Betty Davis and the blues sus4

I heard this Betty Davis song while I was doing a shift at the Park Slope Food Coop and the guitar riff grabbed my ears. In this post, I explain why, and what the riff can tell us about blues harmony.

First of all: is this music blues? You might argue that it’s a funk song. It is a funk song, but Tony Bolden’s book Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk makes the case that, well, it’s right there in the title. The sixteenth-note swing of funk is different from the eighth-note shuffle of the blues, but they share the same harmonic structure, and the same general cultural context. Betty Davis makes the connection explicit in this song, which is all about her and her family’s love of the blues. Continue reading “Betty Davis and the blues sus4”

Warp factor

In this post, I dig into a profound and under-appreciated expressive feature of Ableton Live: warp markers, the “handles” that enable you to grab hold of audio and stretch it precisely. Warp markers have practical applications for getting your grooves sounding the way you want, but they also open up unexpected windows into the nature of musical time itself.

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Psycho Killer

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 “And She Was”, “Cities” and “Don’t Worry About The Government“: a collage of simple musical ideas that do not have any obvious relationship to each other. This makes the songs feel comfortingly familiar within each section while also feeling jarringly weird every time they move from one section to another.

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Crosseyed And Painless

Since I’m stuck in my apartment with Covid for a while, looks like I have plenty of time to continue my Talking Heads series. Here’s one of their funkiest and most Afrobeat-sounding tracks.

David Byrne always speak-sings to an extent, but this song has an actual rap verse (“Facts are simple and facts are straight…”) Chris Frantz says that he played Byrne “The Breaks” by Kurtis Blow to inspire his delivery. Frantz also says that the song’s title refers to being extremely drunk.

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Take Me To The River

See the complete Talking Heads series

The only cover that Talking Heads ever recorded was a tune co-written by Al Green and his guitarist Teenie Hodges.

Like all Al Green classics, this was produced by the great Willie Mitchell. Teenie’s brothers Charles and Leroy play organ and bass respectively, the drums are by Howard Grimes, the horns are by the Memphis Horns, and the strings are by the Memphis Strings. The Reverend Al dedicated the song to his cousin Junior Parker.

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Making Flippy Floppy

Somebody suggested that I transcribe all the Talking Heads songs. I won’t do that, but I do seem to be in the process of analyzing all of my favorites. There are a bunch! Here’s one. I assume that the title is a sexual euphemism? If so, it’s a weird one.

In addition to the four band members, the track features guitar by Alex Weir and double violin by Lakshminarayana Shankar. According to the album credits, David Byrne is playing percussion. My guess is that he played over a slowed-down track and then they sped it back up. Either that, or he has secretly been a virtuoso drummer this whole time.

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Burning Down The House

Here is the closest Talking Heads ever came to a legitimate pop hit, their only song to crack the Billboard Top Ten. It isn’t as conceptually or musically groundbreaking as “Once In A Lifetime“, but it contains depths of its own.

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Once In A Lifetime

Here is what might possibly be my single favorite song in the world:

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Lonely Woman

I have always had a hard time with Ornette Coleman, but I love “Lonely Woman”, because it manages to be both extremely weird and extremely catchy.

Notice that at 2:09 during Ornette’s solo, someone goes “Woo!” Rightly so.

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The tale of my PhD

As of last week, I am the proud recipient of a doctorate in music education from NYU. It was quite a journey! (Isn’t it always?) The official part took me six years, but the whole process really took more like ten years, or twenty, or thirty, depending on how you count. In this post I’ll do my best to tell the story of how I got here. Let’s start at the end, with my defense. Meet my advisor Alex Ruthmann, my distinguished committee members Matthew Thibeault and Charlton McIlwain, and my outside readers Jason Thompson and Nancy Smithner:

You can read my dissertation here, and listen to the mixtape here. 

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