Journal tags: songs

So Frostapalooza happened on Saturday.

It was joyous!

It all started back in July of last year when I got an email from Brad:

Next summer I’m turning 40, and I’m going to use that milestone as an excuse to play a big concert with and for all of my friends and family. It’ll sorta be like The Last Waltz, but with way more web nerds involved.

Originally it was slated for July of 2024, which was kind of awkward for me because it would clash with Belfast Trad Fest but I said to mark me down as interested. Then when the date got moved to August of 2024, it became more doable. I knew that Jessica and I would be making a transatlantic trip at some point anyway to see her parents, so we could try to combine the two.

In fact, the tentative plans we had to travel to the States in April of 2024 for the total solar eclipse ended up getting scrapped in favour of Brad’s shindig. That’s right—we chose rock’n’roll over the cosmic ballet.

Over the course of the last year, things began to shape up. There were playlists. There were spreadsheets. Dot voting was involved.

Anyone with any experience of playing live music was getting nervous. It’s hard enough to rehearse and soundcheck for a four piece, but Brad was planning to have over 40 musicians taking part!

We did what we could from afar, choosing which songs to play on, recording our parts and sending them onto Brad. Meanwhile Brad was practicing like hell with the core band. With Brad on bass and his brother Ian on drums for the whole night, we knew that the rhythm section would be tight.

A few months ago we booked our flights. We’d fly into to Boston first to hang out with Ethan and Liz (it had been too long!), then head down to Pittsburgh for Frostapalooza before heading on to Florida to meet up with Jessica’s parents.

When we got to Pittsburgh, we immediately met up with Chris and together we headed over to Brad’s for a rehearsal. We’d end up spending a lot of time playing music with Chris over the next couple of days. I loved every minute of it.

The evening before Frostapalooza, Brad threw a party at his place. It was great to meet so many of the other musicians he’d roped into this.

Then it was time for the big day. We had a whole afternoon to soundcheck, but we needed it. Drums, a percussion station, a horn section …not to mention all the people coming and going on different songs. Fortunately the tech folks at the venue were fantastic and handled it all with aplomb.

We finished soundchecking around 5:30pm. Doors were at 7pm. Time to change into our rock’n’roll outfits and hang out backstage getting nervous and excited.

Right before showtime, Brad gave a heartfelt little speech.

Then the fun really began.

I wasn’t playing on the first few songs so I got to watch the audience’s reaction as they realised what was in store. Maybe they thought this would be a cute gathering of Brad and his buddies jamming through some stuff. What they got was an incredibly tight powerhouse of energy from a seriously awesome collection of musicians.

I had the honour of playing on five songs over the course of the night. I had an absolute blast! But to be honest, I had just as much fun being in the audience dancing my ass off.

Oh, I was playing mandolin. I probably should’ve mentioned that.

The first song I played on was The Weight by The Band. There was a real Last Waltz vibe as Brad’s extended family joined him on stage, along with me and and Chris.

Later I hopped on stage as one excellent song segued into another—Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

I’ve loved this song since the first time I heard it. In the dot-voting rounds to figure out the set list, this was my super vote.

You know the way it starts with that single note tremelo on the guitar? I figured that would work on the mandolin. And I know how to tremelo.

Jessica was on bass. Jessi Hall was on vocals. It. Rocked.

I stayed on stage for Radiohead’s The National Anthem complete with horns, musical saw, and two basses played by Brad and Jessica absolutely killing it. I added a little texture over the singing with some picked notes on the mandolin.

Then it got truly epic. We played Wake Up by Arcade Fire. So. Much. Fun! Again, I laid down some tremelo over the rousing chorus. I’m sure no one could hear it but it didn’t matter. Everyone was just lifted along by the sheer scale of the thing.

That was supposed to be it for me. But during the rehearsal the day before, I played a little bit on Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain and Brad said, “You should do that!”

So I did. I think it worked. I certainly enjoyed it!

With that, my musical duties were done and I just danced and danced, singing along to everything.

At the end of the night, everyone got back on stage. It was a tight fit. We then attempted to sing Bohemian Rhapsody together. It was a recipe for disaster …but amazingly, it worked!

That could describe the whole evening. It shouldn’t have worked. It was far too ambitious. But not only did it work, it absolutely rocked!

What really stood out for me was how nice and kind everyone was. There was nary an ego to be found. I had never met most of these people before but we all came together and bonded over this shared creation. It was genuinely special.

Days later I’m still buzzing from it all. I’m so, so grateful to Brad and Melissa for pulling off this incredible feat, and for allowing me to be a part of it.

They’ve had a shitty few years. I know we all had a shitty time over the past few years, but the shit kept on coming for them:

And then in the middle of this traumatic medical emergency, our mentally-unstable neighbor across the street began accosting my family, flipping off our toddler and nanny, racially harassing my wife, and making violent threats. We fled our home for fear of our safety because he was out in the street exposing himself, shouting belligerence, and threatening violence.

After that, Brad started working with Project Healthy Minds. In fact, all the proceeds from Frostapalooza go to that organisation along with NextStep Pittsburgh.

Just think about that. Confronted with intimidation and racism, Brad and Melissa still managed to see the underlying systemic inequality, and work towards making things better for the person who drove them out of their home.

Good people, man. Good people.

I sincererly hope they got some catharsis from Frostapalooza. I can tell you that I felt frickin’ great after being part of an incredible event filled with joy and love and some of the best music I’ve ever heard.

There’s a write-up of Frostapalooza on CSS Tricks and Will Browar has posted his incredible photographs from the night—some seriously superb photography!

When I play music, it’s almost always instrumental. If you look at my YouTube channel almost all the videos are of me playing tunes—jigs, reels, and so on.

Most of those videos were recorded during The Situation when I posted a new tune every day for 200 consecutive days. Every so often though, I’d record a song.

I go through periods of getting obsessed with a particular song. During The Situation I remember two songs that were calling to me. New York was playing in my head as I watched my friends there suffering in March 2020. And Time (The Revelator) resonated in lockdown:

And every day is getting straighter, time’s a revelator.

The song I’m obsessed with right now is called Foreign Lander. I first came across it in a beautiful version by Sarah Jarosz (I watch lots of mandolin videos on YouTube so the algorithm hardly broke a sweat showing this to me).

There’s a great version by Tatiana Hargreaves too. And Tim O’Brien.

I wanted to know more about the song. I thought it might be relatively recent. The imagery of the lyrics makes it sound like something straight from a songwriter like Nick Cave:

If ever I prove false love
The elements would moan
The fire would turn to ice love
The seas would rage and burn

But the song is old. Jean Ritchie collected it, though she didn’t have to go far. She said:

Foreign Lander was my Dad’s proposal song to Mom

I found that out when I came across this thread from 2002 on mudcat.org where Jean Ritchie herself was a regular contributor!

That gave me a bit of vertiginous feeling of The Great Span, thinking about the technology that she used when she was out in the field.

I’ve been practicing Foreign Lander and probably driving Jessica crazy as I repeat over and over and over. It’s got some tricky parts to sing and play together which is why it’s taking me a while. Once I get it down, maybe I’ll record a video.

I spent most of Saturday either singing the song or thinking about it. When I went to bed that night, tucking into a book, Foreign Lander was going ‘round in my head.

Coco—the cat who is not our cat—came in and made herself comfortable for a while.

I felt very content.

A childish little rhyme popped into my head:

With a song in my head
And a cat on my bed
I read until I sleep

I almost got up to post it as a note here on my website. Instead I told myself to do it the morning, hoping I wouldn’t forget.

That night I dreamt about Irish music sessions. Don’t worry, I’m not going to describe my dream to you—I know how boring that is for everyone but the person who had the dream.

But I was glad I hadn’t posted my little rhyme before sleeping. The dream gave me a nice little conclusion:

With a song in my head
And a cat on my bed
I read until I sleep
And dream of rooms
Filled with tunes.

This Is My Jam was a lovely website. Created by Hannah and Matt in 2011, it ran until 2015, at which point they had to shut it down. But they made sure to shut it down with care and consideration.

In many ways, This Is My Jam was the antithesis of the prevailing Silicon Valley mindset. Instead of valuing growth and scale above all else, it was deliberately thoughtful. Rather than “maximising engagement”, it asked you to slow down and just share one thing: what piece of music are you really into right now? It was up to you to decide whether “right now” meant this year, this month, this week, or this day.

I used to post songs there sporadically. Here’s a round-up of the twelve songs I posted in 2013. There was always some reason for posting a particular piece of music.

I was reminded of This Is My Jam recently when I logged into Spotify (not something I do that often). As part of the site’s shutdown, you could export all your jams into a Spotify playlist. Here’s mine.

Listening back to these 50 songs all these years later gave me the warm fuzzies.

The three-part almost nine-hour long documentary Get Back is quite fascinating.

First of all, the fact that all this footage exists is remarkable. It’s as if Disney had announced that they’d found the footage for a film shot between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.

Still, does this treasure trove really warrant the daunting length of this new Beatles documentary? As Terence puts it:

There are two problems with this Peter Jackson documentary. The first is that it is far too long - are casual fans really going to sit through 9 hours of a band bickering? The second problem is that it is far too short! Beatles obsessives (like me) could happily drink in a hundred hours of this stuff.

In some ways, watching Get Back is liking watching one of those Andy Warhol art projects where he just pointed a camera at someone for 24 hours. It’s simultaneously boring and yet oddly mesmerising.

What struck myself and Jessica watching Get Back was how much it was like our experience of playing with Salter Cane. I’m not saying Salter Cane are like The Beatles. I’m saying that The Beatles are like Salter Cane and every other band on the planet when it comes to how the sausage gets made. The same kind of highs. The same kind of lows. And above all, the same kind of tedium. Spending hours and hours in a practice room or a recording studio is simultaneously exciting and dull. This documentary captures that perfectly.

I suppose Peter Jackson could’ve made a three-part fly-on-the-wall documentary series about any band and I would’ve found it equally interesting. But this is The Beatles and that means there’s a whole mythology that comes along for the ride. So, yes, it’s like watching paint dry, but on the other hand, it’s paint painted by The Beatles.

What I liked about Get Back is that it demystified the band. The revelation for me was really understanding that this was just four lads from Liverpool making music together. And I know I shouldn’t be surprised by that—the Beatles themselves spent years insisting they were just four lads from Liverpool making music together, but, y’know …it’s The Beatles!

There’s a scene in the Danny Boyle film Yesterday where the main character plays Let It Be for the first time in a world where The Beatles have never existed. It’s one of the few funny parts of the film. It’s funny because to everyone else it’s just some new song but we, the audience, know that it’s not just some new song…

Christ, this is Let It Be! You’re the first people on Earth to hear this song! This is like watching Da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa right in front of your bloody eyes!

But truth is even more amusing than fiction. In the first episode of Get Back, we get to see when Paul starts noodling on the piano playing Let It Be for the first time. It’s a momentous occasion and the reaction from everyone around him is …complete indifference. People are chatting, discussing a set design that will never get built, and generally ignoring the nascent song being played. I laughed out loud.

There’s another moment when George brings in the song he wrote the night before, I Me Mine. He plays it while John and Yoko waltz around. It’s in 3/4 time and it’s minor key. I turned to Jessica and said “That’s the most Salter Cane sounding one.” Then, I swear at that moment, after George has stopped playing that song, he plays a brief little riff on the guitar that sounded exactly like a Salter Cane song we’re working on right now. Myself and Jessica turned to each other and said, “What was that‽”

Funnily enough, when we told this to Chris, the singer in Salter Cane, he mentioned how that was the scene that had stood out to him as well, but not for that riff (he hadn’t noticed the similarity). For him, it was about how George had brought just a scrap of a song. Chris realised it was the kind of scrap that he would come up with, but then discard, thinking there’s not enough there. So maybe there’s a lesson here about sharing those scraps.

Watching Get Back, I was trying to figure out if it was so fascinating to me and Jessica (and Chris) because we’re in a band. Would it resonate with other people?

The answer, it turns out, is yes, very much so. Everyone’s been sharing that clip of Paul coming up with the beginnings of the song Get Back. The general reaction is one of breathless wonder. But as Chris said, “How did you think songs happened?” His reaction was more like “yup, accurate.”

Inevitably, there are people mining the documentary for lessons in creativity, design, and leadership. There are already Medium think-pieces and newsletters analysing the processes on display. I guarantee you that there will be multiple conference talks at UX events over the next few years that will include footage from Get Back.

I understand how you could watch this documentary and take away the lesson that these were musical geniuses forging remarkable works of cultural importance. But that’s not what I took from it. I came away from it thinking they’re just a band who wrote and recorded some songs. Weirdly, that made me appreciate The Beatles even more. And it made me appreciate all the other bands and all the other songs out there.

Here are five songs that came out in 2018. I enjoyed hearing them. Maybe you will like them too.

1. Comeback Kid by Sharon Van Etten.
2. Lights Shine by The Equatorial Group.
3. As A Man by Anna Calvi.
4. We Appreciate Power by Grimes.
5. Me & My Dog by boygenius.

Today was a Salter Cane practice day. It was a good one. We tried throwing some old songs at our new drummer, Emily. They stuck surprisingly well. Anomie, Long Gone, John Hope …they all sounded pretty damn good. To be honest, Emily was probably playing them better than the rest of us.

It was an energetic band practice so by the time I got home, I was really tired. I kicked back and relaxed with the latest copy of Spaceflight magazine from the British Interplanetary Society.

Then I went outside and watched the International Space Station fly over my house.

Richard has published his annual round-up of the past year’s music available, as usual, on CD for anyone willing to reciprocate. It’s a great idea that always reminds me of Thurston Moore’s essay in Wired magazine on the subject of mix tapes:

Once again, we’re being told that home taping (in the form of ripping and burning) is killing music. But it’s not: It simply exists as a nod to the true love and ego involved in sharing music with friends and lovers. Trying to control music sharing — by shutting down P2P sites or MP3 blogs or BitTorrent or whatever other technology comes along — is like trying to control an affair of the heart. Nothing will stop it.

Inspired by my esteemed colleague’s example, I hereby present a short list of songs from some of my favourite albums of 2006. To say that I bought all these songs would be stretching the truth beyond its elastic limit.

• Forty Dollars from the album Powder Burns by The Twilight Singers
• Off The Hook from the album Cansei de Ser Sexy by CSS
• Britney’s Massive Hole by Divide and Kreate
• Map of the Problematique from the album Black Holes and Revelations by Muse.
• Way Out from the album Show Your Bones by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• Black Swan from the album The Eraser by Thom Yorke
• Honey Child What Can I Do? from the album Ballad of the Broken Seas by Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan
• O Mary Don’t You Weep from the album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions by Bruce Springsteen