I love when my songwriting students drop albums

A student in my Song Factory class at the New School a couple of years ago has just released his first album. His style is outside my usual listening tastes, but I admire how personal and specific his tracks are: the found sounds, the synth bleeps, the noisy analog tape recording, the layered vocals.

Carson loves intentionally detuned guitars and synths. Check out the last song, “Hurry”, which has a seasick pitch wobble like a warped record. Every time you think that the creative possibilities of rock have been exhausted, someone like Carson comes along and says, okay, but what about the universe of pitches in between the piano keys? It was a real joy having this guy in class, and I’m glad everyone else gets to enjoy his music too.

Satisfaction

I am normally resistant to writing about this kind of overexposed Boomer anthem, but it occurred to me that it would be an interesting tune to analyze on the first day of pop aural skills class, because it’s both simple and harmonically interesting.

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It Takes Two

In 1972, James Brown produced a single for one of his backup singers, Lyn Collins, called “Think (About It)”.

If you listen to this without any context, it sounds like a perfectly fine funk song with an unusual rubato introduction. But then, at 1:22, there’s suddenly that break, followed immediately by that hook. Sing it with me, 80s kids.

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Bob Weir tribute on MusicRadar

I drew on some of my previous Grateful Dead analyses for my newest MusicRader column, Bob Weir in Five Songs and a Jam.

The plan for Pop Theory II and Pop Aural Skills II this semester

This semester I am once again teaching pop theory and aural skills at NYU. I have done some previous reflections on these classes. The students are undergrads, mostly studying instrumental and vocal performance, songwriting and music technology. They range in stylistic background from pop to rock to jazz to R&B to hip-hop to musical theater, and there are also a few escapees from the classical side.

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RIP Bob Weir

Bob Weir’s organically quirky songwriting is one of the central building blocks of my musical understanding. Here’s a solo guitar rendition of my favorite of his tunes.

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Season two of the podcast

I took a long break from podcasting, not intentionally, just focusing on other things. I guess it makes sense to call the 30 episodes I did last year the first season, and the latest episode the beginning of the second season. Happy listening!

Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat? by Dr. Ethan Hein

Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the street

Read on Substack

Things I wrote in 2025

This year I did a lot of rewriting and refining things I had previously written: for my classes, for MusicRadar columns, and for this web site here. I started a podcast, too. Recording and editing it is a lot of work, but it is extremely satisfying creatively and I’m hoping it will find its audience. Here are some of the episodes that I think came out the best:

I taught a new aural skills class at NYU, Advanced Popular Music Transcription. Here’s how it went. I also continued teaching other pop theory and aural skills classes. There was a lot of overlap between things we talked about in class and things I wrote about here and talked about on the podcast.

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Mr Tambourine Man

I grew up with a cassette copy of Bringing It All Back Home. It was the first Bob Dylan album that I remember hearing, and I knew that my Boomer parents and classic-rock-loving peers revered it. That said, people definitely respected Bob more than they enjoyed him. I did enjoy a lot of Bringing It All Back Home, though I had no idea what any of the songs were supposed to be about. I liked the melodies, though, and Bob’s singing didn’t put me off. I thought “Mr Tambourine Man” was intriguing, seemingly weighted with some deep countercultural significance that I wasn’t privy to.

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All of Me

My students and I tend to think of all pre-rock American popular songs as being “jazz”, because that’s the context in which we tend to encounter them. However, jazz was an artistic outgrowth of popular song, and it’s worth seeing how those tunes existed before jazz musicians began interpreting them. The jazz pianist, composer and educator Ethan Iverson has a great resource on the repertoire of core standards. Iverson recommends that you start your journey by looking at the original sheet music, and he includes a bunch of representative examples.

“All of Me” is from the third decade of Iverson’s collection. That meant that it was a “modern” tune at one time, compared to truly archaic standards like “My Melancholy Baby” or “Tea For Two.” The sheet music for “All of Me” is full of delightful surprises. First, there’s the helpful tuning chart for ukulele or “Banjulele Banjo”. Then there’s this verse: “You took my kisses and you took my love, you taught me how to care…” The part of the tune we all know, the “chorus”, finally starts at the bottom of the second page.

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