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Why I get bored with singer-songwriters · Apr 14, 12:42 PM

yeah over the last coupla years i know you’ve got this thing about singer/songwriters

so he quoth, and I promised a rejoinder….

Perhaps I’ve talked about it over the last couple of years a little more often, but it’s not a new motif in my music making lexicon: I get bored with singer-songwriters rather quickly.

It’s rooted in three places.

First, when I started playing, it was at the tail end of an era when bands were, musically at least, relatively non- hierachical, democratic affairs. If anything the accent was on lead guitarists as being the creators of a certain sound world that defined the band. As an audience one usually heard guitars, drums, bass keys etc as a whole, a gestalt of parts, that cubed into a big musical identity. Yeah, that’s shifted, the frontman is omnipresent and has been for decades, and is invariably the singer. I am still in thrall to the (my) original experience.

Second, I came to NYC in the eighties on the tail end of post-punk new wave London, and indeed Berlin, musically ribald, experimental, wild, raucous, subtle, communal. In NYC I was introduced as a player to the world of the singer-songwriter and the sideman, a genre I thought had been buried in around 1972 by luminaries who actually usually led very interesting bands (Neil Young, Roy Harper) or worked with fascinating arrangers (Nico, Leonard Cohen). The NY thing of the eighties, and it may never have gone away, is defined by the sub par in comparison tyranny of ‘tasteful’ playing. Showing off the song, in fact. Or worse, the singer. A bunch of cats going through the usual breaks, or indeed, the motions to earn their crust, not put the proverbial nose out of joint, and to be called for the next gig. And on their off nights play jazz and fusion. No real love for the rock/pop soundworld, just the hope of catching the break, and paying some bills on the way. Moonlighting from ‘real’ music. No balls, at least not on the singer-songwriter set. Careful control instead.

Third, yeah, I have an arty side, that listened to Ornette and Steve Reich and Stravinsky whilst coming up, had an ear out for world music long before it became known as such, always graduated to the difficult side of a record.. timbre, colour, tone, these move me, that’s why I sort of die when faced with Indie Rock that so often guitars grey, or singer-songwriters where it’s all about the ‘song’, wait, the ‘lyrics’. Why should music wait for lyrics when it says so much more with its own voice. I want to be immersed in another place, transported to heaven, adrift in the desert (remember old Taureg saying God gave humanity the desert so he could find his soul there), actually I want the inexplicable and inarticulate made coherent for me in sonic reality, not the lily-livered ramblings of someone’s minor dramas and quotidian meanderings clearly enunciated over arpeggiated minor chords and a drummer stroking a hi-hat with hotrods looking bored at his mate the contra bass-player across the stand.

Lyrics can be wonderful, there have been perfect moments of word and sound, but they too often limit rather than enhance the possibility of music. I’ve really enjoyed certain hip hop moments, but I’m adrift without a rudder in a real world where a, maybe the, dominant form chart music has taken is talking over a beat.

Yeah, I know, I’m the minority, and that’s really alright, but NB I don’t subscribe to the notion that popularity and riches are the factors that define goodness, rectitude, integrity, or the higher ground.

An aside: Rock died with the pistols, the next golden age after 1980 -2, was probably 87 but not in rock, then maybe 90-94 but not in rock, for all I know there is one on now, and yes, world music had a few good energetic years, but I stopped paying attention, around say, 2000. Which is also when I explored solo performing myself, cooked up a guitar/voice dialogue, then expanded to playing with a percussionist for a while, then got bored…... if I get time I’ll come back and name names, add links etc. If I gig later this year, it’ll be with others, and/or I’ll have a multitude of timbres literally at my finger tips.

Criticism is Projection, CG Jung tells us.

oh and thanks T, for the impetus to scrawl this one.

Some comments came in, a dialogue ensued:

NA 15. April um 15:08
Love Jung… but there is something to be said for collective artistic expression with correctly placed emphasis – essence over form (meaning expression; the emotive and transcendental use of the medium to channel something unique and deeply personal as well as resonating on a universal and very “humane” level).

Theatre has a similar problem … where everyone wants to be a star, recognition over substance, and I have found even in teaching methods, cultivating the individual and one’s unique characteristics is strictly avoided in place of conformity and industrialized performance. Personally, and unpopularly, I prefer character work and transformation to the glamorous.

So, in music, I understand lyrics and singing can be better suited when they contribute to the collective work as a whole, instead of upstaging it. There is something to be said for balance. And, of course, when something is more a hindrance than a help, it’s better to exclude it entirely.

Geoffrey Armes am 15. April um 15:43
Well, also the voice immediately anthropomorphises music, which perhaps reduces the spiritual possibility inherent in abstract sound — sound is in a sense a metaphor for or expression of life’s vibration —- blah blah. Daniel Day Lewis: an actor I admire. And yes ‘recognition over substance’ we live in an era where people do stuff in order to be famous, instead of becoming famous for doing something they need to do, well.

NA 15. April um 15:57
Sounds like your daughter may have more to teach you in terms of not being accustomed to the confines of physical form… haha. Well, the human is an expression of the spiritual or a variation of life’s vibration…but I understand in terms of the limitations human sound imposes, just as physical form can be claustrophobia-inspiring, and narrow mindedness tends to limit our world, instead of open it. And the need for human sound does reflect an amount of ego and an over-identification with the work. And blah blah blah.

Geoffrey Armes am 15. April um 16:06 Which daughter?

Btw not arguing a right or wrong here, but do observe that the human voice is also associative… especially with the limits of wordsl. But yeah, definitely a variation of etc.

NA am 15. April um 16:54
The youngest.. It was a reference to your status about teaching her how to live inside a body.

No arguments against transcending limitations or thinking outside the box by any means. Preferences are also reflections of ourselves just as much as criticism, etc. And as a variation, I guess it is just one option. More than one thing can be true at once, and like I said before, work is very personal. :P

Geoffrey Armes am 15. April um 17:53
And admittedly, much of what I am saying is predicated on believing in a ‘higher power’, that if one is open, informs ones work. My feeing is, that when one starts working with words one drifts away from that towards a more ‘me’ centred narrative. One? Me! A ‘one’ who has written and sung a lot of songs!

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