First, let’s get this out of the way: the title of this post is a joke. No chord progression has any inherent emotional quality. Musical sadness is a matter of cultural convention, and even within a culture or subculture, sadness is the result of harmony interacting with melody, rhythm, tempo, timbre, phrasing, articulation and other …
Continue reading “The saddest chord progression ever (revisited)”
David Bowie was a great admirer of John Lennon, and like Lennon, Bowie had the gift of making weird songwriting choices sound natural. You don’t necessarily pick up on the weirdness from casual listening, but then you try to learn a Bowie tune, and it is full of surprises. “Changes” is a case in point. …
Being a fan of James Brown can be a challenge, because his classic songs have all been recorded multiple times in different versions with different names on different labels. “I Got To Move” is a case in point. It was first released on In The Jungle Groove in 1986, but was recorded back in 1970. …
I have been teaching songwriting for a lot of years as a means to other ends: with my private guitar and production students, with my music tech students, with my music education students, with my music theory students. But this semester at The New School, I get to teach my first actual songwriting class whose …
My daughter is getting deep into the Beatles, so I’m listening to them a lot with her. I don’t usually listen to the Beatles all that much, because I know their songs backwards and forwards and inside out. But it’s always nice to come back to the songs in a new context, and it’s rare …
Read my entire Talking Heads series here. I connect more to Talking Heads’ Afrobeat and funk-inspired material than to their more “song-y” material, but, I mean, this is the archetypal Talking Heads tune, so I can’t not write about it. “Psycho Killer” is part of a particular family of Talking Heads songs that also includes …
Since my kids continue to be obsessed with David Byrne’s American Utopia, I have Talking Heads on the brain. Here’s one of their best songs ever, produced by the band members themselves. Here’s the delightful version from Stop Making Sense. As David Byrne says in his interview with himself, “I try to write about small …
My kids continue to be absolutely obsessed with David Byrne’s American Utopia. I am especially surprised by how attached they are to “Don’t Worry About The Government.” Here’s the original version, from the first Talking Heads album. Here’s a live performance from The Old Grey Whistle Test:
I go way, way back with Talking Heads. The first band I was ever in did “And She Was” as an acoustic folk number. My wife, who is awesome, recently took me on a date to see American Utopia on Broadway. You can see the fantastic filmed version directed by Spike Lee on HBO. Like …
In Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity, we include a series of project plans that are designed to scaffold student creativity. If you sit someone down in front of an empty DAW session and tell them to be creative, they are likely to be paralyzed by uncertainty or anxiety. It works …
