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I have one friend who’s a full-time professional singer-songwriter, touring on the lesbian folk circuit. She puts out albums once in a while but those aren’t a major source of revenue; they seem mostly to serve as souvenirs from her gigs. She supplements her touring income with some freelance non-musical work around the sides. Her life is possible because a) she’s just unbelievably good at what she does, b) she’s well-connected to a warm circle of fellow singer-songwriters who form a mutually supportive scene, and c) she doesn’t mind living on the road for long spans of time. I did a little light touring with a band that she was also in, and it just killed me. I couldn’t take it, even for a few days at a time. I need to be close to home. So no touring musician life for me.

Another singer-songwriter of my acquaintance also tours constantly, though not in support of her own work. She’s a horn player who does gigs with a few very high-profile pop acts, several medium-level bands in wildly different styles and many local and session gigs around the sides. Her own material doesn’t seem to be much of a source of income, though that may change someday. She can make her career work because she’s a highly versatile and well-trained musician adaptable to any situation. Also, she has a master’s, so she can get good teaching jobs. She’s also easy to get along with, and has a high tolerance for life on the road. There are times when I envy her, but I get upset when I have to play music I don’t like, and she has a high enough level of professionalism to be able to enjoy whatever she’s playing, so she’s better suited to her life than I would be.

A trumpet player and singer I know has been fronting a series of bands for several years. His current one substantially supports themselves through busking, along with occasional tours, private parties and the like. For several years he mostly paid the bills as a web programmer, and also led percussion classes for corporate groups on company retreats, but has mostly stopped needing to do that. Busking is hard work that doesn’t pay well, so his life is a little on the ascetic side — I admire his commitment tremendously.

A bassist I’ve done a lot of work with has been working cruise ships for the past few years. On the plus side, he gets paid to see the world and play his bass every day. On the minus side, he’s even more nomadic than people who tour, and he has no say about the music that he’s playing. I understand why he likes it but you couldn’t pay me enough.

Other singer-songwriters I know who perform and record at a pro level have day jobs ranging from music therapy to commercial illustration to beer distribution to cartoon voice acting to various kinds of teaching. Some folks also do weddings and DJ gigs, production, film scoring, commercial jingles, musical theater or children’s music. I know very few musicians who have no other kind of job at all; most of them are either independently wealthy, or have very supportive significant others, or simply choose to live in abject poverty.

As for myself, I’ve found that it’s more important to me to play music that I like and that I have artistic control over than it is to be involved in music in any capacity. So I work full-time at the ACLU doing online outreach, a job which I like very much. I produce tracks at night and on the weekend. I gigged really heavily for a number of years but have pretty much completely stopped, because the low pay and general indignity of the live music world isn’t worth it to me anymore. I love teaching lessons and hope to do that forever. I also record and produce other people’s stuff, which sometimes I enjoy, and which sometimes is just as tedious as any other kind of technical work. I love film scoring and theater, and would like to be doing more of it, but in the meantime am content to pursue my own ideas and whims and give away the results on the web: http://soundcloud.com/ethanhein

I guess my point in saying all of this is that there are many different ways to be a musician, and the word “professional” encompasses many different ways of making a living. It’s up to you to figure out what you enjoy, what you can get paid for, and how to juggle it all with the other demands on you as a person. Good luck!

Original post on Quora

My mom is Jewish, so that’s enough for the tribe to have welcomed me as one of their own, but it’s a complex question as to what that membership means. Wikipedia has two separate articles for Judaism and Jews, to distinguish the religion from the ethnicity, and I definitely belong to the ethnicity more than the religion.

My most significant personal connection to the tribe, aside from family Passover seders and Seinfeld appreciation, has come through music, specifically klezmer music. I may not know my way around the Torah, but I know my harmonic minor modes inside and out.

Klezmer is mostly secular, for partying and dancing. Musically it overlaps with sacred Jewish music, but the subject matter tends to be a lot more earthly. A good analogy is the relationship between black gospel music and secular R&B. Jewish sacred music is sung in Hebrew; klezmer songs are usually in Yiddish. Also, klezmer songs usually have more of a dance beat, though they also sometimes make use of the rubato feel you hear in temple.

As jazz has Miles and Coltrane, and rock has the Beatles and the Stones, so klezmer has Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein. Dave is like the Beatles — polished, virtuosic, conversant with many musical styles. Naftule is like the Stones — more raw, more gutsy, inhabiting a single personal style that varies little from song to song. The best introduction to these guys is on the Rough Guide To Klezmer, which combines old-timey traditional music with newer hipster revivalists.

The first two tracks on the Rough Guide are recordings of “Fun Tashlikh,” first the 1990 version by the Klezmatics, then the 1930s or 40s version by Naftule.

The name means “on returning from the river.” “Fun” is related to the German “von,” meaning “from.” Tashlikh is the ritual of casting out your sins on Rosh Hashanah. The Klezmatics version isn’t embeddable, but it’s worth seeking out. It opens with wild shrieking bass clarinet and gets more intense from there. My Jewish relatives aren’t much given to ecstatic states, so it’s nice to hear that at least some parts of the tribe still know how to throw down.

Another standout track from the Rough Guide is “Der Gassen Nigen” by Harry Kandel’s Orchestra, from 1923. I’d love to embed it, but I can’t find it on the web. The tune sounds like a heartbreaking dirge, so I was extremely amused to learn that it’s actually a wedding processional. The name means “the street song,” and it was traditionally played as the bride and groom went back to their house from the temple where they were married. This says a lot about Jewish expectations around marriage. Kidding aside, “Der Gassen Nigun” is one of the most beautiful melodies I’ve ever heard. (The Rough Guide also includes Klezmokum’s maudlin modern version, which, meh.)

“Meron Nign (Tune From Meron)” by The Klezmer Conservatory Band is another Rough Guide standout. It kicks off with a killer unaccompanied mandolin solo that just begs to be sampled. I’ve found a lot of creative inspiration from dropping pieces of it into my tracks.

The only real-life klezmer band I’ve ever been part of was called F Train Klezmer. We weren’t very good. The high point of our performing career was at an old folks’ home in Washington Heights; otherwise we mostly just struggled through traditional material in the trombone player’s living room in Queens. I’ve tried to get various of my other bands interested in klezmer material too, without much success. I’m hoping that this post will draw more klezmer nerds out of the woodwork.

So what’s in this music for me? There’s the historical value — it’s good to know what kind of music my Yiddish-speaking great-grandparents were listening to. Getting into klez was a big bonding moment with my late grandmother, who danced to stuff like Dave and Naftule when she was young.

There’s present-day value too. I dig the sound of exotic Arabic-sounding scales over Western dance music forms. The easiest entry point into klez for Western-trained musicians is the Ahava Raba scale, also known as the phrygian dominant scale, the Freygish mode, and the Hava Nagilah scale. Jazz folks will recognize it as the fifth mode of the harmonic minor scale.

“Fun Tashlikh” uses something like diminished scale in its A section, and lydian dominant in the B section. It’s refreshing to my ears to be reminded that the major scale and its modes aren’t the be-all and end-all of popularly accessible music. Also, it’s cool to discover that flat seconds and fifths aren’t the exclusive province of highbrow artsy music. For all their exoticism, klezmer tunes are perfectly accessible to first-time western listeners.

Klezmer often gets referred to as “Jewish jazz.” This is an appealing name, and it has some basis in reality;Benny Goodman did take clarinet lessons from Dave Tarras. But jazz isn’t really the right analogy. The improvisation in klezmer is mostly variations and embellishments on the melodies, not like the harmonically-guided freeform lines in jazz solos. Klezmer is more like Jewish blues, or Jewish country. The scales are different, but the subject matter is mostly the same. Also, like blues and country, klezmer is full of soulfully expressive microtones.

Digging into klezmer also put me in contact with the music of the New York City Yiddish theater scene, which combined traditional shtetl sounds with American jazz and showtunes. You can hear this music, along with ads for various Lower East Side businesses, courtesy of the Yiddish Radio Project.

I’m especially drawn to the Yiddish vaudevillian Aaron Lebedeff. He was a comedian given to singing in “Yinglish,” going between Yiddish and English in mid-phrase. Here’s one of his big hits, lamenting how confusing America is to the newly-arrived Jewish immigrant. The chorus translates to “What can you do, it’s America.” I feel that way a lot.

My absolute favorite Aaron Lebedeff song is called “I Like She,” which I learned during my F Train Klezmer adventure. It’s pretty much impossible to find online, which is too bad because it’s hilarious. Sample lyrics:

She’s got cheeks like fresh tomatoes
She’s sweet like herring mit potatoes
I like she, and I like she and that’s all.

Klezmer is a distinctly fringe taste in America outside of Jewish hipsters in New York and their most elderly relatives. But it’s making a comeback in its original home in Eastern Europe. When I was in Krakow visiting Anna’s family, the klezmer musicians probably outnumbered the Jews significantly. My great-grandparents were mostly relieved to be putting the shtetl behind them and were eager to embrace American culture. For me, though, American culture has too many empty calories. Outsider music like klezmer, along with blues, jazz and hip-hop, feels a lot more nutritious.

I’ll close with the Klezmatics singing a traditional anthem of brotherly love, “Ale Brider.” Here’s a translation of the lyrics.

Oy, oy, oy, oy!

Her staggeringly ambitious album The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III) is reason to be optimistic for the future of music. The big single is “Tightrope,” featuring Big Boi of Outkast, and the video is worth watching just for the shoes:

The ArchAndroid is not very sample-heavy. Actually, it’s remarkable how much varied live instrumentation it uses. But the few samples in there are killers. The first one that jumped out at me is in “Locked Inside.”

Fifteen seconds in, there’s a sample of the drum intro to Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You.”

There are some classical music references too. The Suite III overture quotes Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” And for me personally, the most surprising and evocative sample comes at the end of “Wondaland.”

The choral singing is an excerpt of “Alleluia” by Randall Thompson.

This piece of music is a choral cliché but for good reason, it’s a beauty. Wikipedia says it was commissioned by the Tanglewood Festival as a fanfare to kick off the festivities in 1940. Randall Thompson didn’t feel very festive, what with the war and all, so he wrote a moody and pensive piece instead. He meant for it to be sung slow, and while conductors rarely obey his tempo instruction, it still has an introspective wistfulness when sung fast. The whole text is the word alleluia, repeated like a mantra, with a single amen at the end. Thompson said that he thought of it as

a very sad piece. The word “Alleluia” has so many possible interpretations. The music in my particular Alleluia cannot be made to sound joyous. It is a slow, sad piece, and…here it is comparable to the Book of Job, where it is written, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

The first time I heard it was the night before I graduated from college. It was a weird night. I felt like a huge blowout party would have been the symbolically appropriate thing, but I didn’t know of any, and I wouldn’t have had much fun if I had gone to one. I felt really strange that night. I’ve since learned that feeling depressed or anxious the night before a graduation is pretty ordinary, especially if you have a complex family. (One of my friends with an even more complex family than mine told me later that she spent the night before her graduation tripping out of her skull; it shocked me then, but it doesn’t now.) I had my entire nuclear family assembled for the occasion, which was a rarity. There was my sister, my mom and stepfather, that was usual. There was also my dad and younger stepfather — having them in the same place as my mom and stepfather was strange. My grandmother was there too, and it was really surreal having her and my dad together. I can’t even think of another occasion when this specific combination of my loved ones was together. Maybe one or two of my birthdays when I was a kid? Certainly it had been a long time. To compound the intense feelings, my stepmother had died seven months before, and that was still hanging over all of us.

So the night before graduation, I felt out-of-body, not depressed exactly, I didn’t even know what that meant yet, but definitely not all present. I had some friends singing in the choral society, so I went to hear them. They sang “Alleluia” and it snapped me right into focus. It was so beautiful I couldn’t believe it. The evening got better, too. Wynton Marsalis was our graduation speaker. After the choral concert, someone grabbed me and told me Wynton was jamming with an alum in one of the music classrooms. He ended up treating us to a bunch of impromptu standards, with this random guy accompanying him gamely, it was pretty magical. Jazz got me through a lot of other difficult emotional stretches in the years following.

Anyway. Years later, I pick up this album by an R&B singer I’ve barely heard of, and there’s this huge walloping mass of associations waiting for me. This is why I love sample-based music. It creates dense webs of association and meaning, and that’s what music is all about. Ms Monáe packs a lot of ideas into this album, it’s wildly dense with them, and you may well find some surprises in it of your own.

Muppet Silly Songs came out in 1984. I was in fourth grade. I think my dad got it for us. He had us on Wednesday nights, when the Muppet Show was on, and I associate the Muppets with him. It must have been weird originally to have him living in his own apartment a few blocks away from us rather than under the same roof, but by fourth grade it had been a few years and the whole thing felt normal. The next year Dad met my stepmother and moved to Roosevelt Island, still in NYC but a much longer and more complicated trip than a walk down 181st street. So Muppet Silly Songs represents the end stage of a happy time for me. A lot of complex feelings there.

I’m at the age where if I were going to be a rock star, it would have happened a while ago. My musician contemporaries are dealing with the end of the rock star years in different ways. Some continue to rock, though maybe on a schedule limited by careers and families. Some move into teaching or music therapy or just set the whole enterprise regretfully aside. And some move into making music for kids. Kimberly West and Daniel Cole, two singers I used to play lead guitar for, have reinvented themselves as a kids’ group called the Rock Doves. It’s an idea that appeals to me. I have some ideas for songs about math and science aimed at geeky kids like myself in the pipeline.

What makes for good kids’ music? First and foremost it has to be good music, period. As a kid, I couldn’t have explained to you why I liked Michael Jackson or the Beatles, but I knew that there was something truer and more important about their music than other stuff I was hearing. The Muppet people know from good music. Behind their silly delivery they had strong tunes with catchy melodies. They drew on a wide palette, centering on showtunes but bringing in everything from jazz to country.

I can see the roots of a lot of my present interests in Muppet Silly Songs. Both “The Rhyming Song” and “I’m My Own Grandpa” are strongly recursive. In “The Rhyming Song” the joke is simple: the song doesn’t rhyme, at all.

“I’m My Own Grandpa” is a more ambitious joke, a logical pretzel knot that wouldn’t be out of place in Gödel, Escher, Bach.

The Muppet guys loved Tin Pan Alley songs. In their version of “Who?” by Jerome Kern, the question in the title is asked by an owl.

The album also includes Kermit The Frog’s rendition of “Lydia The Tattooed Lady.” The Muppet Wiki informs me that it was written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg (who also wrote the songs in The Wizard Of Oz) for the Marx Brothers movie At The Circus. Kermit’s version is less saucy.

As a kid I had no idea what the lyrics were talking about, I just liked the complex rhymes. (I guess it warmed me up for the brainy hip-hop I like now.) Shortly after graduating from college I moved back to New York City. I went to a party at my older stepbrother’s place in the Meatpacking District, and then on my way home roamed around the West Village. It was summer, a warm night, people were out. A guy in a bunny suit rode by on an enormous tricycle singing “Lydia The Tattooed Lady” and I felt that weird mixture of adult sophistication and childishness that I feel often in NYC. It’s the way I feel now, listening to Muppet Silly Songs. Not a comfortable feeling, but one I like.

A big part of my sadness is due to the early death of my dad, who loved Christmas and celebrated it with a total and unironic enthusiasm. Among his fellow investment bankers he presented a Frasier-like highbrow persona, opera-going and cosmopolitan. But he showed his midwestern roots in his lifelong devotion to Garrison Keillor, his love of fireworks and especially his fondness for Christmas kitsch. We stopped going to church after Grandma died. Dad didn’t inherit any of her religious fervor. Or did he? He took Santa Claus and the tree seriously. He loved to play Santa at office Christmas parties and signed half the cards on gifts to us “from Santa” into my college years and the one December past them that he lived. As a little kid I thought it was terrific, but the older I got, the more difficult it got. The holiday ritual I liked the best was the Elvis Christmas Album.

The high point is “Blue Christmas” – how hot is that? The male choir is due for a comeback.

We were listening to it on cassette when I was a kid. Later on when I met Anna it turns out her family had an Elvis Christmas Album ritual too (I guess a lot of people do.) She had the CD reissue that includes Elvis singing a few gospel tunes, including “Peace In The Valley”, which I dimly remember from church and which I love to pieces. What a chord progression.

On a more intellectual tip, Dad made an annual ritual out of watching his VHS copy of maybe the best ever adaptation of A Christmas Carol, the 1984 TV one with George C Scott as Scrooge. This is the one with the scrupulously accurate period clothes, furniture and so on. Here’s the scariest scene.

Our VHS cassette was a magnificent unintentional 80s time capsule. Before the movie started there was a snippet of CBS news, Dan Rather giving an update on something Gorbachev-related, right at the peak of the Cold War, when we were all terrified of the USSR. The broadcast was sponsored by IBM, and their ads featuring their then-new smoking hot 80286 processor-based PCs got more and more comical with the passage of time. But as the situation with our stepmother’s health deteriorated, this tape became sad. After a particularly ugly bout of fighting one year, Dad went into the den to watch it by himself. During the short interval between when she died and Dad did, I don’t really remember what happened with the Christmas Carol ritual, but whatever it was, it didn’t get easier. Eleven years later I doubt I could bear to watch it through.

If you know me, you might be wondering where my Jewish mother and the rest of the tribe fit into all this. Mom actually loves Christmas and celebrates it every bit as intently as Dad did. The deal when we were kids was that Dad got us through Christmas Eve, and then dropped us off that night so we could wake up and do Christmas morning with Mom and Ralph. This handoff was sometimes the occasion for the playing out of ugly custodial business. Post-Dad, Mom wanted to carry on with traditional Christmas as usual, maybe feeling a little relieved not to have to compete for attention. But it hasn’t worked out that way. For most of my twenties I preferred to just not have anything to do with any of it. Thanksgiving, yes, by all means, I never miss it, I love the family togetherness and all that. Christmas, on the other hand, just carried too much emotional freight.

My effort to reclaim the culture of late December for myself began with the Ellington Nutcracker. I found out about it from the Amherst jazz ensemble, who played big chunks of it in a concert one year. I almost fell out of my seat. Sam Woodyard’s hand drums in “Sugar Rum Cherry” are the sexiest thing imaginable. (They make a great sample.) Amherst hosted an Ellington symposium a couple years after I graduated. Stanley Crouch gave a talk about sixties Ellington, and he had this to say about Sam Woodyard:

Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard!

This year my sister is back in NYC for the first time in many years. We’re going to do the big Christmas Eve thing at our house, combining it with Anna’s birthday. My mom and stepfather are even coming. This will be the first time ever, and I mean ever, that they’ve been willing to do Christmas on our turf. We’ll play the Ellington Nutcracker and some Elvis, and I expect that I’ll be maudlin and depressed for part of it, but hopefully not too much. And having written this, I’m already feeling more optimistic about the whole thing.

Mad Men is well-made television, but so is plenty of other television. Why is this particular show so compelling to me and so many of my buddies? I think it’s that watching Mad Men is like watching a documentary about our parents and grandparents. In particular, Don Draper is a window into our emotionally inaccessible fathers. For me, the generations don’t line up exactly right – in 1963 my dad was only 21 – but it’s close enough for some intense emotional resonances. I feel like I’m looking through a magic window into events that the old photo albums only hint at.

My dad and Don. There’s so much overlap. Both were authority-resistant guys disguised by suits and corporate jobs. Both underwent name changes and had complex parentage. Both earned a lot more money in New York City as adults than they grew up with in middle America. Both were divorced parents of young kids.  Here’s a more detailed rundown of the similarities and differences.

Name changes
Don changed his name from Dick Whitman as a young adult, voluntarily, to escape an abusive family and general abject misery. My dad’s name change was involuntary and happened when he was an infant. He was born John Arthur Rammer, and was given up by his birth parents when his biological father had to go fight world war II. He was named Michael Hein by his adoptive parents, Milo and Phoebe, who raised him in a stable and relatively loving environment. Still, Dad never quite resolved the issue of his adoption. Like Don, he had problems with commitment, with authority, with connection and a sense of belonging. Like Don, he was a smart and talented guy whose rise up the corporate ladder was slowed at times by an unwillingness to be a team player.

Divorce
Again, not quite the same circumstances. My mom is much more Peggy Olsen than Betty Draper.

To my knowledge, Dad never cheated on her (though he did have some serious infidelities in his subsequent relationships.) But there’s some overlap. My sister and I were about the same age as Sally and Bobby Draper when our respective parents split. I don’t remember this scene from my own childhood but it remembers me. With us and the Drapers, it was a similar slow build to a swift and matter-of-fact resolution.

Politics
Dad was younger than Don and more liberal. He went to civil rights marches and in youth was kind of a rabble-rouser, at least by Wisconsin standards. Like Don, he was intrigued by the counterculture but not a member of it.

Fashion
Dad wore standard-issue gray suits to work, not quite as dapper as Don but presentable. On the weekends he lapsed somewhat into his Wisconsin roots: jeans, sweatshirts with cows on them, caps with logos of machinery makers worn without irony. Hard to imagine Don wearing any of that stuff.

Smoking
Dad smoked a pipe in the office, back when that was still allowed. In that regard he was a little more like Paul Kinsey.

Dad wasn’t a cigarette smoker that I’m aware of, though Grandma and Grandpa were. Grandpa eventually quit after jaw cancer, but Grandma was a Draper-level chain smoker until she died.

Drinking
I never witnessed Dad pounding back hard liquor like Don; he was more of a glass or two of wine with dinner kind of guy.

Recklessness and risk-taking
My dad shared Don’s fondness for reckless driving. Dad rode a motorcycle; Don was a half a generation too early for that. Dad didn’t drive drunk that I know of but he did love speeding. He also loved fireworks, which I could imagine Don having a thing for too.

General emotional inaccessibility
I saw Dad bury both of his parents and his second wife and I never saw him shed a tear. I barely remember him ever even mentioning his emotions, much less frankly discussing them. Very Don Draper in that respect.

A couple of other weird similarities between the Mad Men universe and mine. Dad had an accordion and did a little playing. Not as well as Joan, but still.

Any TV show you want to make that functions as an alternate-universe documentary about my family and friends, I’ll obsessively watch it. King Of The Hill has that quality for Dad’s midwestern ancestors. Seinfeld is a window into Mom’s Jewish relatives. Six Feet Under captured some of my family dynamics early on before it exploded into ridiculous melodrama a few seasons in. It’s lonely in modern life. Our tribes are scattered. If I have to use TV as a way to stay in touch, evidently I will.

For most of you reading, the name Kramer will have a different association.

I have a similar build to Michael Richards and some of his birdlike awkwardness. I’ve been here:

In my early twenties I felt like I wanted to start dressing cool but wasn’t sure how to get started. Kramer is a goofy dude but he always looks sharp. He has some of the same fashion sensibilities as my grandfathers. Papa Kramer was tall like me, not a flamboyant dresser but he liked bright colors and patterns. Grandpa Hein had even more adventurous ideas about colors and patterns. Once I started intentionally modeling my wardrobe on Kramer, my personal look completely came together.

Seinfeld is comfort food for me. It simulates hanging out with Mom, the Kramer clan and the majority of my schoolmates. It’s like how King Of The Hill and Garrison Keillor simulate my dad’s family. But Seinfeld has some authenticity problems. Like, we’re supposed to believe that George, Elaine and Kramer aren’t Jewish. Frank and Estelle Costanza are supposed to be Italian? Whatever. Cosmo Kramer? More like Schlomo Kramer. My sister’s nickname for the changing of Jewish names and identities to fit into America is the semantic nosejob.

A few other fakinesses of Seinfeld: the slap bass riff on the soundtrack is a sampling keyboard. Aside from a few outdoor establishing shots, the entire show was shot in Los Angeles, even the street scenes.

But for all its TV fakiness, Seinfeld is sometimes remarkably psychologically truthful.

Sometimes it even has Buddhist wisdom.

“My name is George. I’m unemployed, and I live with my parents.” This kind of confident embracing of one’s own self with all its shortcomings is a powerful thing. It’s the basic psychological strategy at work in Barack Obama’s confessional writing. It conveys and inspires inner strength.

Janet and Michael have similar musical sensibilities. They like jazz harmony. “Remember The Time” uses C7(9) nine for long stretches. Jazz musicians could go to town on that with diminished scale. Janet uses diminished in the chorus of “What Have You Done For Me Lately.”

This song. So much to love about it. The verse melody is an A flat seven sus to A flat loop over an E flat minor ostinato in the synth bass. The chorus follows the E flat diminished lick with the vocal’s unexpected jump to E flat major in the “ooooh yeah.” The bridge is a bummer, but then the overdubbed rap breakdown totally makes up for it. There’s even some bebop piano snaking around back there towards the end.

“What Have You Done For Me Lately” was co-written and produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. They also produced the one track that Janet and Michael co-released as adults. Michael and Janet’s “Scream” is mostly musically sophisticated and sonically futuristic and everything you’d want in a song, but the lyrics are scary. There’s a creepy Disney interlude and some unnerving baby talk during the breakdown section. Wikipedia says “Scream” is directed at the media. Sounds more to me like it was also directed at Michael and Janet’s dad. The B-side to the “Scream” single is called “Childhood.”

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s posthumous GQ profile of Michael includes a description of Michael working ideas with Janet and Randy into a tape recorder at home.

People want to know, Why, when you became a man, did your voice not change? Rather, it did change, but what did it change into? Listening to clips of his interviews through the ’70s, you can hear how he goes about changing it himself. First it deepens slightly, around 1972-73 or so. (Listen to him on The Dating Game in 1972 and you’ll hear that his voice was lower at 14 than it will be at 30.) This potentially catastrophic event has perhaps been vaguely dreaded by the family and label for years. Michael Jackson without his falsetto is not the commodity on which their collective dream depends. But Michael has never known a reality that wasn’t susceptible on some level to his creative powers. He works to develop something, not a falsetto, which is a way of singing above your range, but instead a higher range. He isolates totally different configurations of his vocal cords, finding their crevices, cultivating the flexibility there. Vocal teachers will tell you this can be done, though it’s considered an extreme practice. Whether the process is conscious in Michael’s case is unknowable. He probably evolves it in order to keep singing Jackson 5 songs every night through puberty. The startling effect is of his having imaginatively not so much castrated himself as of womanized himself. He essentially evolves a drag voice. On the early demo for “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” recorded at home with Randy and Janet helping, you can actually hear him work his way into this voice. It is a character, really. “We’re gonna be startin’ now, baby,” he says in a relaxed, moderately high-pitched man’s voice. Then he intones the title, “Don’t stop ’til you get enough,” in a softer, quieter version of basically the same voice. He repeats the line in a still higher register, almost purring. Finally—in a full-on girlish peal—he sings.

Too bad Janet and Michael didn’t do some albums. It’s hard for me to guess what their relationship might have looked like.

My sister and I had a much easier time growing up than the Jacksons. But thinking about them makes me think about musicality among my siblings. My sister, stepbrothers and stepsister are all musical. Growing up in the same house you get exposed to the same music, TV, movies, and all the weird folk memes of childhood. You’re bound to have some similar tastes and influences.

My sister Molly was my first and in some ways best guitar teacher. She herself started with the folk music standard fifteen chords and took it into a super adventurous style: lots of drones, odd time signatures, and unresolved tritones. Her band, the Vest Pocket Psalm, was Molly on guitar and vocals, Liz Werner singing/shouting, and Leo Ferguson on drums. Leo is a jazz virtuoso type who likes hip-hop. The songs were chant-based. I’m not a punk, but this was a sound I could get into. There was mostly no bass player, long before the White Stripes.

I didn’t just learn guitar from Molly. I learned proper hip-hop appreciation too. Molly was on board with hip-hop from day one. I always liked it too, but I got scared away during the Public Enemy to Snoop Dogg transition and didn’t find my way back in until Missy Elliot. Molly’s commitment has never wavered. We’re both on the same page about Auto-tune and sampling. I’m looking forward to busting some tracks when she moves to town next month.

My parents and stepparents loved music when I was growing up, more as spectators than participants.

My mom and stepfather had a lot cool stuff in their collective record and CD collection: Beatles, Motown, Paul Simon, Duke Ellington. They were into the idea of people playing musical instruments in an abstract way, but didn’t partake themselves. They were generally supportive of me and my sister’s efforts, without quite knowing how to involve themselves. Mom is more into musical instruments as decorative objects than functional ones, like the antique pump organ in the living room or the Mongolian horsehair fiddle hanging by the dining room table. Mom and Ralph keep an admirably open mind about new sounds, and have faithfully trooped out to hear us all play in some really avant-garde bands, for which, bless their hearts.

With my dad and stepmother the situation was more complicated. They had a lot of classical music recordings that they listened to regularly. They also kept a lot of musical instruments around the house, which they just about never touched. My dad in particular would have been a natural musician. He loved listening, his tastes ranged from Beethoven to Elvis, he was a natural mathematician and aesthete and had a vivid imagination. When I was a kid, I couldn’t figure out why he would have surrounded himself with musical instruments without wanting to use them.

Things with Dad and Giovanna were tense. They had a complicated relationship from the beginning and as Giovanna’s health deteriorated, it only got more complicated. Anna asked me recently if Dad and Giovanna ever danced. She might as well have asked me if they ever performed animal sacrifices by the light of the full moon. They came from non-dancing households and weren’t in the right emotional place to break with tradition.  As an adult I understand better, but it still makes me sad to think about it.

The centerpiece of Dad and Giovanna’s collection of unused instruments was a beautiful Yamaha digital keyboard with eighty-eight weighted keys, a variety of realistic-sounding patches and an assortment of rhythm loops. It could even walk bass if you played a note or chord. They had some introductory piano methods and approachable classical scores piled up on it, but only aspirationally. I don’t remember Dad or Giovanna so much as switching the keyboard on. When they weren’t around I’d play around with it. I even tried taping some wild synthesized generative freebop. The keyboard is the big one in the photo above. It’s an anchor of my home studio. It makes a great MIDI controller, and some of its built-in sounds are gorgeous.

Dad had an accordion that he did play a little bit. My sister’s fiancé has it now. Giovanna had a beautiful small Celtic harp. This was understood to be off-limits to anyone but her, but as with the piano, she never once touched it. Same with the dulcimer, which I claimed after they died. I tried some strumming around on it that sounded okay. The best results came from sampling it, slowing it down and reversing it.

After Dad died and we were going through his stuff we discovered Grandma’s alto sax. There’s a photo of her when she was young with the alto slung around her neck. This is not the humorless old lady who scolded us for taking the Lord’s name in vain. I’m curious now to hear what kind of music she played on that saxophone. What kind of music did they like in South Dakota in the late Depression years? In addition to his billion classical CDs, Dad had one album by Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys. He never played it for us or mentioned it, we found it after he died. Who knows, maybe Grandma was playing western swing. I wish I could ask them about it.

Dad and Giovanna also kept us kids well-supplied with music toys. We had a series of little synthesizers, including the red Yamaha keytar so beloved by hipsters like the Autotune The News people and Brian on Family Guy. Seth McFarlane’s sense of humor is like what I imagine my dad’s unfiltered stream of consciousness might have looked like.

In my teen years Dad and I drifted further out of touch, but he continued to have a way of anticipating my interests. He gave me a cassette of Howlin’ Wolf in high school. In college he heard me talking about Miles Davis so he steered me into Gil Evans. He found me some live radio performances by the Duke Ellington Orchestra that doctors should be able to prescribe as mood elevators. I’m looking forward to playing Ellington for my kids. As we plan the family of our own, my hope is that we do more participating, less spectating.