The New York Times has a new blog, Measure for Measure, which lets songwriters talk about their process. Andrew Bird writes about what goes into penning a new song, "Oh No" [via You Ain't No Picasso]:
What is becoming more challenging of late is dealing with so many fully formed melodies that are unwilling to change their shape for any word. So writing lyrics becomes like running multiple code-breaking programs in your head until just the right word with just the right number of syllables, tone of vowel and finally some semblance of meaning all snap into place.
...
The only thing I don’t care for in this lyric is the “calcified charismatist” — it just feels too clever. I’m known to make up words but this is too heavy-handed. So I’m still searching for the right words. For a while it was “unemployed ex-physicists,” but that’s too typical of something I would write. Lately I’m considering “calcified arhythmitist” or just “arithmatist” — something that conveys a physicist’s sketch or formula for what will revive our harmless sociopath.
Jesse Jarnow takes a left turn on the Maxim/Black Crowes flap:
But it's still disappointing that the Crowes bothered to call for an apology at all, especially given their repeated and obvious yearnings for '70s rock culture, when their beloved Creem magazine was stocked with writers like Richard Meltzer who (in his own words) would "throw chicken bones at some annoying singer at the Bitter End, review (harshly) albums I'd obviously never listen to (or concerts I'd never attended), reverse the word sequence of a text to make it read backwards (or delete, for no particular reason, every fourth word)."
It's a testament to the age not that Maxim would be shamed into apologizing for their behavior, but that they were so dreadfully goddamn boring in their fabrication.
Carrie Brownstein at Monitor Mix is the latest to go on about Bon Iver:
from the moment Justin Vernon and his bandmates took the stage, the audience hung on every note, in-between song banter, and a flood of feedback. I am not exaggerating when I say that people cried. Bon Iver's songs are delicate but they are not soft; the comfort in them is fleeting, their beauty uneven. In the live setting the songs are wilder, they screech and veer towards chaos before closing in on themselves. Vernon's voice is part songbird, part howl, and it is fearless.
Personally, I don't get it. The song Brownstein links to sounds like Wolf Parade unplugged, which is sort of an excruciating notion.
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