It’s the time of year for holidays… and vacations!
Songs and Sonics is also taking a vacation. Happy holidays, and see you in a bit!
-Jeff
December 21, 2011
December 16, 2011
Stocking stuffer: Korg Monotron
Here’s a nice stocking stuffer for the synthesizer geek — a Korg Monotron!
They can be found online for around $30. I’ve not used one, I don’t have a need for one, and I have no affiliation with Korg — just thought this was a cool little gadget.
December 14, 2011
Giving it Away: How Free Music Makes More Than Sense
I’m not a fan of Spotify because I can’t see it being a part of a sustainable business model for non-touring recording artists.
Songwriter Derek Webb articulates this position in a must-read blog post, Giving it Away: How Free Music Makes More Than Sense.
What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.
September 10, 2011
Interview: Christopher Greenberg from Hong Kong in the 60s
Electro-futuristic pop songwriter • producer • arranger • guitarist • vocalist • keyboardist
Which singers do you especially admire?
My favourite singers are generally those who convey a lot of emotion and depth in a very understated manner. Joao Gilberto and Trish Keenan (RIP) from Broadcast are two good examples of this, as I feel that the reserved way in which they sing makes the feelings they convey more intense and moving. These days, I also have a particular weakness for singers with soft, breathy, mellifluous voices. As I imagine a lot of other musicians would, I’d absolutely love to be able to sing like Colin Blunstone or Art Garfunkel!
What’s the most recent record you’ve bought?
“In The Morning We’ll Meet” by Giorgio Tuma (on Elefant Records). Perfect pop that is beautifully breezy and bittersweet in a way that seemingly only Italians can achieve. Sadly, I feel like true believers and practitioners of classic pop are doomed to obscurity nowadays, but I honestly believe that the single from this album, “New Fabled Stories”, is one of the most beautiful and unforgettable songs I’ve ever heard.
What’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to you?
To tell you the truth, whenever anyone we don’t know personally says something nice about our music, it still totally floors us. I guess the most flattering thing of all has been when we’ve been lucky enough to receive positive comments from other musicians we love and respect. As far as we’re concerned, the feelings we get from the music and art we love are what makes life worth living. To hear that we’ve created a similar feeling for listeners with our music (even if only for a handful of people) is far beyond anything we could have hoped for when we started the band.
Where did you come up with the idea for your featured song?
I came up with the initial ideas for this track, “Softly Sung”, on a battered old Casiotone MT-205, just messing about over the preset rhythms. I normally figure that if the chords and melodies still sound decent coming out of this rather limited instrument, then they probably have potential! The only concrete idea I had for the song in advance was that it would be nice to do a song that wasn’t in 4/4. I think that classic six-time ’60s pop songs like “The Boy” by The Shangri-Las (as well as Julee Cruise’s later developments of this style) were probably in the back of my mind when I was fooling around with the original idea.
Listen to the featured song!
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September 2, 2011
Interview: Marc Sirdoreus from Marc with a C
Indie pop songwriter • vocalist • guitarist
Who were your musical influences at an early age?
I’d say the five artists that really did it for me when I was a kid were The Who, The Monkees, Duran Duran (pre-Notorious), Pink Floyd and Yes. And I think it shows. I tend to favor somewhat Townshendian attack-banjo-strums for guitar, my voice clearly picked up on the vibrato of one Davy Jones, and it’d be fair to say that any sensibilities for vocal harmonies that I came up with are certainly heavily influenced by Simon Le Bon’s (rather underappreciated) knack for layering his own voice and still making the harmonies sound thick, huge and linear. By the time I was nine, I had pretty much every album by all of these artists, and I find that they are the catalogs that I return to for both fun and inspiration most often now.
Especially when I’m sick. If I’m feeling under the weather, my “musical comfort food” is almost always an album called “So Red The Rose” by Arcadia, a Duran Duran side project.
Is music work or play?
It depends on who you are, what your goals are, and how crazy you want to drive yourself. There should always be at least a small modicum of fun or recreation that overtakes you when you create, but showing up for gigs on time? That’s work. Calling booking agents? More work. Carrying on when you’re ill? That’s the very definition of a job, right there. If you’re not having a good time, it’s clearly work. And if you’re not having a good time, I don’t know why you’re playing for people.
You see, I understand to an extent when people say “I made this music for myself, and I could care less if you like it”, but that begs the question: “Then why did you go through the trouble of mass producing it”?
I can see that it was fun to write the song in those situations, and it was probably fun to make the demo, too. But why’d you bother showing it to anyone? Wouldn’t it have been more effective to make the creation and hoard it if you are unfettered by anyone’s reaction to your art?
In summation, if you don’t do some work, play probably cannot exist. And work can turn into play if you handle yourself right. It can also just as easily change courses back into work when you are no longer having fun.
Do you feel that the album format is dead, or not as important as it used to be?
It’s never going to die completely, but unfortunately, the album format is boring to a large number of people now. Many people want to get the songs of yours that they like in bite-size chunks. And since we’re now seeing an entire generation come of age that may have never, ever had a compact disc in their household at all, you can’t expect those kids to look at a record, a tape, a CD or an 8-track and think to themselves “Gosh, I bet that the time limitations of this clunky format produce some really stunning art”. Why would they?
The album format is not all-encompassingly dead, and it will probably always exist (and be popular with) a small minority of collectors and musical product fetishists, but we’re at the point where we don’t have the attention span to let Jessie J complete her big hit single on the 2011 Video Music Awards before we have to cut to a Clearasil ad. That doesn’t really speak in favor of people coming back around to hearing music by one artist in 35-50 minute bursts in an order deemed suitable by the aforementioned creative party.
Also, typing that last paragraph out breaks my heart. Albums are really what I fell in love with about music first. Context is everything.
Could you provide a little bit of context to your featured song?
Sure! The song is called “Goodnight, Miss Oliver”, and it’s from my new album, which is a ten-song story called “Mother****ers be Bull****tin’”. In this track, Brian (the lead character) has recently been dumped by his girlfriend Jenny Oliver. They’re having a heated post-breakup exchange via instant messenger, and he learns that Jenny is claiming to be pregnant. They’ve been cyber stalking each other, and both parties are mad that the other one has been “creeping” on them.
(Fun fact: the backing vocals in the final chorus are completely inspired by all of Kirsty MacColl’s “sha-la-la” background singing throughout her catalog. I heart Kirsty.)
Listen to the featured song!
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September 1, 2011
Interview: John Lane from Expo
Electronic retro-futuristic pop songwriter • producer • vocalist • keyboardist
How much of your songs pull from your life, and how much of it is fictional?
It’s a healthy mixture, I guess. I’m incapable of being too raw and too exposing in what I write song-wise. So some examples (songs from 40 SLEEPS) of blending real life and fiction would be “Canoe Sinking Canoe” – that’s marriage-related but obscured by sinking canoes, captains, mermaids, etc. Plus I enjoy applying the fictional side because then the listener can apply his or her own interpretation to it a bit. Only someone like Bob Dylan or John Lennon can scream, autobiographically, “I’m in pain” really convincingly and I just wouldn’t sound convincing, ha!
What’s your writing process like?
I constantly have new ideas but it’s just a matter of taking the time to grab ‘em and commit them to paper or recording (in demo form). But I guess sometimes the ‘germ of an idea’ stage feels like ‘no new ideas’ if it’s not fully-formed. The song “The Swear Jar” began with words in a notebook – which I wrote while walking home during a cold night. So I scribbled,
“Blow your trumpet, humble child/You’ll be heard for a country mile.
Tip the swear jar on your way out/ fortune-hunters disappear in doubt.”I kind of knew what it meant, although not 100 percent. It was more of a feeling in my bones. So if I can grab the feeling and wrestle it down, that’s a decent start for use at a later time.
Where do you find your creative inspiration?
Gosh, I find creative inspiration from anything! You gotta keep your antenna up at all times, as you know. But some immediate sources come to mind:
My partner in Expo, Christian, is a direct, immense inspiration. He’s recorded a lot of music before we began working together, and the things he’s done and continues to do with me guide and inspire me.
My cousin, Sean, helped on the last 4 songs we recorded for this album, and he’s inspired me greatly too, in terms of being analytical about what you’re doing and also getting into the ‘nervous system’ of a song.
My brother, Mathew, with whom we’ve been in groups together in the past, has impeccable musical taste and is like-minded; he writes beautiful songs too, so I try to step up my A-game to impress him.
Hmm, also on this list is Rob Gibson, a.k.a. Mister Fusty. Whatever he commits to record is astounding; I’m a big fan and friend, and at various times I’ve been (probably unsuccessfully on my part) influenced from him musically.
Where did you come up with the idea for your featured song?
“Dreaming of Bears” started sometime in 2008. I was on vacation with my family in the mountains in New Jersey, near the Jersey and New York border somewhere in the Oranges. Very woods-y and country. My mother-in-law rented a condo there and I remember she told us how the bears got into the trash at night. Being impressionable, I went to sleep that night and had a nightmare about bears breaking into the condo and terrifying us. In the morning, I wrote down the title of the song and some random lyrics. Then the song became this benign twist on the nightmare – about bears breaking into the house and the warden’s desk at the Parks & Rec, simply looking for honey and pausing to play a game of poker (“the cubby hides the joker”); when morning arrives and the sun breaks, the bears trundle off. So lyrically, it’s almost a kids’ song and musically I was massively influenced by The Beatles, listening to a lot of ‘Rubber Soul’ around that time which influenced the background vocals. Good fun. Christian’s guitar work is superb, but the zinger is that ukulele which he threw in and made me fall on the floor because of its guileless beauty.
Listen to the featured song!
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August 27, 2011
Hello from DJ J-Bot!
Welcome to the Songs and Sonics blog. I’m your host, DJ J-Bot. I was created by Jeff Boller, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from The Simple Carnival. He’s a pretty busy guy, so he built me to manage his blog.
If you’re a songwriter or recording musician, you’re at the right place. This blog is about providing fuel for your creative endeavors. Jeff has loaded my memory bank with hundreds of songwriting and production tricks that he’s discovered over the years. These tricks have worked for him in his studio — they might work for you too.
Jeff is also allowing me to interview other artists about their music-making process. My data bank is filled with hundreds of interview questions, and Jeff has no idea what I will ask. Please support the artists who are interviewed here by purchasing their music.
If you’d like to know more about the guy who built me, you can read about The Simple Carnival here. Better yet, you can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ (do a search for “Jeff Boller” and look for an alien picture).
