The Man Who Sold The World

One of my older kid’s hipster friends introduced him to “The Man Who Sold The World” and he is super into it at the moment. I have been a Bowie fan since forever, but this song was slow to win me over. I have learned to love the song, but I struggle to connect to …

Kumbaya

When you look up “Kumbaya” on Urban Dictionary, you get an adjective meaning “blandly pious and naively optimistic.” This is the sense in which Fox News often uses the word to make fun of bleeding heart liberals like me. I learned the song from numerous earnest white folk singers, many of whom learned it from …

Funky Minuet in G major

In my continuing quest to learn the classical canon through remixing with Ableton Live, I’ve taken on Bach’s Minuet in G major. Which is apparently not by Bach at all, but rather by some guy named Christian Petzold. Live and learn. A minuet is a dance, but in 2018, it’s hard to dance in triple meter. …

Musical simples – Teenage Dream

I’m working with Soundfly on the next installment of Theory For Producers, our ultra-futuristic online music theory course. The first unit covered the black keys of the piano and the pentatonic scales. The next one will talk about the white keys  and the diatonic modes. We were gathering examples, and we needed to find a well-known pop song that …