Steven Douglas Maloney

Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

I have often joked that I could get a grammy award simply by angling for one of the grammy’s ridiculous categories that seems so specific that it elimintaes every other person on earth.  I can picture it now, “and the grammy for the best album recorded of songs sung by someone named Steven singing to music while doing something else at the same time goes to….” (cue shot of me with fingers crossed).  A stretch?  I present to you the clip of the media Q & A for “Best Hawaiian Music Album.”

To make amends, allow me to show the yutube of Radiohead and USC marching band:

Since it is snowing in the Twin Cities, (though it doesn’t look like the picture in the paper this far south) I am using my personal authority to declare it acceptable to listen to The Nutcracker out of season.

I just discovered what Thom Yorke’s “Harrowdown Hill” is about: wow. 

Here’s the lyrics to the song:

Don’t walk the plank like I did
You will be dispensed with
When you’ve become inconvenient
Up on Harrowdown Hill
Where you used to go to school
Thats where I am
Thats where I’m lying down

Did I fall or was I pushed?
Did I fall or was I pushed?
And wheres the blood?
And wheres the blood?

I’m coming home
I’m coming home
To make it all right
So dry your eyes

We think the same things at the same time
We just cant do anything about it

So don’t ask me
Ask the ministry
Don’t ask me
Ask the ministry

We think the same things at the same time
There are so many of us 
So you can’t count

We think the same things at the same time
There are too many of us 
So you can’t count

Can you see me when I’m running?
Can you see me when I’m running?
Away from them

I can’t take their pressure
No one cares if you live or die
They just want me gone
They want me gone

I’m coming home
I’m coming home
To make it all right
So dry your eyes

We think the same things at the same time
We just cant do anything about it

We think the same things at the same time
There are too many of us 
So you can’t count

I was lured into the back of Harrowdown Hill
It was me lured into the back of Harrowdown Hill
I was lured into the back of Harrowdown Hill 
It was a slippery slippery slippery slope
It was a slippery slippery slippery slope
I feel me slipping in and out of consciousness
I feel me slipping in and out of consciousness
I feel me…

The horrendous feeling the song produces in my heart is that the songseems so familiar.  How many of us get up and go to work feeling like other people wish we weren’t there, are totally indifferent to our welfare, and indeed, our value?  For all of us that do feel that way about or next day of work, we do think the same things at the same time, and we still can’t do anything about it.  How many of us our living out a miniature version of this story?  Is it “so many that you can’t count?”

For those in the armed services, leaders, businessmen, students, citizens intent on making and preserving the best of this world so that it may be experienced and shared as broadly as possible, I wish the very happiest Fourth of July.  I give you for the day, the Augsburg Choir from the Twin Cities singing the grand finale of Ralph Vaughan Williams Materpiece (best choral arrangement of the 20th Century?), entitled “Dona Nobis Pacem,” which Vaughan Williams wrote amidst fears in the mid 1930′s that the world was carreening towards unspeakable violence and death.  In our days of potential global economic, terrorist, nationalistic, geopolitical and ethnic violent upheavals, I wish to echo the hope of Ralph Vaughan Williams: Give us peace.

[youtube = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukCBVVKrEp0]

Lyrics:

Nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

And none shall make them afraid, neither shall the sword go through their land.

Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

Truth shall spring out of the earth, and righteousness shall look down from heaven.

Open to me the gates of righteousness, I will go into them.

Let all the nations be gathered together, and let the people be assembled; and let them ehar, and say, it is the truth.

And it shall come, that I will gather all nations and tongues.

And they shall come and see my glory. And I will set a sign among them, and they shall decalre my glory among the nations.

For as the new heanvens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, so shall your seed and your name remain for ever.

Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men.

Dona Nobis Pacem

Good-will toward men.

Dona Nobis Pacem

Good-will toward men.

Dona Nobis Pacem

(Lyrics adapteb by Vaughan Williams from Micah 4:3; Leviticus 26:6; Psalms 85:10; Isaiah 43:9 and 66:18-22; and Luke 2:14)

Before I try to sort through reactions and the import of Boumediene v. United States, I wanted to mention that I will be doing so listening to Emmylou Harris’ new CD, All I Intended to Be. You can get it for 9.99 on direct download from Amazon.  ”Gold” features Harris with Dolly Parton again (woohoo!), and “Take That Ride” features her with Buddy Miller.  Both Buddy Miller and Dolly Parton are good friends with Mindy Smith — would someone please, please, get Ms. Harris and Ms. Smith in a studio together to record a song (or even better, an album!) so that I can die happy?  

If one were to ask me what I think the best rock band album of all time is, I would not even give it a moment’s hesitation to come back with OK Computer by Radiohead (and I’m not alone).   The music means so much to me, for so many different reasons, and in so many different ways… and now it’s ten years old.  It is hard to believe that it was ten years ago, and I still remember the first time I heard “Karma Police” on the radio, or that I can still remember the first time I put the CD into my dorm-room computer and waited to hear if the their other tracks were going to be anywhere near as interesting… and then on came “Airbag.”  And then “Paranoid Android,” and they just kept coming.  It was love instantly.

Over the course of this next year, I pan on occasionally writing some posts about my reflections on OK Computer, it’s songs, what I see as its importance, and what I think still seems meaningful ten year’s out.  I know of other friends out in the blog universe who have similar feelings about the album, so I will link anything they put up as well.

Just downloaded Thom Yorke’s The Eraser.  Rolling Stone liked it.  Just started listening now.  Here are my reactions as I listen song-by-song.

1.  "The Eraser" – Discordant piano playing, this is an old Thom Yorke move by now, but it is a little less jarring in this song.   There’s something very inviting about his vocal tone in this song.

2.  "Analyze" – Really love the ambeince of this one.  What Yorke can do on the piano is a musical reserve he has just barely begun to tap.   There is an incredible sense of urgency that the music provides in this song that the vocals fall away from and then come back to.  Very, very nice.  This song might be an all-time keeper.  Just a feeling.

3.  "The Clock"  – Yorke’s in his haunting vocal range.  The loops are tight.  If Beck seems like one end of the culmination of R.E.M.s influence, Thom Yorke is the other end.  There is such a modernist classical music feel to their works.  Whereas Beck takes the zany genius of R.E.M. and runs with it to create mood – almost Gershwin-like or perhaps even Copeland – Thom York sounds Olivier Maessian to me here.

4.  "Black Swan" – When I see the explicit lyrics warning, I think of raunchy, pointless instant pleasure rock or rap music.  To have such a warning on this song is almost funny.  The F-word is in the refrain, but the song uses it for effect on the audience, not the silly liberation of playing a swear word out loud.  Also, there is something almost effervescent about the melody in this song, which sort of undercuts the language of the song.  Another Thom Yorke song that will get stuck in my head when I’m happy even though the lyrics are probably abot melancholy (It’s my first listen, but a song called "Black Swan cannot be an upper, can it?)

5.  "Skip Divided" – Something almost gospel-like aobut the opening.  Then the vocals conjure up memories of U2′s "Numb".  I still think that Yorke is still only scratching the surface on learning how to use his voice in creative ways.  Which means that Radiohead/Yorke have some interesting music ahead of them. The morse-code like bridge is fantastic.  The vocals at the end of the song are David Byrne-like. 

6.  "Atoms for Peace" – Nice chord progression to start the song.  Feels very ambulatory.  Again Yorke’s vocals have a very different feel and effect here.  He almost sounds like Joni Mitchell in some places.  The other places he sounds like he’s singing with the innocence of a 12 year old English boy.   This seems to me to be a beautifully understated song.

7.  "And it Rained All Night" – It sounds like a really good indie band song.  In a related story, does anyone think that they could get Nigel Godrich to produce Ben Gibbard’s lyrical work?  That would be awesome.  Again, the way mood is created by using so many pieces just in the right amount, and fairly minimally in each piece creates an incredible mosaic of mood. 

8.  "Harrowdown Hill" – The vocals here are not working for me right now.  But again, Yorke’s voice is trying something different, and it is giving a different voice to each song.  "We think the same things at the same time/ we just can do anything about it" – nice little refrain.  There are spots in this song where it really just sounds like a stripped down dance track, which I guess that’s what it is.  I think there’s probably some symbolism in that as well.  Note to Coldplay: see how much mileage York gets out of just that little splash of piano? 

9.  "Cymbal Rush" – beginning conjures up Atari-sound intro to "Summer Girl" off Beck’s last album.  This is another nice artistic stroke in my mind.  All of the "white noise" sounds.  It’s a nice way to talk about our condition.  There’s all of these beeps, whirrs, hums all around us in the modern world, and to try and say something is to be voice trying to penetrate through all of the ambient noise.  Again, Yorke does not pull out any frying pans with this stuff to hit you with.  We get to come to appreciate what he has worked on through our own listening.  Once more, that faint bit of piano gets him so much.  Now the piano is coming on stronger, which we know is a strong move because Yorke has offered us the contrast of holding it back earlier.  Again, bands like Coldplay play all there songs at the same high volume through all points.  They are just big sound after big sound.  They are always at 10 on the volume scale.  Yorke only goes to about 7, but each song is also at 3 at points, and 1, and 5, and etc.  The contrast makes a big difference.  It requires a lot more attention, because the patterns we enjoy listening to as natural music appreciators are buried more, they are quieter, more obscured, and more elusive.  But they are there and they are used well.