makeup, and Perez initially balked. But her time with Rees adjusted her priorities: “I walked onto his set, and I was like ‘O.K.’ ” Working with Rees, she said, “gave me the confidence to do that.” That, she said, was Rees’s gift. “You have to let her be who she is, in order to see what she is trying to give you.”

#Black women #workplace #misogynoir #racism #Rees #director #film #voices

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adabassist · 4 years

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SKATING AWAY ON THE FRETLINES OF A NEW DAY

I expect that there’s not a single electric bassist out there who can’t remember the first time they got to play a fretless bass. The difference in the sonic, visual, tactile, even the emotional experience - it leaves an impression on almost every player, whether they pursue the instrument or not. It’s really as close to the human voice as a bass is gonna get. It’s a truly seductive instrument; it’s even downright sexy. If Kathleen Turner played bass, I’d bet you a dollar she’d play a fretless.

The passion I developed for this instrument consumed me; once I discovered the fretless bass, fretted basses became boring, limiting, and they just felt plain weird. I had a fretless with me everywhere I went, every gig, every studio date, every rehearsal, every trip out of town. I even took it on dates; hey, you never know, right?

My introduction to the instrument was anything but unique: my high school band teacher suggested that I get an album called Heavy Weather by a jazz fusion band called Weather Report. Upon hearing the opening track, “Birdland”, I immediately recognized the sound I was hearing as a bass, but it sounded like what that bassist was doing was impossible! As far as I knew, without a whammy bar, there was no way to make those harmonic notes move and slide like that… so I brought the cassette to my teacher and played the intro for him, and asked him how they were doing that… he said, “Well, isn’t Jaco Pastorius the king of the fretless bass?”

I said, “King of the what? And who’s Jaco?”

What followed was a desperate attempt to get my hands on a fretless, even just to try it; none of the music stores around had them (living in a flyover state with the nearest metropolis over an hour away has its disadvantages), nobody I knew had one or even knew anybody else who had one, and when I finally found an upstart guitar company who made a stock affordable fretless, my folks wouldn’t get it for me because, not being terribly musically inclined, they couldn’t understand why I would need a 2nd bass.

At this point my teacher moved away, and I found a new teacher at the music store the next town over. And HE happened to have a fretless bass, and he let me borrow it that summer while he was on vacation. He dropped it off on his way out of town, pretty close to midnight. I took it down into the basement and pulled it out and was all set to plug it in when I heard, “DON’T TURN THAT AMPLIFIER ON, YOUR SISTER IS SLEEPING!”

Jeez, not anymore I bet, Mom. “Okay, okay, I won’t turn it on…”

But there I sat, on my barstool in the basement, bass strapped over my shoulder, just plucking the strings and sliding my fingers up and down the fingerboard. For a good half an hour. If I had smoked, I would have needed a cigarette afterwards. (I told you it was sexy.)

The next morning I realized how amazingly difficult it was to play that bass in tune. No lines, hardly any useful reference points. Very difficult to figure out where I was on the bass. But the tone it created, and my desire to make more tones like that, superseded any concern about how much practice this was going to take. I finally got my very own fretless - a Rickenbacker 4001 - and really began concentrating on mastering it (much to the detriment of my grades in school).

One of my favorite things about the fretless bass is that the tone really lends itself to lyrical melodies. The instrument takes on qualities of the human voice in the middle to upper registers. And I found myself learning horn parts to jazz tunes as well as more traditional bass lines like those from my favorite rock bands, which ended up serving me really well down the road.

Another favorite thing is the fact that many fretless basses used to be fretted basses, and the slots leftover from said frets being removed usually get filled in with material of a contrasting color to the surrounding wood. These are known as “fret lines”, and if used correctly, they can greatly enhance one’s ability to play notes in tune. They are also the subject of great controversy among we bass nerds, as there are those who feel it’s “cheating” somehow. For my money, I’m on Team Fretlines.

So I practiced and practiced, and even went to music school for a year after high school, and came home and kept practicing. One thing led to another, and less than a year after I returned, I found myself auditioning for a band in the area that had already been signed to a small local record label, and was getting some pretty big gigs around the country, and needed a true fretless bassist, as opposed to a bassist who trots out a fretless as a novelty on stage for one song. Unbelievably, I landed the gig. Of course the REAL work was just beginning, but I was blessed with a really fast and accurate ear, and they decided to give me a shot.

I soon realized how green I really was compared to true professional musicians, and I had to make a concerted effort to keep up, but after a lot of hard work, not only did I learn to behave as a pro, but I really sharpened my ear and its relationship to my fingers… I was developing the ability to create a phrase in my head, and play it on my first attempt. (This is a big deal for musicians; imagine not being able to say much to anyone unless you practice it over and over, and you’ll have an idea of how most musicians approach music.)

Several years later (same band), I get a call from my keyboard player, who wants me to come in to the band studio the next morning before rehearsal (we recorded at one band member’s house, and practiced at another’s in the same neighborhood) so I can put down a bass melody for a demo of a song he’s writing for the next album.

I show up with my bass at 8am (yeech!), and we start discussing the song: “I need you to double that melody with the cheesy synth-sax sound. The song goes through the same chord progression 3 times, and the melody occurs during the 1st and the 3rd pass.”

“Got it. What happens during the 2nd pass? Should I just take a solo over the chords?”

“No, I’m going to have my sax player friend replace the synth melody, and he’s going to do a solo, so just leave it empty.”

Plugged in, got signal and levels. I was taught the melody - beautiful, and not too complicated. Cool little chord progression with a twist. He hit the record button, and I played the melody I had just learned along with the track.

As I played the final note, preparing to rest for the next 32 bars, he dropped a bomb in my lap: “Why don’t you just throw down a solo here anyway.”

This was exactly ZERO WARNING, for a song I had heard for the first time about 10 minutes prior. It’s like being thrown an enormous water balloon at 94 mph and being expected to catch it.

That’s when my brain became my best friend.

My ears said to my brain: here’s what should come next. tell the fingers to make this happen…

My brain said: i can do that! fingers, do this, this, and this, and then this.

And the phrase I thought would sound great instantly came out of the studio speakers.

I didn’t have time to be shocked; my ears were ready for the next phrase, giving orders to my brain, which meted them out. This happened at least a dozen times in a row, right up until the melody was supposed to re-enter. And my ears, having connected a long series of invisible dots over the last 60 seconds or so, even properly glued the last phrase to the beginning of the melody. It was like a factory assembly line: my frontal cortex had an idea, my ears refined it and made sure it fit the chords, the frontal cortex figured out where those notes had to be on the fingerboard, the motor cortex took those plans and sent the signals down to my fingers. And each set of “orders” took less time than the blink of an eye.

I peeked up after I got to the “safe zone” of the out melody (which I already knew), and my keyboard player’s jaw was on his chest. I had to remind myself to concentrate; after all, I was still recording.

When I finished, he hit the stop button, turned to me, and said, “How did you do THAT??”

I didn’t quite understand, so he rewound the tape and played back what I had just recorded.

And I was treated to a sonic representation of the way my brain and ears operate when they’re in top form. I had no memory of playing the actual solo (and I still don’t); it was a true transcendental experience. Yet, as I listened back to the track, I KNEW every note I was about to hear as if I had been waiting my entire life to play that solo. It was like a perfectly written story that practically told itself. 25 years later and I still know it by heart; haven’t thought of a single thing I’d do different. It was a complete stream-of-consciousness expression, in fretless bass solo form. I’ve never had another experience like it since.

We both kind of sat there for a few seconds after the song ended, and he finally said, “I don’t care what anyone else says; for my money, this song’s done. Let’s show this to the band at rehearsal.”

So we took it along and played it for everyone else. Everyone loved it, but the bandleader said, “I know that was an amazing solo, but there’s already too much fretless on the upcoming record. I think the solo should be sax instead. I hope you understand.”

And I did understand, even if it was a bit of a bummer. Oh well, at least I had a copy of my solo on cassette tape for posterity.

Sax player showed up a few days later, on a day when I wasn’t there, to play the melody and do a solo, but there was a problem - he had been sent the same demo tape that I had, with my solo on it, and it was influencing his improv in a way that didn’t really suit the sax. He finally said, “I need to skip the solo. The melody is fine, no problem, but I keep veering off course during the solo because I hear the bass solo in my head so strongly.”

So the bandleader calls me and tells me what happened, and that he’s decided that HE will play an electric jazz guitar solo over the chord changes (he did this regularly in the group, and to great effect). Okay, great. Curious as to what I’ll hear in two days when it’s done.

Two days later I get another phone call: “I can’t do it. I keep playing stuff that works great on the guitar, and it fits the changes nicely, but the phrases just sound disconnected, I keep hearing your solo in my head, and I can’t seem to fix it. Would you mind if I transcribed your fretless solo and played it on the jazz guitar?”

“Feel free, it’d be an honor,” I said. Good thing FaceTime wasn’t a thing back then, because I’m sure I was smirking.

The next day I arrived at the studio to record another song for the new record, where I find the bandleader standing outside shaking his head.

“Did you finish the solo? How’d it go?”

“Yep. And I hate it.”

“What happened?”

“I spent over an hour last night transcribing your part. And I just spent another hour recording it. You know what it sounds like?”

I had an answer ready, but I wasn’t about to say it out loud if I didn’t have to. I figured I’d let him say it instead, which he did:

“It sounds like a bunch of great fretless bass licks, played on the wrong instrument. I think we should just use your original bass solo.”

Now that’s taking the long way around to come to the right decision.

When I look back on that moment, I find it amazing that I don’t remember coming up with the phrases, and I certainly don’t remember anything happening that pulled me out of that “mode” I was in; the solo all but wrote itself, and I was simply the conduit. But I remember my bandmate’s reaction.

Since then, I have tried to conjure that mojo dozens of times, with varying degrees of success, but never quite to that level. But it showed me what was possible within the realm of performance. All those scales and exercises and hours upon hours of practice were paid off in that one instance of musical epiphany and pure expression. It was enough to ensure I’ll die a happy man.

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jmsa1287 · 4 years

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With Her Quarantine-Themed Opus 'How I'm Feeling Now,' Charli XCX & Her Clique Level Up

Charli XCX has been at the forefront of pop music over the last decade and with "How I'm Feeling Now," a quickly-made album created entirely in quarantine with a madcap collection of Internet musicians and input from fans, Charli goes to the next level.

Between 2014 and 2017, Charli XCX almost became the next Lady Gaga. She had released bonafide hits like her Billboard Hot 100 top 10 banger "Boom Clap," from the soundtrack for the tragic teen romance "The Fault in Our Stars." She wrote songs for huge pop stars like Selena Gomez, will.i.am, Blondie, the K-pop group Twice. She was also featured on chart-toppers like Icona Pop's "I Love It," and Iggy Azalea's no. 1 hit "Fancy." But instead of choosing a path where she'd work with producers Max Martin and Pharrell, Charli looked further ahead, stayed online and became the most interesting pop star currently working.

Last week, she released "How I'm Feeling Now," what she's calling her fourth studio album. It arrived on streaming platforms after the British musician announced its conception about six weeks ago on April 6 via a Zoom chat with fans, stressing that it would be a D.Y.I. project with them while she's under lockdown and in quarantine at her Los Angeles home. With 11 songs and a 37-minute runtime, the album, a collaborative effort to be sure, is a masterpiece where Charli makes the most vulnerable and powerful album since Beyonce's 2013 self-titled surprise release. It's an urgent piece of emotional art that finally unifies Charli's ethos and talent into an impressive synthesis of sounds, songwriting and style. And it arrives at a vital moment.

"HIFN" follows her eponymous album from last year — a collaborative effort in a different way as it features several popular artists (Lizzo, HAIM, Christine and the Queens, Kim Petras, Troy Sivan, Sky Fierrea, Cupcake, Big Freedia and more) contributing vocals and felt like, at the time, it was meant to elevate Charli's status in the pop world. It's Charli at her most polished — so much so that the edginess of her music was scrubbed too clean and not everything worked. Her frequent collaborator A.G. Cook, the leader of the internet-dwelling musical collective PC Music, had his signature 00s computer nostalgic sounds bump up against other producers' ideas. A few years before "Charli," she shared the four-track EP "Vroom Vroom" — a maximalist effort from Cook and SOPHIE (another prominent member of PC Music who has had a successful solo career while working with huge names like Madonna) that marked a pivotal career turn for her; a flag signaling that Charli had fully invested in PC Music's chaotically beautiful inorganic sound. In 2017, she released back-to-back mixtapes: the stellar "Number 1 Angel" and the critically acclaimed and fan-adored "Pop 2." Over the release of those four projects, her partnership with Cook grew, morphed and worked out its kinks. On "HIFN," Charli and Cook — both credited as executive producers — unite their best talents while welcoming other sounds from producers, like BJ Burton (a Bon Iver collaborator who is also credited an executive producer), Danny L Harle (who got his start with PC Music as well), Dijon, Palmistry and Dylan Brandy, one half of the mind-bending duo that feels like the logical evolution of PC Music, 100 gecs.

At a time when major-label pop stars are delaying the release of their music — like Lady Gaga, who put off her long-awaited sixth album "Chromatica" a month-and-a-half due to the coronavirus pandemic — Charli is seizing the moment. (Similar to Charli, rising pop star Dua Lipa bumped up the release of her disco-inspired sophomore album "Future Nostalgia" a week back in March.) By directly working with fans — asking them to submit phone footage for music videos and gathering their input on songs by sharing demos to social media and hopping on Zoom chats — Charli has turned her new project into something beautiful and hopeful during a time when most of us are craving any sort of interaction, never mind from a legit pop star. The pandemic is forcing everyone inside and closing us off from family and friends. But Charli is rising to the moment — a moment that feels destined for her —reaching out to her fans to make something that's so of our time.

Though "HIFN" is an impressively made album with music that sounds like it simultaneously comes from both the past and the future, it's untimely successful for being a cathartic and freeing album. Charli has full creative autonomy here and isn't constrained by label meddling. "HIFN" is loud, abrasive, sad, confident and sexy. It's a patchwork of sounds that are stitched together by Charli and Co. where she jumps from genre-to-genre (and sometimes from mico-genre-to-micro-genre) in a matter of seconds, similar to the 100 gecs album "1000 gecs" from last year. It'll give you whiplash where songs are so complex and intricate it's hard to believe it was made in about a month, like on the pulsating and glitchy "Claws," co-produced by gecs' Brady, bounces from love-song to a rave banger that gives way into an eruption of static. To call "HIFN" visceral would be an understatement as a number of tracks are and raw; walls of sound pummel you like on the opener "Pink Diamond," where she sings, "Every single night kinda feels the same I'm a pink diamond/ I need space" as a cacophony of synths and sound effects ram into each other.

"HIFN" defies expectations in many ways; not only that it exists and is excellent from start-to-finish, but the songs themselves are like puzzle pieces arranged in such a way that they pull tricks on what you expect from convention songwriting and producing. Production on "HIFN" is constantly shifting with some tracks initially feel like two or three songs slapped together but careful listening is rewarding as it's revealed how stunningly crafted they are, like "c2.0." That song begins with a sludgy beat but sheds itself to reveal a slick pop song, sounding nothing like the first 90 seconds. It also interpolates Charli's self-titled album cut "Click": "I miss them every night / I miss them by my side / Catch my tears when I cry / My clique on me for life," she sings about the lost days and nights with friends.

Songs you think are about to end go on for another two minutes (like the ethereal and wound-up "Detonate," an album highlight) and songs that you expect to climax collapse inward, like the epic "party 4 u" — the album's best song. It's a lovelorn track full of yearning about throwing a party for a crush who never shows up. It's a simple message (when you're into someone but they don't quite reciprocate those feelings) that's been expressed millions of times throughout the history of pop music - but not quite like this. It opens with an otherworldly synth and builds and builds until it reaches its apex. But instead of a release of sound that you expect, "party 4 u" — the longest song on "HIFN" (nearly 5-minutes) — goes silent and starts from the beginning, becoming one of the most powerful moments on the album.

The track also brings "HIFN" full circle in a profound way. It's a song that's been around for a few years and, after leaking online, it quickly became a fan favorite where people would request it at shows. Charli and A.G. Cook said they always considered putting it on an album but Charli said she was "hesitant...because I like the mythology around certain songs." Nevertheless, Charli said that including "party 4 u" on the album might seem "small and silly" but "it's the time to give something back." Indeed, it's a payoff for those who have invested in the world-building and mythology Charli has created for the last five years as "party 4 u" closes with a live recording from a concert in which fans are requesting the track itself, prior to its official release. It's a beautiful sentiment that propels the album and Charli and her team to a new level of artistry.

#charli xcx #how i'm feeling now #music #pc music #a.g. cook #ag cook #100 gecs #bj burton #Danny L Harle #dylan brady

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crxpeek · 5 years

Text

Hi cool I transcribed that Q104.3 Interview with Nick & Darian earlier.

If you wanna check out the original you can watch/listen to that here

But if not, there’s a transcription right here under the cut.

Transcriber’s note here: It’s pretty long and it took me three hours to do and there’s quite a few good quotes here, so yeah, enjoy.

Jonathan Clarke: Welcome back, Jonathan Clarke, we’re in the studio with Nick Valensi & Darian Zanedi? Did I say that right Darian?

Darian: Zahedi.

Jonathan Clarke: Zahedi. Oh, that’s an H not an N, my bad. Of course, the band is CRX. The new album is Peek. They are playing the Mercury Lounge right here in New York City tonight. And of course, Nick’s other band The Strokes playing New Year’s Eve Barclay’s Center. Is that correct?

Nick: That’s right.

Jonathan Clarke: Fantastic. All the tour dates for CRX crxmusic.com Guys, or, I’ll ask you first Nick, how many times have you played the Mercury Lounge? Because I know you had a residency there at one point with The Strokes.

Nick: Oh man… many moons ago. The Strokes did… I think it was like… every Friday night or every Thursday night for a month. We did that a couple of times, so I’ve played there a dozen times.

Jonathan Clarke: A residency.

Nick: Yeah. It’s cool to do to that.

Jonathan Clarke: Right?

Nick: It’s nice so your fans kinda know where you’ll be every week, it’s like a TV show or something.

Jonathan Clarke: Right exactly it’s appointment viewing.

Nick: Yeah and we’re not doing that this time around, cause I moved to LA a while ago.

Jonathan Clarke: Yes, where Darian’s from.

Nick: Yep.

Jonathan Clarke: But you were born right here in New York City.

Nick: That’s right.

Jonathan Clarke: That’s right.

Nick: That’s right. I grew up listening to Q104.3. To be perfectly honest with you, it was the classic rock station when I was growing up and it still is, although now it’s more of a mixed bag.

Jonathan Clarke: I will ask you guys both the same question, what was the first song you learned on guitar?

Nick: I mean I know-

Jonathan Clarke: Smoke on the Water?

Darian: No.

Nick: The first thing… My very first guitar lesson I remember it very clearly. I wanted to learn uh. Well the guy asked me “What do you like? What kind of music do you like?” I said, “I love Guns ‘N Roses” and he said, “Do you know the song Sweet Child O’ Mine?” I said “Of course,” and he was like “I can teach you this intro.”

Jonathan Clarke: The riff.

Nick: and that’s the first thing that I kinda went through, was this intro to Sweet Child O’ Mine.

Jonathan Clarke: Not actually an easy sort of-

Nick: No, it seems like a sophisticated place to start. But that’s where he started me.

Jonathan Clarke: Darian?

Darian: Man.. going back many many years but it might have been Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Jonathan Clarke: Okay.

Darian: But I remember the first song I wanted to learn was uh Brown Sugar.

Jonathan Clarke: Oh Yeah.

Darian: And the guitar teacher… I had just learned to play like open cords on the guitar, and he was like “You don’t wanna learn that one right now it’s too...” And I was like, “No I wanna learn I really wanna learn how to do it.”

Nick: But it’s in a different tuning that song.

Darian: Well it’s also like bar chords. And he’s like it’s these things called barre chords. And I was like then show me barre chords. And then I, you know, I was like, I’m gonna figure this out. So, I just spent days, you know, making my fingers bleed til I could play barre chords. And then he taught me Brown Sugar. And it was like-

Jonathan Clarke: Now did you do the Keith Richards thing of taking off the Low E string?

Darian: No.

Jonathan Clarke: And then on the Open G?

Darian: I did the Open G tuning, but I didn’t take off the string, I wasn’t, when I was 10 years old, I wasn’t that… you know…

Jonathan Clarke: It’s funny with that particular tuning, which, legend has it, Ry Cooder, taught him that tuning.

Darian: Yeah. He taught him how to play slide too, I think.

Jonathan Clarke: Yeah yeah, and once you learn that, you know how to mess around on the barre chords with that tuning, you can play like 5 Stones hits like right away.

Darian: And you can be high as Keith Richards and still do it.

Jonathan Clarke: Absolutely. We’re in the studio with Nick & Darian from CRX, the new album is Peek. The first album came out in 2016, New Skin. That was pretty much you doing most of the writing, Nick, on that one.

Nick: Yeah, the first album was an experiment for me to start something outside of The Strokes. And I didn’t really know what it was gonna be at the onset. And um, while I was making it, I put together a band of friends to take on tour. And umm, over the course of touring that first album for quite some time. We spent many hours in a van together and listened to a lot music together.

Jonathan Clarke: Like the old days.

Nick: Yeah. And um, just spent a lot of time really talking about music. And um, over the course of that tour we kind of… it was like a kinda… pre-production creative time for starting to collaboratively write this second album together.

Jonathan Clarke: I did plays Ways to Fake It a lot on this show. I love that song.

Nick: Oh, thanks Jonathan.

Jonathan Clarke: So good.

Nick: Thank you so much man, you know, thanks for you continued support man.

Jonathan Clarke: We go back as we mentioned, Modern Age.

Nick: You reminded me you’re the first DJ to play The Modern Age EP, before that first Strokes album. You were playing The Strokes demos on the air.

Jonathan Clarke: Yes yes. And it came in… the CD came in… resembled… You guys may have been the first to like do the retro thing with the CD where it looks like a 45 but it’s actually a regular CD.

Nick: Yeah, I came out of the womb retro.

Jonathan Clarke: Ah yes, nice. That of course was Modern Age. The song I’ve been playing is Falling, and also Get Close. Really good songs. I noticed you guys really do have your own sound, but you are unafraid to proudly show your influences on this current new album. So, talk about there. Cause there’s a lot of things that I hear but I wanna hear what you sort of hear with these new songs.

Darian: Well uh... Yeah there was… you know we… when we were like he’s saying we were on tour we were listening to a lot of music and we started talking about if we were gonna make a second record what would we want it to sound like and what we were vibing on at the time. And it was a lot of David Bowie circa Scary Monster, Iggy Pop circa The Idiot, Talking Heads circa Remain in Light and umm.

Jonathan Clarke: Cars?

Darian: Cars I think is just part of our blood.

Jonathan Clarke: Yeah yeah.

Darian: Cars & Tom Petty, you know, with the songwriting and the vibes. So I think that kinda comes through a little more subconsciously.

Jonathan Clarke: Yeah.

Darian: The other stuff we wanted to sort of, you know, we gave ourself those parameters, to keep things consistent. You know what I mean? And then I think our sort of individual taste and stuff that’s sort of inherent kinda also shines through.

Jonathan Clarke: Isn’t Elliot Easton like the most underrated guitar player?

Darian: So underrated.

Jonathan Clarke: I mean his rifts are like so perfect.

Darian: I think we’re both very influenced by him. I used to have this VHS of The Cars live at Musikladen, 1979, and I would rewind it and rewind it and rewind it and learn his guitar solos from watching it until the tape and the VCR both like fell apart.

Jonathan Clarke: Yeah, I love that.

Nick: You know he’s got the most memorable, melodic, short succinct guitar solos that you can sing along to. That other people, like the guy from Tom Petty’s band.

Jonathan Clarke: Mike Campbell.

Nick: Yeah, Mike Campbell was like that too. Just short and sweet, you make a really good melodic statement, and then just get out.

Jonathan Clarke: Yeah, it’s almost like their solo is like 8 bars and then it’s like back to the bridge or the chorus or whatever it is. It’s almost Beatle-esque in that sense. Like it’s kinda the George Harrison solos are, you know, famously very short and tight and melodic.

Nick: And you can sing along to them most importantly.

Jonathan Clarke: Yeah.

Nick: That’s what I look for in an instrumental section to a song. Whether it’s a guitar solo, or a synth solo, or just a little interlude.

Jonathan Clarke: Yeah.

Nick: I like melody.

Jonathan Clarke: You’ve made a couple video for this new album. For Get Close… now did you, did you set out wanting to make a vampire movie video in New Orleans.

Nick: Well…

Darian: It’s a funny story…

Jonathan Clarke: Tell it!

Nick: Uh…

Darian: We so we… we went out to this, this is a long story I’ll make it quick. We went out to eat at this place called Cole’s in downtown Los Angeles. Which is like an old school LA restaurant. And we went to talk to videos with this video director and we were sort of riffing on ideas. But basically, what happened was that, I ate a lot of spicy mustard and pickles and I couldn’t sleep that night. And I was like lying in bed with acid reflux. And I just envisioned this entire video with a female vampire femme fatale who goes around killing guys and I just sorta saw the whole thing in my head.

Jonathan Clarke: Now did you have Lemmy from Motörhead in your mind as well sitting at bar or no?

Darian: Well no. What happened was I wrote the treatment and I sent it to Kansas Bowling who directed our videos because she’s super into like horror B-movies from like the 60s and 70s, and it’s like she’ll be perfect to make this. She took it New Orleans, she found the cast. And you know we added our friend Christina Masterson, who is the main vampire, we sent her down there with her and just let her sorta do her thing. And she found the guy, she found the bartender, who was a horror movie actress in the 70s… 80s..

Nick: Uh yeah Loretta something…

Darian: Geretta Geretta? Dreada Dreada?

(Transcriber’s note, Geretta Geretta is the actress)

Nick: Yeah yeah.

Darian: And she’s like a master, Kansas, at finding cool people and outfits and locations. We just let her sorta run wild with it.

Nick: She shoots everything on film, on an old camera from the 70s, that she takes on the plane, that’s like her carryon, on the plane, is this big huge heavy film camera from the 70s. And she’s made our videos on that camera.

Jonathan Clarke: Yeah cause it has that quality, I wouldn’t say it’s grainy necessary, but it has that sort of…

Nick: It’s film.

Jonathan Clarke: It’s film yeah yeah. Also, animals in your videos, there are kittens and a goat.

Nick: Yeah.

Jonathan Clarke: I believe.

Darian: Pomeranian.

Jonathan Clarke: A cute little Pomeranian, very nice.

Nick: We’re animal lovers.

Darian: Yeah yeah.

Nick: And so is Kansas the director.

Darian: Story about that goat or lamb or whatever it was. I think it was a goat. She actually rescued that from a slaughter house.

Jonathan Clarke: Aww.

Darian: She went and bought it from the slaughter house, from them, for like $100 or whatever, took part of the video budget. And then after the video, she gave it to this place that like takes in sheltered animals and puts them to pasture and…

Jonathan Clarke: We love that.

Darian: So, she basically rescued this goat from a slaughter house.

Nick: Yay!

Jonathan Clarke: And the goat is now a star.

Darian: The goat is now a star, and its alive, and its happy.

Jonathan Clarke: Yeah. Nick, I have to ask you, when you first started in The Strokes, life on the road I think was a little different than it is now. You have a family. Do you bring them on the road with you for Strokes show or CRX shows?

Nick: Sometimes.

Jonathan Clarke: When it’s convenient?

Nick: Yeah when it’s convenient. And you know, for one off things sometimes. I mean life is different in that I have a family. But life is so different now from when I started on tour with The Strokes because the internet barely existed when The Strokes first… you know what I mean? In the late 90s, early 00s, I didn’t have a cell phone, you know we didn’t have a lot of the ways to stay in touch now.

Jonathan Clarke: Right.

Nick: I can be on a tour bus somewhere and just facetime my wife and my kids. Back when I… I started touring when I was 17, 18 years old so it was stops at payphones.

Jonathan Clarke: Right.

Nick: Which seems crazy now, that that was even a thing.

Jonathan Clarke: And some payphones actually still work.

Nick: You find them sometimes, they’re more and more rare.

Jonathan Clarke: I have heard that the new Strokes album is finished, and that you are mixing now. Is that correct?

Nick: Wow you heard that?

Jonathan Clarke: I heard that.

Nick: Who told you that?

Jonathan Clarke: Fairly reliable source.

Nick: Um… Well it must be true then.

Jonathan Clarke: Aha. Okay so you can’t give us any more info on when and if or?

Nick: When, I don’t know. If… is… I would say is a strong likelihood.

Jonathan Clarke: Yes. So, I’m in my gym the other day you know just doing my stretching and things like that. And then ‘Last Nite’ comes on the system of, you know, the gym. And I’m thinking “Wow, okay” so I don’t think this would have happened necessarily 18 years ago. But now I’m hearing it on the system of the gym playing. And I’m wondering when you go grocery shopping or you’re in your car or you’re some place, and you hear one of your songs, and I’ll ask this to both of you. Is it just like no big deal now or does you mind take you back to in the studio? Like kinda what goes through your mind when you hear your songs in places or on the radio?

Nick: First thought is “Am I getting paid for this?”

Jonathan Clarke: Yeah.

Nick: Sorry that was a joke.

Jonathan Clarke: That’s okay.

Darian: This is a safe place.

Nick: Sometimes I hear songs like you said, in the supermarket or in a store, and I think it’s The Strokes, and it’s not.

Jonathan Clarke: Oh yeah.

Nick: And then I think, am I getting paid for this?

Jonathan Clarke: And yourself? What do you think?

Darian: It’s weird. My experience with The Strokes personally is these guys were my friends in 1999, 2000. So, I was hearing these songs at Luna Lounge when it was still on Ludlow St. and places like that. So, I have like, a different relationship with it than I think most people. Where it’s strange, but it’s also… I don’t know.

Nick: So, the backstory here is that the way I know Darian is, he went to a year of college with Albert Hammond Jr., the other guitar player in The Strokes. So they were... They became fast friends cause they were in a music class… music class together?

Darian: Beethoven.

Jonathan Clarke: Wow so you can actually read music?

Darian: Oh, we both failed that class.

Jonathan Clarke: That’s very rock and roll Darian.

Nick: As Albert and I were… you know as The Strokes were kinda coming together… and like he said doing small gigs downtown you know to maybe a couple dozen people, if that, they were in school together, and we were just all part of a circle of friends. And so, we’ve known each other for a long time.

Jonathan Clarke: Well what about when you hear a CRX song on the radio? That’s gotta be a thrill, right?

Nick: That is actually kind of cool.

Darian: That is very exciting.

Jonathan Clarke: Yeah.

Nick: It is cool.

Darian: Especially cause we do, I do think about when we were in the studio how we created this how, how this part came about and how you know it’s like…

Jonathan Clarke: So, you flashback? Flashback to the studio and the creation?

Darian: Yeah totally. And you think like... you realize when you hear a song, well most people hear a song, they don’t’ think about what went into it. They’re just experiencing it. Music you experience it and it gives you emotions and it becomes your personally thing. You know what I mean? It doesn’t matter what it meant to me, that’s not what’s important. What matters is what it meant to you. But then as the person who created it, yeah you think about like… it’s like making sausage. All the weird stuff that went into it, and the emotions, and the time, and the changes, and the whatever, the little arguments, and this and that. Just to make this thing that you ended up proud of and happy with. And that hopefully means something to someone else.

Jonathan Clarke: It is Nick Valensi & Darian Zahedi. The band is CRX. The new album is Peek. They’re playing the Mercury Lounge here in New York City tonight. All the tour dates crxmusic.com. I was not at Lollapalooza this year, but everyone said you guys, it’s one of the best shows they ever saw the strokes play.

Nick: Oh great!

Jonathan Clarke: How did it feel on stage? Was it… Did it feel that way to you as well?

Nick: It felt great. It was a great show. I actually stayed for some of the weekend. And you were asking me before if my family comes on tour with me ever, and that was one show where my daughter, my 12 and half year-old daughter in particular wanted to go to Lollapalooza and had a whole itinerary of bands that she wanted to see.

Jonathan Clarke: What band did she want to see?

Nick: Well there were several. Among them were, this guy, Conan Gray and Tame Impala. Tame Impala was a highlight for me too. The whole family can enjoy Tame Impala.

Jonathan Clarke: Yes.

Nick: And they were really actually fantastic.

Jonathan Clarke: I saw them once at radio city, they were so good, fantastic. Do you still have the Gibson ES 335 that Albert gave ya?

Nick: Yes. Although it’s not a Gibson 335, it’s… it’s kinda…

Jonathan Clarke: Epiphone?

Nick: It’s an Epiphone. Yeah. It’s kind of a copy of a Gibson 335, kind of, it’s an Epiphone Rivera.

Jonathan Clarke: Ah very nice.

Nick: He gave me to me long ago. I remember when we were first starting The Strokes and I just had the crappiest guitar that wouldn’t stay in tune, and the strings were like an inch away from the fretboard.

Jonathan Clarke: Oh no that sounds painful.

Nick: Yeah, I couldn’t, you know, I just did my best with this thing. And Albert one day came home from this used guitar shop with two guitars, a white Fender Strat and this orange Epiphone hollow body thing. And he was like “You can play one and I can play one!” and I was like “Wow that’s amazing! I wanna play the Strat!” and he was like “No the Srat’s for me! You’re gonna play this one.” And I was very grateful, and that guitar ended up becoming like kind of a signature thing for me.

Jonathan Clarke: Nick & Darian thank you guys so much. The new CRX album is Peek. It sounds fantastic.

Nick: Thanks Johnathan.

Darian: Thank you.

Jonathan Clarke: And it sounds fantastic on the radio which we’re gonna do right now actually. Everyone go see them tonight at the Mercury Lounge here in New York City and you can get all the tour dates for the band at crxmusic.com. Thanks guys.

Darian: Thank you.

Nick: Thanks for having us man, great to see you again.

#CRX #Nick Valensi #Darian Zahedi #Transcription Work

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fmdtaeyongarchive · 5 years

Text

↬ i just wanna free somebody.

date: early 2019.

location: n/a.

word count: 1,641 words not including lyrics.

summary: n/a.

notes: creative claims verification for free somebody.

it begins at the start of the new year in the confines of an old bc entertainment studio that ash is very familiar with. he wants to try writing something different than anything he’s ever written before. that’s what he tells his producer friend (can he call him his friend yet? senior? colleague? colleague sounds best).

well, he wants to write a lot of things different than what he’s every written before, but he has to start with something, he expands in the low light of the studio. he can’t pump out an endless stream of creatively challenging songs just because he wants to. ambition is a taste he’s come to enjoy again, after years of lacking it, in the form of song creation, but it won’t do well to bite off more than he can chew.

it feels like he takes too big of a bite anyway. a few sessions with other producers and composers go by with only stray scraps of songs to show, most of which hadn’t been contributed by him, and ash starts to doubt his own ability. he’s not at the point where he can reinvent the wheel, he laments on one late night (not that time is easy to tell within the dark, soundproof rooms of the studio unless he pulls out his cellphone to check its digital clock) and the producer he’s found to keep him company one night looks at him silently from across the room.

“you’re being stubborn again.”

ash pauses and shakes his head in confusion. he wants to ask what the hell that means, all he’s been doing is trying to expand his horizons which, honestly, is pretty much the exact opposite of being stubborn, but he has too much respect for the other man to argue with him so forwardly. “i’m not trying to be stubborn,” he says instead. he rubs at his eyes and sighs as he stretches his arms over his head in an attempt to drag the fatigue closing in on the corners of his mind out of him. that never works, no matter how hard he tries to turn the metaphorical literal.

“if you want to make something different, it doesn’t have to be something no one’s ever heard before. you’re not going to have much luck with that. the human race is hundreds of thousands of years old and we’ve been making music for a lot of our existence. i’d bet nearly all of it if i was a wagering man. you’re not going to create something completely new and that’s not our job. challenge yourself instead of challenging the entire history of mankind and our artistic accomplishments. you like to act like you can handle every single task you put on your checklist, but you’re one person, taeyong. start acting like it.”

ash nods and he feels like he’s been scolded. he’d known he wasn’t going to be able to create an entirely new invention in the form of a song, but he’d let the reminder of that slip away in his singular vision of wanting to create something groundbreaking instead of more of the same he’d become known for. besides, this is the idol industry. ash loves pop music, but the bc entertainment studio wing isn’t going to be the site of any breakthroughs to change the entire course of music history any time soon. he’s deluding himself if he pretends like it is. there’s ambitious optimism and then there’s an utter lack of self-awareness and ash doesn’t want to wind up as that person too far up his own artistic ass to see the difference.

his ballads have more often than not been the work bc has dubbed satisfactory without as much reworking required, so ash promises himself to stay away from those in his mission to step outside of his comfort zone. but still, it would be pointless to expect himself to create a genre he has no experience making. ash kwon’s attempt at death metal or polka would be a disastrous way to start a new year.

ash spends a few hours listening through the depths of his music library and jotting down ideas for genres and styles he doesn’t find himself creating as often to bring up in the next writing session with some of the other producers. upbeat pop becomes a common theme of what he hasn’t been writing recently. that doesn’t surprise him. ash doesn’t often finish the songs he begins writing that fit that descriptor, as his own sound leans far from upbeat. it wouldn’t fit for one song out of an entire album track list to be a bright party song, and that isn’t what most people he’s worked with come to him to write for them either.

when he sits down with that in mind, he hums through melodies and taps out rhythms with a pen on his desk until he finds ones that grow into a longer form that he transposes onto his computer. it turns into a funky instrumental, a retro 80s dance take (ash is inspired by a uk house song he stumbles upon on one of his forgotten playlists) mixed with enough modern electronic pop to push him beyond the basics. the other composers and producers he brings in to help him throughout the process have to come in to keep him from making the song melancholic or subdued even when the production thins out during the chorus for what he imagines to be a strong powerhouse vocal lead. making it, he knows this won’t be a song for him, and he’s not sure it’ll ever find its way to release by anyone else either — he can’t see any of the usual people he shows his work to seeing it, quite frankly, and he thinks its value would be depleted if it were to be done as a group song—, but that’s something that had been on his list of new year’s resolutions — sell some songs off instead of gifting them to build his profile as a songwriter.

the near-final demo version of the instrumental is decided on among all of the producers and ash asks if he can try to write the lyrics to it. he’s inspired by what they’ve all created together and he wants to write its lyrics too. they agree, and ash spends a few days in his studio dedicating himself to nailing down lyrics. he has an idea of what he wants the words to encompass thematically; the first word that comes to mind when he listens to the song is freedom. ash can envision the song being played at a huge open air music festival mid-spring. thanks to becoming a trainee at thirteen and an idol at sixteen, ash hasn’t been to any of those sorts of festivals, but he does have a glamorized notion of what they’re like in his head.

after a few rough drafts, ash stumbles upon a phrasing that burrows its way into his heart. i just wanna free somebody. it’s a notion ash instantly circles and underlines among the mess of more easily disposable ideas that lean more obviously romantic in nature. freeing somebody is certainly worthy of being a romantic notion and ash plays with that as he scribbles out more ideas that build an image of a relationship, one that’s purposefully vaguely anywhere between a one night stand and soulmates. the specifics of that don’t matter in the context he’s writing because, in his mind, the two people involved don’t care anyway.

when that near-final draft lays in front of him, though, he’s struck again with the feeling that he’s playing it too safe and not stepping outside of his norm. love. wow, that’s a new topic for you, ash, he mentally derides himself.

it’s a few nights later when he’s hard at work on a different song, one that’s supposed to be for his next album but doesn’t feel anything like him that he writes a lyric that pulls his mind back to the track he’d been working on previously.

i hope that you find your true self.

he tacks on the hook to see how well it works in his head before committing to it fully.

i wanna free somebody.

of course that’s the path he could take the song down instead. the other song is quickly abandoned as ash returns to his aptly-named “free somebody” draft. he keeps the verses and most of the chorus, but scraps most of the pre-chorus and fits in the new line in place of what had previously been a repeat of a truncated take on one of the chorus lines. he reworks the parts he’d trashed to fit his new vision better. at other parts, he removes lyrics from entirely and goes back to make the instrumental synths more compelling to stand on their own. music is already freeing; ash can attest to that himself as someone who would rarely use the word free to describe himself.

the first drafts of the song had suffered by being weighed down by ash’s instinct to inject romantic storytelling, but this time, he doesn’t need a full story. he focuses on the goal of freeing somebody for the length of a song instead and it can be a romantic freeing, yes, that is clear from the parts he keeps, but it can simply reflect the goal of the song itself too.

he records his own voice for the demo though he thinks he’s unable to do it justice due to not having the sort of female powerhouse voice he sees singing it one day, but when he gets the news the song has been sold off to gold star media, he lets a small bud of hope blossom that it’ll wind up in the hands of someone capable so it can see the light in all its glory one day. its message had really grown on him.

#fmdverification #beth write something decent challenge failed #&& queued

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sometimesalwaysmusic · 5 years

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SURRENDER

Surrender is a duo of Dave Williams (DW) and Scott, veterans of the Ottawa music scene. They are set to release their debut album soon; in the meantime, give their first single, Hold On, a spin, and read on about their vast experiences in music, top albums, and thoughts on the Ottawa music scene. (Photo: Rémi Thériault)

VITALS

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/surrendersounds

Bandcamp: https://surrendersounds.bandcamp.com/releases

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/surrendersounds/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/davemonomania (Dave)

Upcoming shows: Stay tuned!

SA: How did Surrender come to be as a band? DW: Scott (Surrender vocalist) and I had been playing in the band Crusades for the past ten years, and in early 2018 we all quite amicably realized that the band had run its course. We did a final tour in the UK/Europe, one hometown show, and played our final two sets at The Fest in Florida. Toward the end of all that, with things winding to their conclusion, Scott and I began discussing working on something new together - something outside of the punk/hardcore scene that we’d been deeply involved in for the previous twenty-plus years. We’re both hugely into pop music, and of the synth-driven variety specifically. I had inherited a Roland Juno 106 when my best friend’s father passed away a few years earlier - it was a fixture in the home studio that I initially learned how to record in - and I sorta longed to make something with it. So, I started writing some songs on it at home, sent them to Scott, he sent some vocal ideas, and we were off. SA: What bands or musicians would you cite as the biggest influences on your sound? DW: Whew. I’ll do my best to keep this as brief as possible. There are some obvious touchstones: Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Tears for Fears, all of Vince Clarke’s 80s output - Erasure’s The Innocents is a big one, Eurythmics, OMD, Cyndi Lauper, The Cure... essentially the more ‘serious’ side of 80s synth-driven pop music. Later 80s/early 90s stuff like Björk/Sugarcubes, New Order and the ‘Madchester’ scene, Jesus Jones, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and the other Grebo bands. I probably can’t overstate the impact of the quintessential 80s soundtracks: The Lost Boys, Footloose - Kenny Loggins’ “I’m Free” might be my favourite pop song of the decade. I’m a sucker for some of the big producers of that era too. Desmond Child was unstoppable for a while - Cher’s Heart of Stone is another BIG one. As for more modern stuff, I’m pretty obsessed with a lot of the Norwegian pop scene. Cold Mailman is a HUGE influence, as is Hanne Kolstø, Pyke, the new Misty Coast record, there’s a ton of amazing stuff coming out of that country. Some straight-up dance stuff too: Toulouse, Robyn, Pet Shop Boys, ABBA obviously. And of course, the still relatively-new Synthwave scene has some amazing artists: Kristine, FM-84, Michael Oakley, the whole culture of nostalgia surrounding the NewRetroWave world - music, movies, fashion - certainly runs parallel to what we’re doing, and I really dig a lot of it. SA: Thus far in your career, what has been your biggest success? DW: Hm. It’s safe to say that there are MANY variations on how one might measure artistic ‘success’. Coming up in a community where monetary success was never the goal (or at all likely), I’d say that getting to travel all over the map multiple times with my closest friends, meet and befriend people we’d have otherwise never crossed paths with, and see things most folks don’t get to see - all because we wrote some pretty cool songs - is probably my greatest personal success. SA: On the other hand, what is the biggest challenge you have faced, and how have you dealt with it? DW: I think, for me anyway, the biggest challenge has been balancing my creative life with my personal one. I’m married with three small kids - 7, 4 and 2 - and that can obviously present a different set of priorities than simply hitting the road for most of the year and really pushing a project to its fullest potential. Admittedly I’ve been envious of friends and peers who just throw their gear and clothes in the van and make it happen ‘the old-fashioned way’. But that’s just not the life that I set up for myself, nor is it for Scott or the other folks we’ve played with - and I’m far from resentful of that - it just means we need to take a different approach. Amassing a substantial following or getting the attention of a bigger label isn’t terribly easy when you can’t be doing the literal legwork that other bands can. But I do my best to stay close to the people I’ve worked with all along, to show my gratitude and appreciation, and I work endlessly (to some peoples’ chagrin) on the music we make. SA: How do you guys approach the song-writing process? DW: Since it’s just the two of us, it’s pretty easy to just bounce things back and forth before we actually get together in a room. Basically, I’ll come up with some chord progressions, leads, arpeggios, whatever on my Juno or my wide array of Arturia soft synths, then I’ll record the rhythm section tracks, typically writing most, if not all, of an instrumental song. I’ll send that to Scott and he’ll come up with vocal melodies and record a demo to send back to me. Then I’ll kind of edit the parts around his vocal ideas until we’re happy with the dynamics and how the song sorta lives and breathes. Then we’ll get together at Scott’s with a selection of wine and beer and a pizza, usually with extensive notes on harmonies and how to punch-up the existing vocal parts. We’ll track that stuff, I might do a few more edits at home, and then we send it to the wildly talented Alex Gamble at The Hive in Toronto for mixing, producing, extra instrumental layers, added drum machine stuff, whatever he hears. That’s pretty much how this first LP has gone, and it’s been an absolute pleasure. SA: What are your thoughts on the Ottawa music scene? DW: I imagine like anyone who’s spent twenty-plus years in a community, subculture, what have you, I’ve got a lot of thoughts and feelings about the Ottawa music scene. My personal involvement tends to ebb and flow as new waves of participants arrive and others exit - years will go by where it feels like home and then there might be a few where I’m not quite as active - but it’s always very near and dear to me. There’s certainly never a lack of quality artists in this sleepy city. I started going to punk shows when I was thirteen - Punchbuggy (featuring a young Jim Bryson) at the Greely Legion was my first show ever - and twenty-five years later there are still a ton of the same faces mixed in with a ton of different ones. That’s a pretty special thing. SA: As I understand it, you guys have been active in other bands of quite different genres in the past. Why SURRENDER, and why now? DW: As I mentioned, Crusades finished our ten-year run this past October. Black Tower, the sorta traditional heavy metal band I play drums in - with Scott on bass and his partner Erin on guitar and vocals - also decided to take it easy for a while, and although I still kinda ‘moonlight’ with The Steve Adamyk Band, that wasn’t happening at the time. Scott had also just wrapped up the “album cycle” with his band The Creeps and didn’t have much on the horizon there. I briefly played in a hardcore band called Power of Fear that did a few shows, but the current hardcore scene is very... let’s say... ‘youthful’, and it became apparent pretty quickly that it wasn’t something I wanted to stick with. Mostly I just wanted to make music with Scott, and based on our mutual love for 80s/90s pop music (and Scott’s equally toned down schedule), we decided to take a crack at doing something closer to the music we listen to the most. And honestly, I’d been writing and playing fast and/or aggressive music for so long, I really just wanted to make something upbeat and positive that people could dance to. SA: A question for fun: your three desert island albums. What would they be and why? DW: Alright, this isn’t gonna be easy. Or brief. Note: these aren’t necessarily my favourite albums of all time (certainly they’re in the Top Ten), but if I’m gonna be listening to these on whatever hi-fi system this hypothetical island has until I wither away, here’s what I’d hope washed ashore with me (also, I’m gonna cheat using a nostalgia loophole):

1. Alice Cooper - Love It to Death / Killer (my Dad’s old dubbed cassette version) These two albums, both released in 1971, were my first love. They were on a single cassette in my Dad’s collection and really still exist as a single entity to me. I always cite my discovery of these two albums, probably at 4-5 years old, as the foundation for my entire musical life to come. Not only were they mysterious and rather frightening, but there was an eclecticism in this batch of songs that made everything I fell in love with afterward - metal, punk, prog, pop, garage, etc. - seem somehow part of the same cloth. Alice and that original band showed me very early on that there’s no need to limit oneself to the confines of a style, sound, genre, whatever. Most important records that ever happened to me.

2. Misfits - Walk Among Us / Earth A.D. / Legacy of Brutality (also a homemade cassette version c/o my friend Judd’s older sister, fully decorated with black Sharpie and White-Out) If early Alice Cooper set me on the weirdo path as a youngster, it was a single afternoon taping CDs in my friend Judd’s bedroom that locked me into the punk rock subculture forever. We’d been Guns N Roses turned Pantera turned Sepultura fans like many a shitty kid of the 80s/90s, and Danzig’s ‘Mother’ was in heavy rotation everywhere at the time, so we were no stranger to that beautiful beast’s howl. When Judd’s sister borrowed a stack of Misfits CDs from a pal at school and explained to us that this was Glenn Danzig’s old band (of course we recognized the name and logo from Rockabilia ads and Cliff Burton photos), we dove in assuming we knew what was coming. We most certainly did not. The Misfits became my favourite band that day and have been for every day since.

3. Peter Gabriel - So Every time I listen to this incredible record, I discover new things I love about it. A perpetual go-to and a true monument to the possibilities within pop music (shout out to Daniel Lanois there too). I was going to choose his Shaking the Tree compilation because it contains my favourite PG track - the piano version of “Here Comes the Flood” - but I figure I’d cheated enough with the first two answers. ...also Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, The Hellacopters’ High Visibility, Cold Mailman’s Everything Aflutter, Cave In’s Jupiter, and The Lemonheads’ It’s A Shame About Ray. This is an unfair question. SA: Finally, what comes next for Surrender moving into 2019 and beyond? Best of luck! DW: First on the agenda is to find an ideal home for the LP. We’d kinda like to step out from beneath the umbrella of labels we’ve worked with in the past, but there are no specific plans thus far. Just release the second single, hope the feedback is good and see if anyone wants to partner up for the long haul. As far as any live performances go, that’s a big question mark. It’s been so great doing this with just the two of us, it’s hard to imagine inviting anyone else into the fold. That said, it’s even harder to picture just the two of us on stage like Yazoo on “Top of The Pops,” so who knows? Thanks so much!

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grimelords · 6 years

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I’m all caught up and presenting my August playlist just in time for September to end! Disco! Italo-pop! 90s gangsta rap! 3 hours worth of music for everyone!

Good To Me - THP: The most surefire way I’ve found to track down a great song you’ve never heard before is to look up every single sample on the Duck Sauce album. It has quite literally not failed me yet. This song is great, and being so used to the sped up sample in Goody Two Shoes this song sounds like the expanded chopped and screwed version to me which is even better.

Who Do You Love - THP: The other thing about THP is they’re extremely hard to search on Spotify because it thinks you’re trying to type ‘The’ and suggests 'The Beatles’ which is helpful.

Beleriand - The Middle East: I started rereading The Lord Of The Rings this month, and even got so deep in it that I started reading the Silmarillion for the first time and I suddenly remembered the time The Middle East wrote a song about Melkor and Angband and all that. Maybe the best Lord Of The Rings song I’ve heard almost exclusively for the drum work in the intro before it really settles into its Tolkein vibe.

Dead - San Fermin: I love this song but god I wish it were louder and more out of control. The sax sounds great but every other part isn’t nearly as turned up to 11 as it should be. The problem is that everyone in this band is such a professional they don’t know how to play like the maniacs this song deserves!

Tuesday Fresh Cuts - Bree Tranter: I’ve been looking up what all the members of The Middle East have done since they broke up and the best thing I’ve found is Rohin Jones writing music for a Dulux Paint commercial after the verse in Ninth Avenue Reverie about the guy who sniffs paint every night and dreams about being dead. Anyway as far as I can tell Bree Tranter is the one that’s had the most consistent and normal output since they broke up. This song is very much an ultimate night driving type song, except the lyrics are really not great but you can ignore that for how great it sounds, especially near the end when it really gets into a meditative state.

Ted, Just Admit It - Jane’s Addiction: Continuing my Jane’s Addiction phase, I really love this song. This is such a great brooding piece of music before it finally explodes into the declaration that sex is violent. Kind of a shame that it’s a serial killer song because he’s right about everything. Sex IS violent, the tv DO got them images, etc.

Fire Back About Your New Baby’s Sex - Don Caballero: I think this is probably Don Caballero’s most popular song, and with good reason. It’s among the most straightforward of their backward-ass songs and gives you a good grounding in how to understand the total chaos that is everything else they’ve done.

Ballad Of Circling Vultures - Pageninetynine: The entire last half of this song, when it slows down, is one of the best things I’ve ever heard. It feels like the entire mix begins to close in around you as it gets darker and darker before a door slams and you wake up somewhere else entirely.

You’ve Never Been Alone - Andrea Balency: I was watching this live video of Mount Kimbie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6co64HYurg and they’ve got like a full band now! They’ve been slowly expanding from a duo and I suppose it makes sense because their last album really sounded like a band playing in a room rather than two guys on computers. Anyway it turns out the woman in their band is Andrea Balency and this song of hers is very beautiful and you can see exactly why they asked her to join.

The Conspiracy Of Seeds - 65daysofstatic: I was going through Circle Takes The Square’s performance credits on discogs (very cool hobby) and found out they’re credited on this 65dos song and was shocked that I didn’t know that already. It feels like they pretty much split the song down the middle and did half each, which is great!

Spanish Sahara (Deadboy remix) - Foals: This song isn’t on Australian spotify as far as I can tell, so if you’re in the UK I think you can listen to this. Otherwise it’s on youtube for everyone here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk24ujPN4Lo This is probably one of my favourite pieces of music ever, it’s such a beautiful remix even though it’s not particularly far from the original. It just does the work of focusing the vibe down to a laser point. I love how mechanical every part of it is contrasting against the dreamy vocals and organ, until it almost feels overloaded with hats and clicks in the highest points before it focuses down again and introduces the bassline alone. Then the last section! The stabbing insistence of the synth driving the whole thing to a fever pitch.

T69 Collapse - Aphex Twin: I’ve never been huge on Aphex Twin because all his songs sound like you pressed the demo button on a keyboard and then turned the tempo way up but I really like this one, almost exclusively for the bassline the comes in in the second half after the big space-out breakdown. It’s groovy! It’s the most I’ve ever liked the evil man!

Kansas City Star - Kasey Musgraves: The Kasey Musgraves album everyone was going wild for didn’t really do much for me but this cover is so fantastic, the slight melody change she’s done to the chorus is such an improvement and really makes it soar. Also google is good because right now the 25th image result for 'kacey musgraves’ is a deviantart pic where someone’s photoshopped her to be extremely obese called Kollosal Katy. Not really related to the song but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Pyramids - Frank Ocean: A big group of friends and I went to karaoke a couple of weeks ago and the version of Pyramids they had didn’t even have the second half! If I can’t subject everyone to ten full minutes of me doing it badly then what’s the DAMN point?

Aqua - Eurythmics: I heard this song on NTS and was instantly in love with the lyrics. Don’t touch me, don’t talk to me, throw me in the water, watch me drown! It’s that simple!

gonk steady one - Autechre: I went and saw Autechre when they were here a few months ago and I’m still thinking about it because it was like a multiplayer dream. They insisted on total darkness and everyone just kind of stood still or sat down for the whole show in the dark while an endless wave of sound from another dimension washed over us all. Then eventually the music stopped and the lights came on and I never actually saw Autechre the whole time I was there. I’m still working my way through their fucking 8 hour long new album but this is an early highlight. I don’t know how to explain this but it sounds good. It sounds like music by and for aliens that we can listen to and understand a small part of.

Poor Kakarookee - Venetian Snares: I was listening to this song and thinking the other day there’s a certain subset of Venetian Snares songs that sound like that bit from Parks and Rec where Adam Scott is like 'could a depressed person do THIS?’ and is holding up his deformed little stop motion figure from the deformed little stop motion movie he’s making. This is absolutely one of those songs. It’s a great song but it’s one of those songs.

Future People - Alabama Shakes: For a long time the only Alabama Shakes song I’d heard was Don’t Wanna Fight because it was just so good I figured there was no need to go further, which it turns out was extremely wrong because this whole album is completely killer. I just can’t believe her voice. The album version is great but the live version really shows it off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbR999N5MiALa

Mia Mania - Giani Morandi: I rewatched all of Harvey Birdman a couple of weeks ago and finally looked up what the song is in this clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xkhqce43mA because it gets stuck in my head all the time, and the only version I could find is this one with vocals which sounds even better!

Capriccio - Gianni Morandi: Then I dug deeper and started looking up the rest of this guy’s songs and totally loved it. There’s nothing better than digging around and finding what you think is some obscure artists before looking them up and finding out they’re incredibly famous and like the Italian Neil Diamond.

Parli Sempre Tu - Gianni Morandi: This is my favourite of his just for the insane pitch shifted vocal at the start, what an insane piece of sound for 1964! I’m desperate to know how they made it.

Forgotten Children - Mouse On The Keys: I suddenly remembered Mouse On The Keys the other day and thank god. They’re an instrumental band that’s two pianists and a drummer that looks like its jazz because of the instrumentation but is really more like post-hardcore in execution.

Can’t Get Right - Ghost-Note: I normally don’t go in much for this sort of drum clinic type music for musicians only but the central groove in this is just so good. It feels like two completely different songs playing at the same time, except if that sounded good. I found it because the bass genius Mono Neon played on it, watch the video and see if you can tell which one is named Mono Neon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVw1b4gVYrU Also one of the guys seems to be playing a vibraphone that is a midi controller which I have never seen before in my life.

Shoot Myself - Venetian Snares: Venetian Snares has such a great melodic sense and it feels kind of underappreciated just because of how much his percussion is at the forefront of every critical appraisal. In songs like this where the drums are more restrained you can really feel the melody and harmony shine through, the layers of cascading synth lines piling up louder and louder before returning to the jazzy organ near the end is just such a beautiful moment.

Bad Boy - Den Harrow: This song sounds like an 11 year old wrote the lyrics and I absolutely love it. The best and most sexy lyrics: “Some dress Valentino, others wear t-shirts to show what a shapely bust they’ve got.”

Summertime - Barney Kessel: Barney Kessel the jazz guitarist that I only found out about this month did a bossa nova album when bossa nova was the biggest thing in the world and it’s so so good. He also does some very interesting playing on it that’s a lot closer to surf rock and rock n roll than anything else I’ve heard of his. This is also a good example of that thing when Stereo sound was brand new where every single instrument is panned hard left or right which is a treat in headphones.

Slice Of Heaven - Dave Dobbyn: It’s kind of a shame that this song never really gets better than the intro but when the intro is this good it’s fine. I remember this song from when I was a kid because it’s on the soundtrack to New Zealand’s first ever feature length animated film, Footrot Flats which I watched a lot.

Sailin Da South - ESG + DJ Screw: The hardest part about putting any one song from 3 N Tha Morning Part Two on a playlist is they’re not designed for that and it sounds awful and cruel to cut them off like that. So really instead of listening to this song listen to the whole album and turn purple.

Right Action - Franz Ferdinand: I think Franz Ferdinand deserve better than the sort of one hit wonder status they’ve got, because they’ve got a lot of great songs and this is one of them, and probably the danciest summary of the Noble Eightfold Path I’ve ever heard.

The Thing That Should Not Be - Metallica: I have done zero research but to me the 80s feels like the decade when HP Lovecraft and the Cthulu mythos really hit the mainstream. Dungeons and Dragons and all that. Anyway apparently Cliff Burton was a huge Lovecraft fan and they would all read his stories in the tour van which is a funny thing to imagine. Metallica have five or six Lovecraftian songs and the bulk of them were written after Cliff Burton died which is sort of touching in a way. Paying tribute to your friend by invoking the nameless horror that sleeps in R'lyeh.

Waters Of Nazareth x We Are Your Friends x Phantom - Justice: Justice’s new album is so good because it’s sort of halfway between a remix album, a live album and a Best Of. It’s essentially a studio live album, or maybe just a live recording straight from the soundboard with no crowd noise. Either way it’s great and leads to incredible three way mashups of their best songs like this one.

Mr Ice Cream Man (feat. Silkk The Shocker) - Master P: I was thinking about how you don’t really hear about Master P these days, but according to the first result when you google 'richest rappers’ he’s doing fine with a net worth of $227 million, which is more than Eminem. So good for him. Even if his music hasn’t really lasted I’m sure his many, many business dealings will leave him in good stead for the rest of his life. I’m just going to copy and paste some phrases from his wiki article here because it’s truly ridiculous: “He has since parlayed his $10,000 initial seed capital investment into a $250 million business empire spanning a wide variety of industries” “As a businessman, Miller was known for his frugality and keeping business expenses down and profit margins high” “He has since invested the millions of dollars he made from his No Limit record company into a travel agency, a Foot Locker retail outlet, real estate, stocks, film, music, and television production, toy making, a phone sex company, clothing, telecommunications, a jewellery line, auto accessories, book and magazine publishing, car rims, fast food franchises, and gas stations.” “Miller also has his own line of beverages, called "Make ‘Em Say Ughh!” energy drinks" “first rapper to establish a cable television network.”

The Party Don’t Stop - Mia X: Anyway via Master P I found Mia X, who sings the hook on Mr Ice Cream Man, and her album is actually good as fuck for an 80 minute No Limit album, mostly because it’s so packed with guests (it feels like everyone else on No Limit is on here, including guys with great names like Mo B. Dick and Kane & Abel, but also Mystikal and Salt N Pepa are here!) that you never get tired of the flow, and the production is nicely varied too.

Shut Up - Stormzy: This is like Stormzy’s biggest song and I’m dumb as fuck because I haven’t heard it until now when I was listening to Functions On The Low and found out he used it as the beat for this song. What an absolute thrill to see this perfect beat back in the limelight thanks to the man bringing grime back to the limelight!

All N’s - Mia X: I wanna talk about the beat on this Mia X song because it’s incredible front to back. (Lyrically this song is fucking great, especially the chorus) but the vocal synth bass sound is just amazing, and the hook melody is the damn 'there’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance’ melody. Every part of it’s insane.

Milk - Kings Of Leon: I got into a real groove this month and learned how to play this whole Kings Of Leon album on guitar for some reason. So now I’ve got that knowledge. But I forgot just how incredible this song is. It’s a testament to how if the music is good enough and the performance is good enough the lyrics can be absolutely anything. By the time he says “she’ll loan you her toothbrush, she’ll bartend your party” I’m already crying.

listen here

#playlists

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theplaguezine · 6 years

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MORTIIS

Interview with Mortiis by Daniel Hinds

(conducted November 1999)

Mortiis is the elusive musician that started his career as bassist for the notorious black metal outfit known as Emperor, before going solo and heading off into uncharted territory. Using synths, he has created some stirring, epic-length pieces that blend dark ambient with medieval folk and even some classical music elements.

Released through Sweden's Cold Meat Industry and his own Dark Dungeon Music, the drow elf produced four full-length albums before signing with Earache for his latest, The Stargate. Using the vocal talents of Sarah Jezebel Deva (ex of Cradle of Filth) and Kalle Metz, this album shows Mortiis developing a much broader and deeper sound than ever before.

After a string of dates here in the U.S. with Christian Death, Mortiis and crew were just about to cross the border into Canada when I got a chance to chat with him via cell phone…

Could you tell me a bit about the storyline of The Stargate and what inspired it? I guess musically I was inspired by Basil Poledouris - he did the soundtrack to the first Conan movie, for example. Musically, that's about the only thing I can put my finger on. As far as concepts and stuff, there's a myth in certain cultures that you can travel between different dimensions using stars - use them as gates. I just found that concept very fascinating and it inspired me to do something along the same lines and incorporate that into the whole Mortiis thing.

The CD booklet says "to be continued..." at the end - will it be continued on the next album? Probably not the next album, but at some point in the future I would like to make a second one. It's not actually finished. I have the rest of the concept worked out, the storyline so to speak.

Did you come up with the concept before writing any of the music? Sort of. I think I had some basic musical ideas, maybe a few raw demos or whatever lying around, but I think the storyline was pretty much figured out before I did the music.

In the past, your image has always been very mysterious and in the shadows, but on the Stargate, there are very clear pictures of you on the cover and back cover and tray card. Why the decision to make yourself more visible this time out? I think I always wanted to do that. The fact that it turned out the way that it did [in the past] gave people a certain impression - it's not like that was intentional. We didn't have any professional photo shoots back then, so basically it was me and my girlfriend with an amateur camera, taking photos in the marshes. That kind of thing, which tends to give things an obscure angle. So when I had the chance to work with more professional people as far a photo shoot, it turned out differently. That's how I wanted it from the beginning anyway.

Are you pleased with Earache so far? Yeah, I guess. You know the way it is with labels, they can be bastards, but what can I do? What can I say? We have a contract. But I think they're doing a pretty good job, though. I'm getting to do a lot more shit now that I would have never done with another label.

Do you still have a connection with Cold Meat Industry? Yeah, sure. Not at this point, because I'm doing the U.S. support and stuff, but when I'm back home, we do talk. I'll check in and see what's going on and stuff like that.

How about Debbie at Blackmetal.com? Yeah, how about her? (laughs) We were kind of not talking for a long time. I did a San Francisco show a couple weeks ago and she turned out at the show, she and her guy Elden, they do this thing together [blackmetal.com], and we talked and things were okay. We exchanged new phone numbers and stuff, so I think that dispute is probably in the past.

How is the tour going? Not very good. I mean, someone has not taken responsibility for promotion - the promotion is horrible. I don't know who to blame anymore and I don't want to mention names, but it just seems like no one is doing their job, basically. We had these posters printed up and we've done like 23 or 24 shows so far and I've seen those posters up at about 3 of the shows. That's very annoying. Plus the fact that my album should have been out in the U.S. and Canada at least a month ago, before the tour started. That got screwed up, so I'm pretty much doing a tour for a record that's not actually out. If you look away from that, we are getting a good response, which is very good. People show up at a show that is pretty much not being promoted, they get to hear music they've never heard before, and still at some of the shows we're getting an amazing response. I'm pretty happy with it, despite everything that's fucked-up about the tour.

Have you done any major touring in the past? No, this is my first tour basically. I'm being introduced to a pretty rough world right now (laughs). Is it supposed to be this fucked-up all the time? But I'm getting the impression that it's not supposed to be this bad. I've talked to the other people we're touring with who have done this a lot of times and they're like, 'This is a fucked-up tour!' So, I guess I'll try it again. Maybe. (laughs)

I understand that Dark Dungeon Music is closing down. Is that true? Why? Yeah. I was the only guy working at that label. I was doing everything and it just took up all my time. I saw my music fall to shit - I could mention a couple of records that I've done that I should have never done or should have taken a lot more time doing. But I didn't have the time because Dark Dungeon took up all my fucking time. So, it just came to a point where I realized, okay, this is not working out. I don't want to do the label anymore. I hated going down and doing it every day, I hated every minute of it. I don't want to deal with all these people, I don't want to have all these worries, 'Is he gonna pay me?,' 'Are they gonna pay me?,' 'When are they gonna pay me?' and blah blah blah. I hated it and I still hate it. So I put it down. I want to make music; I don't want to be in the business side of it.

You've always released your music on vinyl. Is there a vinyl version of The Stargate? Is that important to you? The Stargate is available on vinyl. We have a bunch of it in the van. Vinyl forever! It is something that I used to be a lot more fanatic about in the past. I've come to accept CDs. I mean, you have to accept the day and age that you live in. If you didn’t do that, you'd be in big trouble. Time will not wait. But there's nothing wrong with being a bit nostalgic; I just try not to take it too far.

What is the status of your other projects? I put them down. Just like with Dark Dungeon Music, I pretty much put everything down the same day, except Mortiis. This is what I'm going to do now, fuck everything else. I want to do one great thing instead of a bunch of mediocre stuff.

Is there anyone you would like to collaborate with musically in the future? I don't know. I could probably come up with a few names, but I don't want to say, "I want to work with this person,' as it might create problems or something. I'm sure there's a whole bunch of people I'd love to work with, but I'm so used to working alone it's hard to come up with names. I've never really bothered with other people, never paid attention to anyone else. I'm starting to change that, I'm starting to look into what other people do and it's pretty healthy, actually. It's good to be on top of things.

Was it kind of a different experience working with vocalists on this album? Yeah, I was nervous. Before they came out, I was really nervous. Like, oh my god, I haven't worked with anybody since Emperor back in '92 and that's like six years at that point. I don't even know how to collaborate. But it worked out really good. It took a little longer than we expected, but just a couple days, no big deal. But it definitely worked out really good and I definitely plan to continue to work with other people. It can only make things better.

Would you like to score films at some point? Everybody asks that and I always say that I don't think I'm good enough. Definitely not good enough. I mean, I know what I do and I can compare it to movie soundtracks and I'm like, okay, damn. I'm a long way away from being that good. That's how I feel anyway. I mean, I'd love to do it, but I don't consider myself good enough. That's just me being my worst critic. At some point, I would like to try something like that out, but maybe not this week. (laughs)

When you write songs, do you hear the whole work in your head or do you start with one instrument and build it up from there? Kind of both, I guess. I think I know kind of how I want the song to sound, but it never really turns out like that. I start realizing, okay this didn't work out, that didn't work out - maybe 50% of what you had in mind stays with you. The rest is just something that popped up during the writing process.

I read that you are working on a book… That is something that I've been working on for several years. It's pretty much like the young days of Mortiis up until the day he decides to leave the world he was born into. It's all very symbolic and reflective of what goes on this world and my own state of mind. It'll be out next month, as far as I know.

Who is publishing it? Oh, Earache I guess. They're doing like a limited edition thing, a box with The Stargate CD and the book. Sometime in November.

Are you happy with how the book came out? Well, basically, if I were to do it today, 90% of that I would have never done. It's like a diary almost of the last few years and it's the oddest thing to see the changes in the attitude. In that sense, it's very interesting. As far as me being very naïve and evil and shit like that, but as you grow and develop, your mind matures a little bit and becomes more realistic.

www.mortiis.com

#Mortiis #interview #nov1999

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pedalfuzz · 6 years

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Speedy Ortiz

Speedy Ortiz singer-guitarist Sadie Dupuis’s craft is in full focus on the album Twerp Verse, released earlier this year on Carpark Records. Complex lead lines twist and careen alongside tightly crafted power-pop hooks that have the record already being counted amongst the year’s best.

After playing a catchy, caffeinated set at the 2018 Hopscotch Music Festival, Pedal Fuzz sat down in a cluttered greenroom with Sadie Dupuis, to talk pedals, songwriting, and fingernails. THE FOLLOWING EXCERPTS HAVE BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED

Pedal Fuzz: So first I would love to know about the guitar you were playing last night.

Sadie Dupuis: Yeah, I don't think they're making them anymore. The company was called Moniker, Austin-based—and they would do different custom guitars. That particular model is the Anastasia. It’s shell pink. It has like a like a crescent moon cutaway, and there are pearl details throughout it. And then the headstock has my Sad 13 logo on it.

PF: Cool, so it was made for you?

SD: Yeah!

PF: And do you move through the three pickups, or do you usually stay on one in particular?

SD:I put Strat pickups in the middle, but there are humbuckers on either side, so it's a little unusual. If I'm recording, I'll switch them, but for live I'm pretty much just in the middle.

PF: Is there a piece of gear—it could be an instrument or a device of some sort—that has changed the way you play, or changed something stylistically?

SD:I think every piece of gear has some impact in that sense. But I think the biggest thing for me over the past two or three years has been that I stopped playing with a pick. So, that's not so much adding a piece of gear as much as getting rid of a piece of gear. When we would record I would always have parts that I would need to fingerpick because I wouldn't be able to play them with a pick, and then live I was always playing with a pick. Going back and forth between the two felt kind of clumsy to me.

Or the things that I did have to fingerpick live wouldn't have the same presence or attack as the stuff that I would play with the pick. And so I would be modifying the parts to play it with a pick, and I kind of wasn't into that at all. I could never wear nail polish because—guitarists know—it just scrapes off. Especially the second fingers just get scraped off.

And we had a front of house engineer whose girlfriend was a nail artist who was like, “let me just do your nails. There's this kind of nail polish that won't come off. It makes your nails stronger.” And I was like, “Okay, I'll try it.”

And I sort of realized that I could just grow my nails out, have polish on them, and use these as picks [brandishes canary yellow fingernails]. So now I—Dolly Parton-style—have very long nails on my right hand, and I don't play with a pick at all anymore, because I don't have to - I’ve got five.

So that's been the biggest change in my style, I'd say, in the past couple years.

PF: You modded your hand! So, what pedals do you use now, or what are some ones that are important to you?

SD: I have a ton of pedals at home, and if I'm home-recording I tend to use totally different stuff then I use for the live setup. And that's partially in the same way that I don't want to eat hummus when I'm not on tour because I'm used to having it fed to me in greenrooms every day. Or I don't want to wear the clothes that I wear on tour when I'm home from tour.

The first thing on my chain is an Earthquaker Devices Monarch Overdrive, which is discontinued. It's just an overdrive pedal that's meant to model an Orange amp, and I use that basically as my clean tone, so that's on all the time. I have the gain turned up with not too much volume at 12 o'clock, bass at 9, treble at 12. I don't totally understand why they discontinued it. They do sell the Stew-Mac kits so people could theoretically build their own.

I got used to playing with that pedal because I was playing with certain Fender amps that just felt too common, you know what I mean? Like, a Deville is such a backline amp, which I like a lot, but I played it forever and I liked having this as part of my “clean tone” because it just made the clean a little bit different than the Fender stock sound.

Then I have a Catalinbread Callisto, which is a chorus/vibrato pedal. Again, it likes very mild settings.

And the Dispatch Master, which is another Earthquaker pedal. It’s a reverb/delay, but I'm using it to just give a little bit of reverb. Those are the three pedals that are on all the time. They make up my clean tone.

The second two that I mentioned kind of came onto my board later because I started playing with the Divided by 13 amp CJ 11, which I love, but the only knobs it has are master volume, volume, bass and treble. So, having played Fender amps forever, being used to having the vibrato and the reverb, I wanted to have a little bit of that so that’s what those two pedals kind of accommodate for me.

Beyond that, my overdrive, for when I want to do a cool solo or something, is Earthquaker stuff. I really like their tones. So I use The Dunes for when I'm playing a solo or I need to be loud. It’s another overdrive - I’m weirdly anti-fuzz.

Past that I have Earthquaker’s Pitch Bay, which is an octave plus overdrive pedal, so I'll use that if I want to make a solo a little weird and outerspacey, or sometimes to simulate a synth I played on the records, particularly older records. There would be a synth part that happens for eight seconds, and there was no reason for me to play a synth, so I would just learn the part and play it through that pedal.

PF: An octave up?

SD: Yeah, I have the tiniest amount of octave down that's basically inaudible but pitched off a little bit so it sounds like a weird synth, and then the octave up is pretty gainey.

I used to play a POG 2, but I could never make it not sound like an organ, which is why I like the Pitch Bay. I've always had an impossible time finding any kind of synth-emulating pedal that doesn't sound like it’s just an organ.

PF: I have an old Electro Harmonix Microsynth—one of the big ones—and it's pretty dirty and cool.

SD: Those are cool. I do have a Synth 9 on my board right now, also from Electro Harmonix. I use it on the Prophet-V setting for some of the songs from the new album that I didn’t even play guitar on during recording. The Pitch Bay is great, but it doesn’t really sound like a synth. It makes the guitar sound spacey and digital. So, I wanted something that could be a little more filtered and sound like the synth I play on songs from the new album.

I also have the Old Blood Noise Endeavors Black Fountain delay on my chain. Beyond that I use an ISP Technologies Decimator G-String, which is a noise gate. All of these overdriving pedals give me some signal noise.

PF: Is it noisy all the time otherwise?

SD: It's not. It depends on the electricity of the room. It can get pretty bad when the electricity isn't up to snuff, so I have that [Decimator G-String] in case of emergencies, and that's why I play on the Strat pickup live because if I'm on anything that's humming at all, it’s just magnifying…

Oh, I also use the Walrus Audio Deep Six Compressor, so obviously that's also propagating any kind of signal noise I get. So, there's a fair amount of a harm reduction that has to happen in this chain. [laughs]

PF: I was going to ask you if your setup changes when you're on the road versus recording.

SD: If I'm recording a record, and we're in a studio, anything is kind of fair game. I'll use what the studio has in addition to whatever I brought. But at home when I'm just making demos, I'm like, “I've accrued all these pedals that I don't get to use live so I'm just not interested in even opening my stage pedalboard.” I assemble a separate chain for whatever the song kind of wants. On a lot of the stuff that we've recorded, I didn't use any of the pedals I just mentioned. But it doesn't have to be the exact same sounds live, right?

PF: When you're thinking about your next record, writing songs and demoing at home, is there an ideal Speedy Ortiz song you’re reaching for out in the ether? And what does the ideal Speedy Ortiz song do?

SD: That’s a tough one, because I think it depends. I mean, not every song has the same goals or forms or changes, but there are things that I try to make happen with every song, and I don't really like when a song gets in, like, a groove, and it's too comfortable - I always want a weird surprise.

So whether that's in the lyrics, or whether that's in the time signature, or whether it’s just how many measures something repeats, I tend to change things. So even if a chorus happens three times in the song, it'll be slightly different every time.

So usually my goals are to get somewhere with the writing of it that surprises me, and that I think would be like a fun Easter Egg for the person who's heard it a few times, and then is like, “Oh, the chorus starts on the three this time rather than the one.” Or something like that.

PF: Something surprising.

SD: Yeah, and, by extension, even if the form stays the same, maybe the sounds will be different. One thing I love is to have a second verse in which a lot of stuff drops out, and maybe a weird sound is introduced. If I go back through all my songs, I can probably check that off happening a lot of the time. [laughs]

So there are certain tricks that I definitely pull from song to song, but I just like it to change throughout.

PF: Are you aware of things that you do habitually in the structure of your songs?

SD: I don't think about it when I'm writing a song, but when I show something to my bandmates, they're like, “Oh, of course it's a measure of six this time at the end of the chorus, sounds like you!”

So, I'm sort of aware that there are certainly compositional tools that I lean into more often than not, but I think also they're not super common, so I feel fine repeating them.

PF: So that's, like, your…

SD: Little signature.

PF: Yeah! It’s part of your architecture.

SD: [Laughs] You know all those condos that look the same? That's like the choruses of our songs.

*main photo courtesy of Hopscotch Music Festival / Garrett Poulos

TOM SOWDERS PIROUETTES ANGRILY THROUGH THE STREETS OF DOWNTOWN RALEIGH. LIKE REALLY AGGRESSIVELY, REALLY WINDMILLING HIS ARMS AROUND. HIS HOBBIES ARE NOT USING HIS PHD AND FRONTING THE BAND TOOTHSOME.

#Speedy Ortiz #Sadie Dupuis #guitar #pedal #EARTHQUAKER DEVICES #Hopscotch #music festival #twerp verse #pedal fuzz #Moniker guitars #sad 13

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onestowatch · 6 years

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Q&A: Meet Husband-Wife, Surf-Rock Duo, *repeat repeat

Husband and wife duo Jared and Kristyn Corder, also known as *repeat repeat, have been up to a little bit more than your typical married couple. In 2014, the band took a risk in combining California surf culture with New York street smarts, but it has really been working out for them. In the early *repeat repeat days, founder Jared Corder wanted to make fast paced, edgy, guitar driven music but felt as though the band needed a female harmony singer to round out its sound. He didn’t have to look far -- soon after the search began, the band’s producer Gregory Lattimer (Albert Hammond Jr.) proposed the idea of Jared’s wife Kristyn filling the role. Much like their relationship outside of music, the couple’s voices seemed to be made for each other and with this addition to the band, new inspiration was found.

In the fall of 2017, the band released their second album titled Floral Canyon, a subtle salute to the iconic songwriters of the 60s and 70s who resided in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon. The album stretches the band’s musical horizon, adding “depth, drive and darkness to the sun-baked, surf-tinged pop music” that the band had built its foundation on. This new composition consists of deeper, cultural driven themes such as rocky relationships, religious ideologies and many subjects in between that are all perfectly woven together with a mixture of percussive thunder, trembling organ, synth pads, coed harmonies and wide-ranging guitar parts.

Coming off a memorable Bonnaroo performance where the band was crowned “Most Enthusiastic Rockers,” the duo hopes to keep the positive trend going. Don’t sleep on these two, as they may have you and your partner contemplating a new joint career path.

Jared and Kristyn took the time to answer some questions we had about their music, personal relationship, inspiration and future releases that can be found below:

OTW: Having just been claimed Bonnaroo’s “most enthusiastic” rockers in Rolling Stone magazine, can you tell us a little about where this enthusiasm comes from? Does being in a band with your husband/wife add to the enthusiasm?

Jared: For us, I think we always feel an overwhelming sense of gratefulness when people appreciate the music we make. Time is a valuable thing for people, and for any one person to take time out of their life to listen to our music or come to our show is a really incredible. Appreciating the fact that people could easily choose to spend their time doing literally anything else but decide to give their time/money/support to our endeavor is an important part of the artist-fan relationship. When we walk onstage to a crowd and see that they’re there to see us, and the energy is palpable, it’s impossible for us to feel anything but enthusiasm and gratefulness. Getting to create those moments with your partner and loved one by your side only increases our enthusiasm and excitement.

OTW: Being from California, do you guys feel as though you set out to combine 60’s surfer pop music and edgy rock or did the two find themselves coming together naturally?

Jared: Kristyn really brought the 60’s surf pop element into the band. She is a lover of harmonies, and dreamy beachy sounds. I grew up listening to west coast 3-chord punk rock. Before we started making music together I wanted everything to be fast and loud. Sometimes I still want it that way, but now it just has pretty harmonies and beachy undertones.

OTW: Do you feel as though you get more of your inspiration from your past or what you see now in your new home in Nashville?

Jared: I honestly don’t know anymore. With our first album (the independently released Bad Latitude), we very much set out to define our sound. Then with Floral Canyon, I wanted to take our sound and evolve it by writing about more personal, deeper themes. Those first few years as a band felt more calculated, but I’m trying to not do that in this chapter of my life. I’m always trying to think of ways to challenge myself as an artist, and right now letting everything happen organically seems scary and challenging as fuck.

OTW: Who were some of your biggest inspirations growing up in California during the 60’s? What kind of music did you listen to growing up and has it influenced the music you make today?

Kristyn: My dad grew up in Long Beach, California during that time and later raised me on great 60's pop and rock, so I listened to a lot of The Mamas & The Papas, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, The Hollies - stuff like that - and of course The Beatles. I think it gave me a love of big layered choruses and a tendency toward more retro-sounding harmonies. That mixed with Jared's punk-influenced guitar riffs and overall crunchiness seem to have somewhat shaped our sound.

OTW: Having listened to your new album Floral Canyon, I noticed that your voices complement each other very well, did that come naturally when Kristyn joined the band or did it take some adjusting to fit together?

Jared: That came naturally. It wasn’t even planned. She sang on a few demos because I knew we sounded good together, but Kristyn never set out to be in a band. So initially we weren’t setting out to be in a touring band together. In hindsight I couldn’t imaging singing these songs with anyone else.

OTW: Your newest album Floral Canyon is said to stretch the band’s musical envelope -- tackling modern culture, rocky relationships, religious ideologies -- do all of your songs tend to have an underlying meaning to them?

Jared: On Floral Canyon, yes. Every song on that record has a story behind why I wrote the song when I did. With the new songs we’re working on, I’m trying to tackle songwriting from a different angle, and Kristyn and I are writing the songs together for the first time. I still draw from personal stories and experience when I’m writing new stuff, but it’s more about the song and less about the specific story I’m trying to tell.

OTW: You guys have described your group as a “family business” -- do you feel like being in a band with your wife/husband creates only positivity or are there some cons? Do you guys make an effort to keep both separated?

Jared: Kristyn and I have something unique, and I can’t even pinpoint it. We’ve not spent a night apart in the 6 years we’ve been married and 7 years together, we really enjoy each other’s company. I wouldn’t say being in a band with your spouse is for everyone. We’ve always worked together on a number of projects, including music festivals and other business ventures. The only negative aspect is that sometimes it’s really hard doing the long drives and the late nights, and you see your spouse tired, sometimes sick, sometimes frustrated, and you feel like you’ve put a burden on your family. But then you also get to share in the incredible moments together and it all makes sense. I’ll go to my grave knowing I got to play Bonnaroo with my wife. That’s something I’d never take back.

OTW: What’s it like being in a band with your partner? How does it feel on stage seeing one and other with all of your fans in front of you? Does having each other on stage help with any nervousness?

Jared: The best part about being onstage with your partner is that right next to you in front of a crowd of strangers is someone that knows you more deeply and intimately than anyone else. That helps us feel like no matter what happens onstage, there’s someone right beside you that understands you. I love that we have a little secret language onstage and can share inside jokes just with a certain look from the stage.

OTW: Who would you consider some Ones To Watch?

Jared: Our friend R.LUM.R is a great, modern R&B and pop hybrid. Sad Baxter is super cool fuzz rock. Sun Seeker is awesome too. There’s really a ton of great new music coming out of Nashville.

OTW: What do you guys have in the works right now? Any new singles coming soon?

Jared: There’s no set timeline for new releases yet, but we can’t wait to share the new music with our fans that we are currently working on.

Take a listen to Floral Canyon:

#*repeat repeat #surf rock #indie #alternative #Floral Canyon #Bad Latitude #interview

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lordendsavior · 6 years

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Olly Alexander, the frontman of the British band Years & Years, has blood-red dyed hair. He wears a brass safety pin through one ear and sometimes grins so widely, so wildly, that the edges of his mouth seem to disappear around his narrow, fine-boned face. What soon draws the eye is a scar on his forehead. “I ran into a brick wall as a kid,” the 27-year-old says over lunch at a cafe in London. He touches the scar. “I was playing at being a Power Ranger. Ouch.”

These days, Alexander plays at being a pop star – and on the surface, at least, it seems like a game that’s going well for him. With the launch of their first album in 2015, Years & Years enjoyed a really remarkable few months. They were named BBC Sound of 2015 in January, promptly going to No 1 in the UK singles chart in March, and likewise topping the album chart in July. The band’s propulsive, 90s-nostalgic dance pop (like Disclosure or Clean Bandit, only up the randiness and add a little disco) caught on. And Alexander made a quick Meghan Markle-like ascent to something like pop royalty. “One of the most influential gay pop stars of this generation,” the Gay Times wrote. “All hail the King!”

Years & Years are a three-piece – also made up of keyboard and synth player Emre Türkmen and bassist Mikey Goldsworthy – but it has always been clear that Alexander is the band’s guiding force, their chief lyricist, a Gaga-like taker of risks when he performs and a political voice, off stage, who has an appealing, glitter-speckled sense of activism. A pithy and witty speaker on LGBTQ+ rights, Alexander has also opened up engagingly about his struggles with mental health. “A lifeline to troubled young people,” the Observer wrote of him, in 2016, around the same time that Years & Years played at Glastonbury. There, Alexander wore an oversized choirboy smock strung front and back with rainbow-coloured ribbons – it was Pride weekend – and made a widely admired speech about battling prejudice. “Shove a rainbow in fear’s face,” was how he put it.

Musicians must pray for debuts like this – to come over credible, commercial, with real-world clout. No brick walls clattered into, no obvious “Ouch” moments. Or were there?

Years & Years are almost done on their second album, due this summer, and from the demos I’ve heard the new music admits a brittleness and vulnerability in Alexander that wasn’t so obvious on the 2015 debut. He is still a fabulous and steely man when in pop-star mode (at the photoshoot, he prowls around in heels and a collared lace bodysuit that make him resemble a steampunk, space-bound Queen Elizabeth I), but he cuts a shyer and less certain figure at lunch.

He arrived with a cigarette pushed behind his ear, and smoked it outside with quick, jittery puffs. Now he hunches over a salad, an elbows-in kind of eater and a nervous giggler. Of his pop-mode confidence, he says, “I wish I carried that around with me in my day-to-day life. But I don’t.” He’s wearing a pair of dungarees that he likes, he says, because they feel “like clothes that give you back a hug”.

As Alexander eats, he talks about what happened in the aftermath of that famous Glastonbury performance, once he was out of public sight. The band had been cheered off, a career high. And once backstage, the musician recalls, he sat down and wept. Inconsolable, feeling lower than he’d been in months. “It happens,” he shrugs. “A falling off a cliff. The pendulum swings.”

“When I was younger,” Alexander says, “I thought that if you were famous and successful, it would mean that you just felt happy all the time. That you would become, like, this mystical creature that people just adored. And so you would adore yourself.”

Alexander doesn’t always make eye contact, and he addresses this next bit at the napkin dispenser between us.

“Obviously I realise how ridiculous that sounds. But it wasn’t until our album got to No 1 that I realised I still believed in it. We’d basically won the lottery. I felt like I’d won the lottery. And at the same time I still felt like the same person I’d always been. And all the things that I associated with my depression, and my anxiety, those periods of feeling really low, they were still there. And I was so annoyed at myself. ”

Alexander talks about first discovering the transformative, strengthening power of a good costume. It was on a trip to Disneyland, when he was nine. “The greatest experience of my life up to then,” Alexander says. “The pomp! The whole make-believe nature of that place. It was very powerful for me.People were all wearing costumes, playing characters. It was this other reality where fun things happened, more than they seemed to in real life. And I just remember wanting to be a part of something like that.”

Theme parks were a big feature of his young life. Alexander grew up living next door to them, not one but three, first Alton Towers, then Blackpool Pleasure Beach, then Drayton Manor. His father helped launch and market new rides in these places, and the family moved wherever the work was.

He was born in 1990, the younger of two sons. His mother ran community craft groups. His father, while employed in the theme parks, tended side dreams of being a professional musician. Of his father he says, cautiously: “Quite a difficult man... Definitely not happy within himself.”

Alexander is more explicit about his own early troubles. “I used to have hallucinations and hear voices and stuff as a kid. Which sounds alarming, but it’s just the way it was.” Also: “I had what would now be called sleep paralysis, from six years old until maybe I was 16. Terrifying dreams.”

His parents separated when Alexander was 13, a daunting and confusing period for him. “My dad had been very absent, even when he was there. Then he left the family and moved away. Our relationship, it feels to me, ended when I was 13.” With his mother and brother, Alexander relocated to a sleepy village in Gloucestershire called Coleford.

Part of Alexander’s conversational charm is that he’ll veer between the frank and sober discussion of the self-doubt and difficulty he experienced as a young man, into brilliantly catty and droll little anecdotes about his upbringing. Here he is, describing his first paid employment – a Saturday job in a Coleford shop called Moonstones. “We sold incense, candles, spellbooks. Um, bongs. Chocolates shaped like penises. Everything you’d need really – a one-stop shop.”

He wasn’t a popular teenager, and was bullied at his secondary school in Coleford just as he had been at his old primary schools. He marvels, thinking back, at his response to this. “I started wearing eyeliner to school. Nail varnish. Choker necklaces.” He put on a costume: a counter-intuitive form of self-defence. “I’d been bullied for years and all I wanted was for that to stop. But at the same time I had this sense that I was different, I was weird, and wearing makeup and crazy clothes was my way of trying to find an identity, in the face of people who were going to rip me apart anyway.”

What brought him out of his “goth phase”, as he calls it, was the music. Alexander chuckles. “I could never really get on board with the bands you were supposed to like.” He couldn’t shake the love for pop music he’d developed as a pre-teen, when pop bands would visit the theme parks his dad worked for. “Remember [the Irish pop band] B*Witched? They came to open a ride once. Then Steps – I got all their autographs.” So when it was time for the school talent show, Alexander chose to sing a TLC song. At home he obsessed over Christina Aguilera videos. He was pop through and through, and wanted to be a star in the mould of all these heroes.

Half by accident, he embarked on a different artistic career first. At 16, Alexander auditioned for the Channel 4 drama Skins, and was in talks about a role. The job didn’t materialise until he was well into his 20s, when he was cast as a creepy student photographer, but meanwhile his agent put him up for other stuff. By the time he’d finished his A-levels and moved to London, he was getting varied work – in Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void and Laura Wade’s The Riot Club and a corporate video for Google, playing a confused consumer who didn’t know how much he needed the advice of a really good search engine. Probably his peak as an actor came in 2012 when he was cast in a Michael Grandage production, Peter And Alice, alongside Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw.

This West End run coincided, in Alexander’s breezy telling, with the busiest period in his romantic career. “Lot of sex.” He had known that he fancied boys from the age of about 10, though the concept of being gay was something only introduced to him via playground insult; he can remember drawing stick figures in a geography textbook, bewildered, trying to figure out how two men could ever even manage it. These days, Alexander says, “my sexuality is part of my music, part of my identity”, but this was a clunky journey in its early phases and it wasn’t until he arrived in London and got into a first relationship, with the brother of a friend, that he felt he could properly come out to those closest to him.

After that – whoosh. “I figured out that I could pull, basically. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. I realised that, actually, everyone’s pretty horny, pretty desperate at times, and all you needed to do was maintain eye contact and be confident and that was kind of it.” Since then, he’s sampled romance in many of its forms, being single and shagging a lot, being single and not shagging so much, being in an open relationship, being in a celebrity relationship (with Clean Bandit’s Neil Amin-Smith), being in a quieter relationship with somebody unknown – that was the most recent, and it came to an end about 18 months ago. What has he learned? “That the longer you’re single, the more you notice how everyone else is in a relationship. But that’s a whole other thing.”

He says he finds it harder to pull in clubs without the freedom of anonymity he used to enjoy. “I’m having much less sex than I did in my early 20s, for sure.” He’s tried the hook-up app Grindr, but the men he messaged with wouldn’t believe he was who he said he was. “So that didn’t go very well.” After years of living with flatmates, he recently moved to live on his own, in a flat in east London. “The last few months I’ve been wondering, ‘Will I just be alone, for ever? And would I be OK with that?’ I want to be OK with that.”

Thinking of how ill-informed he felt as a kid, and of the anxiety he might have been spared had he only known more and known better, Alexander has resolved to be a public figure who is as vocal and open about his sexuality as he can be. As soon as he was asked, in an early-career interview for a blog, he said he was gay. (This was actually how his beloved grandmother found out: Alexander hadn’t yet got around to telling her.) Last year, he made a BBC Three documentary, Growing Up Gay, that is still on iPlayer and gets broadcast around the world. “I get messages about it at weird times of night.”

Soon after our lunch, he’s due to give the keynote address at an annual Stonewall event. He hasn’t written his speech yet, and is still toying with points of view he might want to get across: that LGBT-inclusive sex education should be compulsory in schools; that LGBT support groups need more government funding than ever; “that yes, we can get married now, but that’s not the end of the story, that’s not gay rights done.” When the event does take place, Alexander will speak about how, as a young actor who went through media training, he was told it might be best not to speak about his sexuality at all. (“I ignored advice.”)

Alexander made an interesting choice, in 2013, when major labels started showing an interest in Years & Years. He entered therapy, specifically in anticipation of what a frontline music career might do to his fragile emotional state. Polydor were still six months from formally signing them.

He knew fame was coming, though – that early?

No, he says. But if there was a chance of the band making it, however slight, he reasoned he’d better be prepared. “And I’m grateful I made that decision. I’ve been seeing the same therapist through the whole process.” Through the band’s kick-starting anointment as the BBC Sound of 2015, then their smash No 1 single King that spring, then their No 1 album Communion that summer. “To go from zero to 100. To have an idea of what success is, your entire life, and then it happens to you. It’s overwhelming. There’s a lot of noise. And people start talking to you differently.”

Which people?

Alexander laughs, frowns – speaks at the napkins again. He starts talking about his dad, with whom Alexander went through an awkward episode after Years & Years topped the charts. By then, father and son had no relationship to speak of, Alexander says. They hadn’t said a word to each other in seven years. “And, um, my dad started tweeting at me.”

A pause. “It’s hard for me to talk about. It’s a hard issue, because it’s tied up with my family, and also his new family. I want to be respectful.”

He doesn’t sound sure whether his father even knew whether what he was doing was public; but anyway, he messaged him over Twitter, in full view of social media. “And it got really, really messy. There were some Years & Years fans who started tweeting him back, trolling my dad. He was talking back to them. It was a real head-fuck.”

However clumsy the timing and the method, was a part of Alexander gratified that he got in touch?

“The best way I can describe it is that when me and my dad last knew each other, when I was 13 or 14, that’s frozen in time for me,” he says. And back then, he continues, he couldn’t have imagined any better future for himself than becoming a pop star and having his father want to be a part of his life again. “But then he did get in contact with me. And it was then I realised that what that 13-year-old wanted, that wasn’t actually possible. Not any more.”

What did the 13-year-old want?

“I realised that a part of me wanted to be successful in music because my dad wanted to be a musician. That a part of me thought, if I became a musician and I did well, he’d be proud of me. Or he’d, y’know, be so sorry for not being the dad I wanted him to be.”

But that’s not how it felt?

No, he says. When they did come together, Alexander noticed that, “I’d become something that my dad was sort of intimidated by. I’d been wanting to be successful, in part, because I wanted to prove something to him. And when that happened, I realised it didn’t feel good, it just felt like… like I’d tricked somebody.”

Listening to demos from Years & Years’ new album, there’s a sense that fatherhood has been much on Alexander’s mind in the aftermath of this episode. Person-to-person, the musician says, he and his father “have very, very minimal contact” right now. But a dad figure stalks the new work. On one song, Alexander sings about breaking with his DNA. On another, it’s as if karmic retribution is being summoned and directed at a “daddy [who] said I never could win”.

Yeah, he says, his father was foremost in his thoughts when he wrote that one. But he’d been thinking, too, about past relationships, those various boyfriends he’d dumped or been dumped by. Alexander sees a clear thread running through it all, from parental to romantic difficulties. “I guess at its heart it’s just not really being able to trust someone who says they love you. If that’s something that’s ingrained in you, then I think it’s hard to get past that.”

We’re finished with lunch. Having travelled deeper into his psyche than he expected to – “normally I would have these mental conversations alone with myself, in my flat” – Alexander starts to wonder about another cigarette, and pats the pockets of his dungarees. I tell him that, yeah, I can see why he might choose to wear clothes that feel like they hug. He smiles.

Before we stand up and gather our things, he asks to add a couple of “bookends” to what’s been discussed. That he experienced a lot of love and support, growing up, from his mother and grandmother. (“I feel I have to say that: My mother loved me! She tried her best!”) And also that he’s profoundly grateful to music, to his band and their followers, to the rainbow smocks and lace bodysuits and the whole pop palaver, for the release-valve it has offered a troubled mind.

“There’s a lot of quite raw emotion inside me,” Alexander tells me. “Obviously. And most of the time it can only come out in these tiny little cracks. One of those cracks – that’s the music.”

#this is such an amazing read #i cried #i love him so much #btw i didn't know he smokes #olly alexander #a human rainbow

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