Music
The Smile - “Bending Hectic”
I wrote last year about The Smile’s “The Smoke,” a song I spent a lot of time with off an album I absolutely loved. The Smile is a Radiohead … what? Side project? Spinoff? Is it Radiohead now? It is a band that contains Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood, both of Radiohead, but also a jazz drummer, Tom Skinner of Sons of Kemet. So maybe a bit of all those things. Regardless, it is not unfair, I think, to say that A Light for Attracting Attention, The Smile’s debut record, felt like a continuation of Radiohead’s most recent album, 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool. That record struck a balance between the electronics of 2011’s The King of Limbs and the (relatively) straightforward rock of 2007’s In Rainbows. A Light for Attracting Attention does the same thing, making space for electronics while also allowing Yorke, Greenwood, and Skinner to find their version of a groove. That’s the version of the Radiohead universe that works best for me, the version that tries to experiment without losing touch with the real organic strengths the musicians bring.
Learning About Classical Music
What I’ve Tried In The Past
Going into this, I’ll own that I haven’t made a great go of learning about classical music in the past. I’ve tried, but in large part that process has consisted of searching for articles with titles like “How To Get Into Classical Music” or “9 Pieces To Make You Fall In Love With Classical Music.” Maybe those articles work for someone? They’re romantic, right? The idea that a single piece of music could somehow instantaneously hook someone into music that is, in many ways, divorced from the music at the center of our popular culture is cool. It’s also wild! I think classical music needs a little more unpacking than those articles provide, not because the music is completely inaccessible, but because a little bit of context goes a long way in the learning process.
A Playlist of Latter-Day David Bowie Songs
Below is a playlist of my favorite Bowie songs from the ‘90s on. We’re starting with 1993’s Black Tie White Noise and ending with Blackstar (his final album) in 2016. After that, I’ve highlighted three songs I think should get some particular notice. Each track should, really, but you’re not here to read a whole book on Bowie. Three highlights it is. Listen, though, to all of them. They deserve your time.
Ten Years of David Bowie’s The Next Day
It was 2012, the drive home from college was five hours, and I was still using a CD player. I burned The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars to disc and got sucked in, listening to it on repeat over and over and over again as I drove. I’m sure I picked it out because Bowie was a canonical artist I’d never heard, because the album was on some greatest records of all time list, something like that. It doesn’t matter, really. I got sucked into the record. It might have stopped there, but then David Bowie came back.
Cécile McLorin Salvant's Ghost Song
In a New York Times profile written around the release of her most recent album, Ghost Song, jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant describes the record as a project that should match the feeling of rifling through a notebook, of reading someone else’s diary or letters. When I first heard the record, I found this feeling unsettling. I didn’t care for the sequencing. The opening cover of Kate Bush’s “Withering Heights” was grand and evocative, but “Optimistic Voices” (from The Wizard of Oz) irritated, spoiling the beauty of Gregory Porter’s “No Love Dying.” I didn’t get it.
The New York Times profile, written by the excellent Giovanni Russonello, helped. For me, Ghost Song makes sense as an artistic notebook. It coheres as a whole, even if it doesn’t flow from song to song. It has real texture, too, real materiality, and the more time I spend with it the more I appreciate that it doesn’t go down smoothly. The children’s choir at the end of the title track bothers, but I like it alongside the exasperation of “Obligation.” “Wuthering Heights” was recorded in a church. The acoustics on the track are great, but its open acoustics sound out of place alongside the intimacy of much of the rest of the record. So? The intimacy and the openness both sound great. They both sound like Cécile McLorin Salvant.
Somehow, somehow, somehow, I have made it this far without talking about the voice that drives this record. McLorin Salvant is a tremendous singer. She can belt, she can wail, she can scold, she tell a thrilling story, she can play a character, she can do whatever she wants. Her voice is a versatile instrument, but she never sounds like anyone other than herself. No, Ghost Song doesn’t flow perfectly. Cécile McLorin Salvant pulls it all together, though. It’s her notebook, after all.