Desert Island albums

There are all kinds of theoretical puzzles; the ones where you have two tribes, one that always tells the truth and one that always lies, the ones where you have a goat, a chicken, a wolf and a boat that only holds two, and my favourite, the one where you're stuck on a desert island that somehow has electricity and a functioning CD player.

There are a few variations of this one, sometimes you're allowed 10 CDs, sometimes just one. Questions arise: is it cheating to pick the Beatles White Album? OK, it's a double album, so technically it's 2 CDs, but it kind of solves the problem of variety by having a truly Polymusical programme. Well, if that's legit, what about boxed sets?

I've long had my own answer for this challenge, and it doesn't involve cheating; it's a single CD, 10 songs (no, I don't need the special enhanced editions with extra tracks, thank you) and in the over 40 years since its release I have not yet tired of a single one. For me, the Desert Island album is Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection.

In interviews, he laughingly complained that Bernie Taupin kept writing all these lyrics that belonged in country and western songs and he'd had to upbraid him for it, but for this one moment it appears he caved, and everyone in the band came along for the ride. They never sounded like that before or since. So listen to this, and remind yourself over and over that it's a bunch of white Englishmen:

Inches Per Second

Inches Per Second. Sounds a little dirty, doesn't it?

But it wasn't that long ago that this was a common measurement, specifically of how fast the tape was zipping past the head in a tape-recorder. The standard was 7 1/2 ips, but for professional quality that would be doubled to 15 ips. If you were just recording voices in a meeting you might save tape by dropping down to 3 3/4 ips or even 1 7/8 ips if you didn't really care whether it was clear.

Musically, though, it was Les Paul who figured out that you could slow the tape down to half-speed, record a track at the slower speed, then speed it up again to get a speedy musical effect that would be virtually unplayable at the speed you were hearing it. He used the effect on many recordings, and I remember reading an interview with Chet Atkins (with whom he used the technique) in which he described meeting some young guitar student who had been diligently practicing one of these speeded-up lead lines, and Chet was shocked that the kid had mastered it at the double-speed pace.

It's been used since then as well; the example that everyone knows is the 'harpsichord' solo in the middle of John Lennon's "In My Life," which is actually a double-speed piano solo. I always assumed everyone knew this, but apparently it's not obvious unless you (as I did when I was a kid) have played around with changing speeds on your tape recorder.

The effect on the human voice is known as the 'chipmunk' effect, after its extensive use by Ross Bagdasarian's Alvin and the Chipmunks. If you search YouTube you can find The Chipmunk Song slowed down to where the chipmunk voices sound normal. Well, normal-ish. In order for the chipmunks to be comprehensible when speeded up, the singers have to overpronounce all the lyrics, and they sound a little otherworldly. (although not as otherworldly as Dave, who in the slowed-down version is identified as Satan)

The best example I can find of altering speeds, however, is something that was pointed out to me by a colleague, who played me a version of Dolly Parton's "Jolene" slowed down. It's nothing Dolly ever did on purpose, but it highlights the mastery of her voice and her musicians when you realize that this is like 'listening under the microscope,' where any imperfection would be magnified. Check it out:

Rock Anthem!

The other night we watched a silly movie, "Rock of Ages" which featured several hits from the 80s (or thereabouts) and kept us entertained easily as much as when we saw the stage version of the same story. Songs from the past have been revitalized recently in TV shows ranging from Glee to the now-innumerable singing contest shows, and listening to new arrangements and recordings of them reminds me that the best of them endure and cause shivers, while the worst of them underline why they faded away.

The rock anthem has been a staple for these shows. I've heard "Born To Be Wild," "Dream On" and "Somebody To Love" on The Voice, "Can't Fight This Feeling," "Jump" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want" on Glee, and "Dead Or Alive" and "Beautiful Day" on American Idol, but the one song that appears on all the lists, and sometimes over and over again, is "Don't Stop Believing."

Is this the quintessential greatest Rock Anthem ever? You could argue that there are other contenders that have been more popularly used, like the two Queen classics that have become the de facto standards for sporting events, "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions." There's something appealing about an anthem that's not too difficult to sing along with, so points go to "Born In The USA" and "Highway To Hell," but really, don't we want our rock stars to be star singers and sing something we couldn't sing ourselves? I think so.

And if you want to hear some really exceptional, effortless singing, check out Steve Perry live:

Same lyrics, different melody - or not

Yesterday I went to hear my daughter sing in the Hart House Chorus, which was lovely. The programme informed us that the choir would be performing Joseph Haydn's Mass followed by Ludwig Van Beethoven's Mass, and the Latin Mass was printed beside its English translation, but it wasn't until the Beethoven began that it dawned on me that both composers were setting the same words to their own music.

I started thinking about how often that happens, and although some quick Google research yielded several instances of more modern artists who have created a drastically different arrangement of one of their (or someone else's) songs, they tend not to vary so much that you would call it a different piece.

I remember that years ago an ad agency here in Toronto wanted to create a new TV spot for Pepsi in which a well-known band sang a song they had written using lyrics provided by the agency. Several bands were contacted to write their version of the song. The Kings participated in this, and wrote a pretty good tune, but the agency ultimately went with a version created by Rough Trade instead. (The spot didn't air for very long because it featured imagery of people completely wrapped in bandages, and Nash the Slash, who had not been consulted, forced them to cease-and-desist)

It makes me wonder why this doesn't happen more often. There are several examples of different lyrics being written for the same melody, (some even unintentionally actionable) but it seems to be almost unheard of the other way around. Maybe the following story partially explains why.

A friend of mine wrote a musical setting for Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening" which was beautiful, but led me to wonder about the legalities of using existing poetic works that hadn't yet passed into the public domain. Some research led me to the sad story of noted choral composer Eric Whitacre, who had also written a lovely setting for the same poem, but ultimately learned that Frost's estate wouldn't allow him to use it. Whitacre was forced to commission a completely new lyric, "Sleep," that followed the same rhyme and scan as the original from his friend and longtime collaborator Charles Anthony Silvestri. The result is fantastic, and although you can imagine the original poem being sung against this melody, Silvestri has created a different lyric (which Whitacre publicly professes to prefer) that perfectly captures the spirit of the music without referring to Frost's imagery at all. Watch how delighted Whitacre is to conduct this:

If I admitted to my friends that I like musicals, they'd start to wonder if my wife was a 'beard.' It's not really true, though, I don't like most musicals. There have been the occasional songs that I have liked over the years that originated in musicals: "'Til There Was You" as sung by Macca, "Over The Rainbow" from the Wizard of Oz, and you have to admire "And I Am Telling You I Am Not Going" with all its scenery-chewing vocal virtuosity.

I've often wondered, though, what it must have been like to sit in the audience on March 15, 1956, at the Mark Hellinger Theatre attending the Broadway premiere of "My Fair Lady." Musicals were a pretty familiar form at the time, and although the notices from New Haven were probably pretty good, the audience may not have been adequately prepared for what they were about to see and hear.

Once in a while, a lyricist would turn a clever line or two in a comedic song for the stage, and if the producer was lucky, one of the songs would have a memorable, singable melody that left people humming it as they left the theatre. Alan Jay Lerner, taking his cue from G. B. Shaw, wrote the most hilariously venomous lyrics, song after song, and Frederick Loewe, using Gabriel Pascal's line, "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain" as his launching point, wrote Spanish-inspired melodies that stayed hits for decades. How many hit songs came from that show? And of the 'album tracks' could it be said that any of them were filler? I don't think so; the least distinguished song in the show would be "Ascot Opening Day" which is devastatingly funny in skewering the pretensions of the upper class, and is also virtually the only ensemble song in the show. Everything (including that song) is gold, and I had a hard time picking the best example to accompany this article, but I had to come down in favour of "Why Can't The English Learn To Speak" as a first-rate depiction of the art of lyric writing. Enjoy:

'Influence' or theft?

In interviews, songwriters and bands are always asked to name their influences. I can tell you that this is an uncomfortable question sometimes, because one doesn't want to disappoint the fans when they discover that even though your music is known for balls-out rocking guitar pop, it turns out your influences include Cat Stevens and Dvorak.

It's usually not that much of a surprise though. Sometimes the influences are so obvious you wonder whether the artist is embarrassed to admit them because they're so clearly ripping off the style of their heroes. I won't name names here, primarily because anyone who is that transparently unoriginal doesn't receive enough acclaim to become well-known. (The exceptions tend to be those who become successful because of their looks!)

But sometimes the influences are purposely worn on the sleeve as a love-letter to their musical idols. And sometimes it works so well because the artist has mashed up elements from a few different influences into one piece. Tame Impala's "Elephant" is my current fave example of this: everyone agrees that Kevin Parker sounds like John Lennon on this song, and most would agree that the band has a definite Beatles-y sound behind him, including the distinctive Hofner bass anchoring the groove. Then in the middle of the song, after a connective phrases that sounds like the connective descending scale in Pink Floyd's "Money," a loopy keyboard break feels like it could have been Ray Manzarek soloing in a Doors song. The Comments section on the YouTube posting confirms that I'm not the only one hearing these, but (aside from the usual YT trolls) no one seems to mind.

When is it OK to copy your influences? Well, I suppose the three intervening decades help, but for me it's the fact that these influences are combined in a new, exciting way, a way the influencing artists might not have thought of.

How to invent a new musical style

The history of music has really been the history of musical instruments and advancements not only in those instruments, but in techniques for playing them. There was a time, for example, when keyboard instruments didn't have black notes, and the addition of the B-flat key revolutionized music for a time, at least until the other accidentals were added.

The dance music of the early twentieth century was played on traditional instruments, but there were advancements in the way those instruments were used. Glenn Miller was the first to call on the clarinet section to play melodic blocks as the primary instrument in the ensemble, and as a consequence invented a whole new genre of Big Band music. Perhaps the changing social mores of the day permitted people to make more of a public spectacle of themselves, so rhythmic music was more accepted.

When electric guitars were invented, several new ways of playing them appeared, and led to rock 'n' roll and new country and jazz styles. When synthesizers first appeared, they completely changed the way pop music sounded, and when digital workstations led to the creation of loop-based music, everything changed again.

But some technological advancements come along that are so difficult to exploit that their influence, though impressive to listen to, remains limited to one artist. Wendy Carlos' synthesized recordings of Bach's works have never been equaled, and sometimes an instrument ends up 'belonging' to one artist, like Herb Alpert's flugelhorn or Don Ho's ukulele. (Although Israel Kamakawiwoʻole became the successor, it always belonged to just one artist)

There is one technology, that of the vocoder, which to my knowledge has been successfully exploited in only one song. Oh, many artists have used it, and occasionally it makes a minor moment of interest in a song, but there's really only one song that features it and uses it to draw us into an emotional, artistic world, and that's Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek." I remember first hearing it on one of those dance competition TV shows, and completely losing track of everything else, listening to this unearthly, beautiful creation, trying to figure out what I was hearing. I understand the song gained some popularity when the coda was used to score the final scene during the 2nd season finale of "The O.C."in 2005, but for me the best part is...well, all of it:

Playing with fire

The other day I wrote that humans like listening to humans singing more than anything, but I'd like to qualify that by saying that humans also like listening to phenomenal instrumentalists as well.

I do believe that there is a correlation between the finest instrumental work and the quality of human singing, though; a lovely violin solo or even a sublime electric guitar solo have qualities of vocal pyrotechnics to them, and instruments that can't bend or modulate notes have a limited ability to thrill in the same way. Oh, there have been standout piano solos, Mike Garson's brilliant turn in Aladdin Sane, Billy Joel's intro to "New York State of Mind" and Roy Bittan introducing "Jungleland," but the most famous popular piano 'solos' are notable for their simplicity, like Jim Gordon playing the back half of "Layla" or Lennon's workmanlike "Imagine." Piano pieces may subconsciously appeal on the basis of "I could play that," while a truly sublime instrumental testament requires the listener to think, "How does he (or she) do that?!"

When I was a kid, I was fascinated with the idea of the church organ with its many stops; I imagined what it would be like to be able to create a whole orchestra of sound with one instrument, using these pipes for brass sounds and those for reed sounds...and then when I grew up it became a reality, with a computer sequencer program 'playing' multi-timbral synthesizer modules. The catch, it turned out, was that there are several instruments that keyboards playing synthesizers are absolutely hopeless at reproducing: trying to make an authentic-sounding solo violin, electric guitar or saxophone is a lost cause. And these are the very instruments whose best players are revered, because they have mastered the millions of micro-adjustments necessary for producing human-vocal-like sounds from these instruments.

Sometimes an instrumental break is just a break, a chance for the singer to catch their breath, a place to fade down and bring up the foreground dialogue in a movie or order another beer in a live show. And sometimes it rivets everyone's attention and makes the hair on the back of everyone's neck stand up. Those players are the ones that inspire, drawing little drops of perfection from their instruments until they have poured a cup of delicious nectar into our ears.

So hats off to the master instrumentalists, and to represent them today, here's Larry Carlton with his extraordinary guitar on Steely Dan's "Don't Take Me Alive."

Music That Makes You Move

Some songs can move you. Pick your brain up and wring it out until a huge lump appears in your throat. I've had that happen listening to "She's Leaving Home," Joni Mitchell's "River" and Macy Gray's "I Try," among many others. It's a pleasant catharsis, cleansing in its way, but mostly reserved for when one is listening by oneself.

And then there are songs that make you move. Songs with funky rhythm, songs that even if you wanted to you couldn't stay still while you're listening to them. Oh, plenty of song have a groove, plenty of songs have a beat that you could dance to if you wanted to, but I'm talking about the songs that find some primal resonance and force you to move in spite of yourself.

I'm not sure what the mechanics of it are; I have a theory that the rhythm is set up to go one place, and then frustrates our expectations by leaving a hole where the beat ought to be, and that forces us to twitch involuntarily where that beat should strike. I haven't done the scientific analysis to prove whether there's any merit to this theory. I only know that there are certain songs that make you move, that make you tap your foot or drum your fingers, even in situations where you're supposed to be still. The musicians have conspired to infect your musculature with rhythm, and you're powerless to stop them.

I was sitting in the car waiting for my wife to come out of a store one day in 1990 and this came on the radio. When she got back to the car I was dancing in the driver's seat. The song had been over for 10 minutes, but I turned off the radio and kept playing it in my head. It was the first time I'd ever heard this version:

Two-part Harmony

The human voice is the thing humans like to listen to above all else. The history of western music begins with monks chanting and progresses through choral harmony until the invention of musical instruments, but instrumental music has always been a pastime for a small (and often wealthy) minority, whereas popular music through the ages has been sung.

Since singing was discovered, (probably around a fire in the Pleistocene age) humans have known what an improvement it is to sing in groups, and when it was discovered that different members of the group could sing different notes from each other and sound even better, things took off: at first it was just monks singing in parallel fourths, but before long we had massive choral works sung by 50-voice choirs accompanied by full orchestra. But even as the serious devotional works were being enjoyed in churches, the popular music was still songs, minstrels and operettas playing for loose change to the working folk. It has carried on to this day, and although 20th Century music made stars out of certain singers, they were often accompanied by (underacknowledged) backup singers.

There is a special magic, though, about a duet; it's two people singing together, without the depersonalizing mask of a section of singers doubling their parts, sometimes even singing as though to each other, depending on the lyric. When the third voice is added, it's as unwelcome as a chaperone on a date; if there are to be more voices they have to recede into the background the way the Motown backup singers updated the Greek Chorus concept.

The Everly Brothers sang dozens of these, like "Let It Be Me" and "When Will I Be Loved," and Lennon and McCartney had some classic duet moments like "Love Me Do" and (especially) "If I Fell." But I will always love the duets sung by a male and female singer, with lyrics that cast them as lovers, whether wanton or bittersweet. From the pop innocence of "I Got You Babe" by Sonny and Cher to the stressed-out couple depicted by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush singing "Don't Give Up," there's a recognizable connection when a couple sings to each other.

I got the same chills again a few weeks ago when I tuned in to "Nashville" and heard this:

What if your polymusical taste didn't involve several different disparate pieces of music, but instead consisted of several different disparate approaches to music all appearing moments apart in the same piece of music?  This is the delightful conundrum faced by fans of Laura Nyro, the brilliant singer/songwriter who was never able to fit in any kind of programming slot because she just wrote and sang what she felt.

My brother introduced me to Laura Nyro's music when I was quite young, and over the years going back to it always proves to be an antidote to the rigorously programmed music of the radio world. Although her songs were covered by radio artists, listening to her original versions of those songs is like stepping away from an old black and white TV camera monitor and looking past it at the real, full-colour original performance it's recording.

But for a truly soul-cleansing experience, step inside the world of the songs she wrote that no one else ever tried to sing, songs that defied cover versions, songs that feel so personal that no one else could sing them, and when you're listening you feel like you've been given a private display of what it was like to be her, to live her life for three or four minutes. These songs play like life itself, moving along at a nice pace, then suddenly grinding to a sudden halt, a moment of introspection that gives way to a madcap rollercoaster downslope whose manic salchows stop just as suddenly on the other side.

I love so many of these songs it's hard to pick a favourite, but if I had to it would be "Poverty Train." Songwriters often reach into the 'what-if' bag and write songs about what they think it would be like for someone else to live a life they themselves have not experienced. This is not one of those songs:

I can't speak for any other composers, but I have, on occasion, dreamed that I or someone else was performing a song, and when I woke up it was stuck in my head and turned out not to have existed prior to that time. It's a great way to write songs when it happens (my lifetime total is 3 songs) but it can be upsetting when you can't remember it when you wake up. The most maddening experience of this nature was a dream in which the music playing was gorgeous, and changed keys frequently, but in an elegant and harmonious fashion. Of course, when I woke up I couldn't remember a note of it, just the sense of this elegant and constant key change.

It wasn't until years later when my wife and daughters were studying piano that I finally heard a piece of music that did this (and much more elegantly than my dream song) and it was only 300-odd years old: Bach's Sinfonia No. 9 BWV 795.

Bach was a great musical experimenter, and his music is like the audio embodiment of pure mathematics. I remember reading an article once about a medium who claimed to communicate with dead composers, and she said Bach loved the possibilities of computer music. While I don't really buy the notion that all the great composers channel their post-mortal communications through one person, I have to admit that this one snippet sounded plausible - yes, of all the famous composers who've lived and died, can't you imagine J. S. Bach sitting at a workstation with Logic or Digital Performer?

This one piece sounds like Bach sat down and consciously tried to create a piece which changed key as often as possible without losing the thread. It's dark, it's moody, it's disorienting, and in the hands of Glenn Gould, it's incredible. (Gould played all the Inventions and Sinfonia, and when he didn't like one he would play it impossibly fast - clearly he liked this one)

Classical encoded in rock

In keeping with the objective of this blog, I'd like to point out something that should be self-evident, but apparently isn't:

Playing an instrument, even in a 21st-century, anti-hero counterculture style, requires some training, and training in music must include some basics from the classical world.

Think about it: the guitarist in the raunchiest punk band still has to know some chords by name and be able to communicate the progression to the bass player without resorting to elaborate guesswork or the band will sound too horrible to make any kind of a dent in popular consciousness. A singer who can't understand how keys work or why harmonies should usually follow the key signature of the melody will have their career top out at being insulted by Simon Cowell.

It is, therefore, always a great pleasure to find musicians who have learned all they can learn from the classical world, and then import those lessons into the popular music of the modern era. I'm not talking about jazz (although those players have inevitably studied the same canon) because due to a trick of the human brain, 'popular' music tends to exclude that level of complexity. I'm talking about players like Thijs Van Leer of Focus, Imogen Heap or the incomparable Roy Bittan of the E Street Band.

I particularly would like to single out the Professor (Bittan) in this regard. Rock and roll piano has a long tradition of pounding the same chord rhythmically and playing outrageous glisses up and down the keyboard with a flat hand a la Jerry Lee Lewis. The occasional straying from this usually happened in pop ballads, and while some of these might lean in a 'classical' direction, they were usually most similar to a classical piece from the Grade 2 Conservatory book, like Chicago's 'Colour My World' or 'Morning Has Broken' as popularized by Cat Stevens. Roy Bittan did something new with rock piano: he utilized the skills of an advanced player in the simple chord progressions of rock tunes, and the effect was magical!

Here's how I found out about Roy Bittan: there had been some buzz in the news about this new guy, Bruce Springsteen, and some friends wanted to see him when he came to Toronto, so we lined up in the freezing cold outside an auditorium at Seneca College (we had to go into an ice arena to warm up, that's how cold it was outside) and were finally let in an hour late. I'd never heard any of his songs except one on the radio in the car on the way to the show - I don't remember which one. So we were all pretty grumpy from the cold wait when we sat down on folding chairs inside this big warehouse of a concert venue. The lights went down, a spotlight came on stage and this is what I heard:


I had never heard that kind of piano playing in rock music before. In later years I thought I heard other rock pianists who had learned the trick from Bittan, but afterwards I would check the album credits and find that the guest pianist was none other than the Professor himself. It seems no one else has ever perfected it. More shocking to me was realizing, upon listening to several different live versions of 'Jungleland,' that Bittan was actually improvising onstage each time he played it, and no two performances are the same.

BTW the photo is NOT from that night, but it should be marked (c)TheLightinDarkness.com - it was just the only two-shot of Bruce and Roy Bittan I could find.

As a songwriter, I've often struggled with songs that get away from me and try to be something different than I intended.

That probably sounds a little strange, but other songwriters will know exactly what I'm talking about: a snatch of lyric inspires a melody, an idea forms, then while you're guiding it into being it takes on a different quality and turns out to be about something different than you thought it would be.

I'm betting that's what happened to poor Gilbert O'Sullivan when he was writing "Alone Again (Naturally)." How did that come about? The lyric is essentially a suicide note, but the music came out sounding like a comedic Robert Charlebois song. Did Gilbert have a melody in mind but was so depressed that the lyric came out inappropriately sad? Probably not. It sounds like he had this tragic lyric brewing, but being schooled in the art of pop music writing, the bouncy tune was as sad as he was capable of.


I started looking for cover versions, assuming that someone in later years would have identified the heartwrenching depression at the core of the lyric and tried to drag the music in that direction. Surprisingly, although there are several covers out there, some alter the lyrics and others find even less connection between the mood of the music and the lyrics than O'Sullivan's original. Of all the covers the only one I quite liked (aside from my surprise that Donny Osmond actually improved a little on the original in terms of matching the mood to the lyric) was this one by Ian Shaw, who I've never heard of:

Are you polymusical?

Am I what?

Polymusical?

What the hell is that?

A long time ago, I used to listen to an FM radio station that played interesting music from all sorts of artists in all kinds of genres: the DJ might play a new track from John Prine followed by an old Zeppelin favourite, then an album track from Laura Nyro or The Moody Blues. I found that not only did I appreciate the artistry of each one of these pieces, I genuinely looked forward to the variety of the set that was being presented to me.

Now we have formatted radio stations, satellite channels that play nothing but Bruce Springsteen 24/7, pop radio stations that limit themselves to danceable releases from the video-friendly (i.e. young and beautiful) performers in the top 10, and all-classical radio for people who don't care for that kid's stuff.

The assumption seems to be that every person in the music market has decided what type of music they like and they will only listen to that type of music from here on in.

Does that seem reasonable?

Now, most of the musicians I know have learned to play many styles, mostly out of self-preservation in a competitive market, but also because to a player each style of music has its own charms and challenges. I can't believe that this affection for various musical styles is the exclusive domain of the world's musicians; it seems more likely that the average person has to keep flipping from satellite station to satellite station looking for some variety. Now, I'll grant that there are some stations, like The Loft that boast of eclecticism, but for every one of those, there are two dozen others with some narrow range of 'Hits from the '60s' or 'Lite Pop Hits.'

I think this musical balkanization is the result of corporate statisticians being given the levers of control over the artistry of radio broadcasting. At some point it became more profitable to feed a steady stream of Music That Was Popular When Baby Boomers Were Teens to the masses than any other style, so we have chains of stations cranking that out. Other stations carved out their own niches with a single style, and before long it was the accepted model, musical eclecticism having proven less profitable.

My mission (if I can call it that) with these sporadic musings is to remind people that it's OK to love Radiohead AND J.S. Bach, and we won't think ill of you if your iPod shuffles Norah Jones into Whitesnake into Little Feat. And if you're searching for a name for this kind of musical diversity, call yourself:

Polymusical.