the other side

An essay by John Jeremiah Sullivan in the latest issue of Harper's describes a recently reissued, extremely rare country blues recording called "Last Kind Words Blues" by Geeshie Wiley. At one point Sullivan cites some lines from the song, which he hears as "The Mississippi River, you know it's deep and wide, / I can stand right here, / See my baby from the other side." In the context of the song, whose narrator seems to be speaking with her dead father, the peculiarity of the syntax takes on a spooky literality: the narrator seems half embodied, this side of the river, and half ghost, viewing her "baby" from the other side.

While Sullivan acknowledges the possibility that such a reading pays overly literal attention to the lyrics (Sullivan quotes John Fahey, who - after asserting that the lyrics of these old songs didn't mean much - spends several hours trying to determine what the words are), and while he analyzes obsessive rare-record collecting to some degree, he only hints at one possible reason such collectors might be so compellingly haunted to track down these records. And that is the way that, much like the narrator of the Geeshie Wiley song, sound recordings can open a sort of virtual portal to another time and place.

The art of audio recording, conventionally conceived, tends to stress "fidelity" or "presence," the illusion that the performance you're hearing sounds as if it's taking place right there in your room - but even the highest-fi recordings generally sacrifice sonic literalism for musical purposes. On rock recordings, for example, no one bats an eye when an acoustic rhythm guitar is the same volume as, or louder than, a hugely distorted electric lead guitar, even though that's possible only with differential amplification. (This amplification already departs from the "realism" of the actual loudness of an acoustic guitar, and therefore calls into question whether there's any such thing as the "actual" loudness of an electric guitar. Of course one might argue that rock is the first fully postmodern music, conceived entirely in the era of mechanical reproduction of sound, which therefore never depended upon a hypothetical "real" performance based in real time and space.) I remember reading a fascinating article called "A Bedroom Community" by Franklin Bruno (from the 1997 issue of Badaboom Gramophone: it does not appear to be available online), in which he analyzed the effect of the creation of sonic spaces in recorded music: far too little attention is paid to the way such essentially spatial effects like reverb or echo affect listeners' perception of the imaginary space of the hypothetical performance, or the way even clearly patchwork recordings, dubbed part upon part, sometimes strive to create an aura of performed authenticity through the inclusion of count-ins, stray amp noise, or even mistakes in playing or singing (despite the obvious fact that if the song's made up of multiple overdubs, such "errors" could easily have been removed or eliminated in a subsequent take).

An interesting thing happens when the "fidelity" of a recording is less than ideal. First, there's the question of how that infidelity (secret noises offstage) came to be: through the unavailability of quality recording equipment or technique, through intentionally eschewing such equipment or technique ("low-fi"), or through aging and degradation of the recorded artifact itself (such as an old, scratchy 45). Clearly these things signify differently: the recording that's poor of necessity might convey the artist's persistence, rawness, amateur intensity, etc.; the "low-fi" recording might seek to convey those same things or, more smartly, undercut the assumptions that low fidelity just does mean persistence, rawness, or intensity; and the degradation of the artifact is often thought of as irrelevant to the "real" recording.

This last assumption isn't correct, though. First, although we might try to hear "through" noise and poor signals (and the more experienced we are as listeners, the likelier we'll be capable of pulling off this listening performance), I don't think we can fully escape the crackle of the vinyl or the attenuation of dynamic and frequency range. This is particularly the case with older recordings (whether by "older" we mean scratchy LPs we've owned since our teens, or recordings that are mastered from ancient 78s): I'd argue that the older the recording, the more we tend to hear those sonic accretions as part of the musical experience. It would seem strange indeed if, somehow, a Robert Johnson song were suddenly available in wide-screen, massively compressed, state-of-the-not-necessarily-high-fidelity-art 2008 sound.

One of the peculiarities of recorded sound is the way it can substitute itself for real-time performance even when such a real-time performance was a necessity. (Bruno quotes Stephin Merritt, who refers to the "false realism" of recordings that seek to convey the illusion of a unified sonic space, even though there was never any such space of performance.) My Robert Johnson example is unfair in that way: rather than imagine a Robert Johnson recording that sounds like a modern recording, imagine what being in the room with Robert Johnson playing "Dead Shrimp Blues" might have sounded like. Even though it was 1936, presumably our ears, and the air in the room, would have been every bit as capable of conducting sound waves without the imposition of crackling static as they are now when our friend or roommate belabors an acoustic guitar in the same room with us. Would that 1936 performance sound "right," the unmediated Robert Johnson, with no microphone, no recording equipment's stamp of sonic character, only his voice and guitar in the naked air? I think most people would like to say it would...yet since we know such a thing is impossible outside of science fiction, I wonder if we'd respond the same way to such a recording (if it were possible). I suspect that, just as some people respond to what they perceive as the "warmth" of vinyl, and most respond more positively to the exact same recording if it's louder than another, our history of contact with old, degraded sonic artifacts would mean that ultimately, we'd prefer those over the hypothetical, ultra-cleaned-up recording. No doubt such arguments would be mounted in terms of "authenticity," with claims that our hypothetical sonic clean-up device somehow distorts or cheapens the original sound (as if we'd know what the original sound was). Even though sound behaved in 1936 the same way it does in 2008, the context of a performance's larger sonic world is not the same now as it would be in the world of 1936. (A clichéd citation...but this idea is converging on one reason Borges' verbatim new Quixote differed from the original: though the object is identical, its context is not - and since no object is apprehensible without context, essentially the object is not identical in any real experience.) The removal of the patina of age, which might seem superfluous to the object itself, results in a significant loss.

Specifically, what would be lost is such a recording's ability to open a psychic time-portal in the listener: the sense that while I'm here in 2008, and the Mississippi of time is deep and wide, I can see myself listening there, on the 1936 side. I think this effect is one reason some people are so strongly attached to old recordings: the sound of the time is right there, magnetically arrayed, etched into shellac or vinyl grooves, encoded in cryptic digits of shiny, aluminum-coated plastic that can reflect another world.

The paradox is, that patina wasn't there from the start (except insofar as 1936 recording equipment was less capable of "fidelity" than contemporary equipment). It itself is an artifact of the fact that many such old recordings exist solely on a mere handful of timeworn old 78 RPM records, and it's the patina of such records that we hear. Which is to say, if a record collector or serious fan fetishizes such sound, it's because they hear themselves in the sonic reflection: the years of their and others' collecting, the inevitable wearing down of such records no matter how carefully preserved and packaged, their own obsessions emerging into the air, curatorial and remembered.

paging Dr. Lynne...

Can someone explain to me the popularity among dentists of the Traveling Wilburys?

I went to the dentist this morning and I swear, the last three times I went there, at some point while having my teeth cleaned, a Traveling Wilburys song played. My guess is that the mysterious Volume 2 is full of songs entirely about dental hygiene...

M...M...M...!

We begin with Negativland's "By Truck" - a reconfiguration of the usual perspective, wherein the importance of trucks to the consumption of our breakfast cereals received its due.

We follow that with Was (Not Was)'s absurdist logic problem "Tell Me That I'm Dreaming" - which, as an aside, features a line that might perhaps take early '80s entrepreneur-worship to its ridiculous extreme.

And finally, Aphex Twin mutters like a masturbating dwarf in a basement window-well, making some sideways associations, in "Milkman."

Our common thread? Well, my first published online writing was for the late, lamented Milk magazine - and so, although I'd thought of this trio of tracks before this realization, their consideration seems fitting for this my 1,000th post.

Negativland "By Truck" (Thigmotactic, 2008)
Was (Not Was) "Tell Me That I'm Dreaming" (Was (Not Was), 1981)
Aphex Twin "Milkman" (Richard D. James Album, 1997)

(That link above is to a fascinating article by Peter Blegvad, illustrator, musician, and curious thinker, whose work - particularly his The Book of Leviathan and his collaborative album with John Greaves and Lisa Herman Kew: Rhone - is worth seeking out...although frankly, the rest of his musical output is less compelling than that album.)

things I care about so little that writing a blog entry about them is head-spinningly contradictory

The world awaits at long last the actual physical release of Guns 'n' Roses*' new CD Chinese Democracy, whose first "single" actually exists, at least in digital form.

Can I hire the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to sing "so what?" for about five hours?

GNR sucked back when CDs were new, shiny, wonderful objects that would transform the music industry, and they suck even more irrelevantly now that CDs are bizarre artifacts purchased only by the elderly (why yes I did buy a handful of CDs just last week, thank you very much). Axl and his gang of idiot poseurs were always just a bunch of dunderheaded clowns laughably enacting the lamest possible rock-star clichés on and off stage, and it's been utterly mystifying to me why anyone ever gave them the slightest scintilla of cred.

And to take longer to produce a single album than it took Beethoven to write a handful of symphonies, well, it's just ridiculous. Me, I'm more hotly anticipating the release of a new left-handed flange-grip attachment to the 1947 Grimsby slide rule than I am any new GNR product.

* No, I don't know which of the apostrophes on the already-annoying "'n'" thing GNR decided, for no good reason, to omit. Multiply my not-caring about this album by god factorial, and you'll be within a few light years of my not-caring about that issue.

and they're off...

My mind is sponsoring a race right now. It's between "how fucking outrageous and stupid will they get?" and "how idiotic will enough people be to buy it?"

As P.T. Barnum never said, you'll never go broke betting on the obnoxiousness of right-wing race-baiters...

flimsy

I picked up the new Jenny Lewis CD a few days ago, and while it's a fine CD (in many ways it does what Elvis Costello's last album set out to do, but more effectively...), the packaging is annoying. It comes in a cardboard slipcase, so narrow that there's no spine, and with no inner sleeve to protect or hold the disc. There are four small snapshot-like photos included, which are just tossed inside the slipcase. The musician credits are printed on the back cover, along with the usual bureaucratic info...and the admonition DO NOT DROP THIS RECORD.

Yeah? Because the crap packaging means it might shatter?

Apparently major labels have just given up on trying to sell CDs, and are cutting their packaging costs...even though good packaging is one of the few aspects of physical recorded media that cannot be digitally reproduced. You'd think they'd be going the opposite direction, making more packages with aesthetic value in themselves. If this were the only example of shoddy packaging on recent CDs (and I suppose a number of my readers are like, you still buy CDs? Christ but you're old!), I might not be complaining...but PJ Harvey's last release was similarly packaged (although it, at least, had an inner sleeve, if I recall correctly, so there was some friction preventing the disc from just falling out onto the ground).

I suppose you could argue that such minimal packaging leaves a smaller environmental footprint, and if you did, I'd laugh in your face. There's a difference between packaging that's pointless because it's discarded as soon as the product is brought home (such as the nasty, hard to open, finger-slicing molded-plastic cases common on lots of household products) and packaging that's integral to the product and which therefore will not be thrown away, at least not until the product itself is tossed. But cheap packaging like this almost encourages further waste. I'm tempted to scan the cover and back cover and print it out on some decent paper, and put the whole thing in a conventional jewelbox, just so the CD can sit amongst my other CDs and not disappear and become unidentifiable (no spine, remember?). Which would mean I'd be using more paper, and probably more paper overall than a decent package would have used in the actual product.

Perhaps another irony here is that I bought this CD as essentially an impulse purchase: I was buying something else at the Large Box with Red and White Concentric Circles, and it was on sale, so I picked it up. If I'd known in advance the packaging was so flimsy, I might have decided merely to download it.

A musician named Zimmerman, from the same state as the store, had a new compilation of unreleased material out, too, also on sale, which I also picked up. Funny how that one was almost exactly twice the price of the Lewis release...yet it contained not only twice the music, roughly - two discs - but extensive info and documentation, including a 60-page booklet. Of course this suggests another reason for the lame packaging of Lewis's CD: lower production and material costs mean more profits for the label. I suppose Columbia, which put out that Minnesota guy's set, figures the only people interested in a 2-CD set of obscurities by him are old people who'd buy a CD because they can't handle all this newfangled digital rigmarole, whereas Warner Bros. figures Ms. Lewis's fans are just gonna download the thing anyway. It's also just my personal opinion, but I've gotta say Lewis is a hell of a lot more photogenic than that elderly folksinger dude anyway. I guess good on WB for not caving to the capitalistic pressure to exploit a singer's sex appeal. Columbia, on the other hand, saw fit to fill that 60-page booklet with shot after shot of the nearly seventy-year-old Dylan gazingly faunishly at the camera while recumbent in nothing but a snug yet well-filled pair of bikini briefs.

Thank god I'm kidding, please.

The Mystical Beast (slight return)

A first here at the Architectural Dance Society: a guest columnist. Dana was the proprietor of the wonderful Mystical Beast site for several years, which was one of the first blogs to post mp3s regularly (the site's still up, although the song links are dead), and we met on the old Loud Family mailing list back when that band was extant. He recently e-mailed me with the following observation:

Have you ever listened to "Reflected" (early Alice Cooper), "Elected" (mid Alice Cooper), and "Bell Boy" (mid Who) all in a row?

My reading: "Reflected" is a Who rip-off with some acid guitar and weird chord changes added. "Elected" is a revisitation of "Reflected" but sounds an awful lot like "Bell Boy" in terms of production, riffs, and overall feel. "Elected" came out in '72 as a single and '73 as an album track, "Bell Boy" in '73.

I wonder who influenced who (since release date doesn't necessarily indicate when the song/production was conceived). Weird. I don't usually think of Townshend looking to Alice Cooper for inspiration.

I hadn't been familiar with "Reflected" before this, but "Elected" obviously borrows its main verse melody. But that thing where the chords change over a static bass (as in the verses of "Bell Boy") is a Who trademark - and so "Reflected" is indeed borrowing from the Who (in fact, given its slightly iffy production and raw feel, you could almost pass it off as a newly discovered Guided by Voices track - hell, even the weird chords would fit Pollard's usual MO). And in "Elected" you have an arrangement that's very similar in syncopation and feel, even in instrumentation (real horns vs. synth horns...oddly enough, since John Entwistle often overdubbed his own horn-playing on Who records), but rather than place those chords over a bass pedal tone, the bass first plays its own rather melodic line, and then goes to a rather grandly dramatic walking descent.

So my take is that Townshend didn't really need to rip off Alice Cooper (or Bob Ezrin, who contributed largely to the arranging on Alice Cooper's records of this era), since ol' Vince Furnier had already been dipping heavily into the Townshend Songwriting Book of Tricks with these tracks.

It's still unexpected to find Alice Cooper and the Who put together like that, though!

Alice Cooper "Reflected" (Pretties for You, 1968)
Alice Cooper "Elected" (Billion Dollar Babies, 1972)
The Who "Bell Boy" (Quadrophenia, 1973)

Welcome to the Palindrome

Have you heard the one about how Obama chose his running mate so that their names, together, would sound the first line of a hymn to a weapon deified? "O Bomb abidin'..."

Okay, that hasn't happened yet...but I wouldn't be surprised. What's also amusing is that such lame punning on candidates' last names has been indulged in by Republicans...in the likely subconscious form of Sarah Palin choosing the odd verb, one which almost sounds like her last name, "palling" (as in "palling around with terrorists"). Somehow, working together a decade ago with a man who, when Obama was 8 years old, advocated violence in the anti-war effort, constitutes "palling around with terrorists." I love the plural, by the way...I mean clearly Obama spends most of his off-hours hanging out with every terrorist on the block, shooting hoops and passing arugula-haters.

I wonder if Palin, in her "pro-life" stance, has ever met with any of the folks who winked at or even applauded the murder and terrorization of abortion providers. And I wonder why, even though every homegrown terror group of note over the last two decades has been right-wing (Oklahoma City, anti-abortion, arguably Waco), this flimsy accusation of "terrorist" against a man who once worked with a man who's worked with both Democrats and Republicans on various educational issues has any media traction at all.

from the slightly confused art dept.

Uh, Jared? That's not how a shark works.



(From a new CD for which a publicist sent me a couple mp3s. I haven't had a chance to listen to them...but I'm just amused at the cover...)

making a mountain out of an ACORN

One political party is accusing the other of trying to steal the election. (Also, a pot called a biracial kettle "black" in an attempt to scare certain voters.)

This time, though, it's the Republicans claiming the Democrats are trying to steal the election, by the rather dubious means of registering enough bogus voters to win. Uh, how would that work again? If I register 25 voters in the name of (as this article notes) the Dallas Cowboys, that doesn't mean the Dallas Cowboys are going to show up to vote - and certainly not to vote for a particular candidate. It's pretty obvious (as finally made clear in the last paragraphs) that fraudulent registration in the names of fictitious or ineligible "voters" occurred primarily in order for the registration worker to earn more money...since at one time, such workers were paid by how many voters they registered.

That's clearly a bad idea - but the few cases of fraud it led to were not voter fraud, but fraud against ACORN, in that they fooled or attempted to fool ACORN into paying workers for voters that they had not actually registered. This method of pay has been changed...but the record demonstrates, again and again, that voter fraud is a vanishingly small problem.

No wonder: who would risk a large fine or jail time just to cast one vote for a candidate, as if that's going to turn an election? Almost nobody...and again, the very few instances of purported fraud turned out to arise from bad registration info (outdated addresses, incorrect initials, and so on), or from confusion (ineligible voters unaware of their ineligibility) and not from an 88-year-old guy trying to vote a third time as "Brett Favre."

If the Democrats wanted to steal an election, they have far better examples of how to do it, drawn from recent history.

everything you always wanted to know about John McCain*

An excerpt from Tim Dickinson's "Make-Believe Maverick":

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

* but were afraid to ask for fear McCain would haul off and punch you in the nose.

whittled on the griddle of Japan

One of my favorite semi-obscure little bands is The Sugarplastic. They had a moment's glory back in the '90s with a single release on Geffen, which instantaneously garnered them 7,396 XTC comparisons. On that: the short version is that the band quite openly acknowledges their love of and influence by XTC - but that's not the whole story: for example, Rose pointed out bits that sounded rather Pixies-like...and indeed, the Sugarplastic's penchant for steady 8th-note rhythms, sometimes broken up with irregular meters, is one of two quirks I've noticed in nearly every one of their songs (the other is a love of little chromatic lines).

Anyway: they're one of those bands whose members would seem to have day jobs that prevent them from focusing career energies on the band (to judge from his website, Ben Eshbach, the main songwriter, is quite the smart cookie), and so their release schedule has been quite irregular. Their last recording was released in 2005, and their website is infrequently updated.

Eshbach's site also contains mp3s of early Sugarplastic songs that are somewhat difficult to find, as well as some of his own MIDI experiments (not terribly interesting to my ears). One of the better Sugarplastic tracks at that site (follow the link above to explore further) is "Motorola Rocketship," which was released on the Japanese version of their third full-length release Resin in 2000. The arrangement, as is typical for the band, is fairly transparent, allowing the various parts to interweave without obscuring one another. The sort of early-sixties rock feel in the rhythm guitar and the occasional Beach Boys-like touch in the vocals is relatively unusual in their stuff: even though it's still fairly subdued, this is pretty much as rocking as the band gets.

A much earlier song, "Ottawa Bonesaw," is another story. Doing web searches on the band, I discovered that (unsurprisingly) Dana formerly from The Mystical Beast had already written about the Sugarplastic. While he finds much to like about their music, he notes that sometimes they can sound "a little cutesy-poo" and "white-bread." My guess is, this isn't one of his favorite tracks. For me, though, it's maddeningly catchy - and I find myself thinking of it as a slightly off-kilter children's song, so the cutesy stuff has a reason to exist: the rhymes based on people's names, the funny voices, etc., make much better sense if you imagine this is music for kids. (My theory is that the song is loosely based on a French-Canadian children's book whose title, in English, is "To You a Good Evening!" - the song title is a mangling of the French title "À Toi Bonsoir!"... Okay, probably not.) Regardless, I think more people should howl the title at the moon in the manner of the song's closing.

The Sugarplastic "Motorola Rocketship" (Resin, Japanese edition, 2000)
The Sugarplastic "Ottawa Bonesaw" (Ottawa Bonesaw, 1993)

Postscript: Curiously, if you Google the titles of these two tracks, one link will lead you to an academic study on pattern recognition in music, whose authors used these two Sugarplastic songs to determine whether a particular band could be recognized by their software. Fans do funny things.

however, absolutely no making love in a canoe

With the opening of Café Centraal on the corner of East Lincoln and KK, along with (blessedly smoke-free) Sugar Maple half a block east, this half-block of Lincoln has officially become beer-lovers' heaven. Sugar Maple has 60 premium American microbrews on tap, and a goodly number more in bottles, while Centraal has countless beers (I tried to count them and got lost) both on tap and in bottles, focusing (as its name might suggest) on European brews. Between the two, there are at least 200 different beers available for the drinking.

I would suggest not trying to sample them all in a single evening.

might be a bit difficult to obtain...

I'm (still) in the midst of digitizing my CD collection, and I ran into Polvo's first EP. The name of the "label" (I think it's really just self-released) is "Jesus Christ," and I think it was chosen solely to allow the following copyright notice that appears at the bottom of the back cover:

Unauthorized reproduction without the express written consent of Jesus Christ is prohibited.

departures

A feature article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel the other day described the journey of comedy director David Zucker (a native of a Milwaukee suburb, Shorewood, and best known for his involvement with brother Jerry and Jim Abrahams in the production of the Police Squad and Naked Gun movies) from his liberal background to his current conservatism. At first, my reaction was, okay, some guy becomes more conservative as he ages - nothing very unusual there - but at a specific point in the article, I realized Mr. Zucker had departed the plane of reality. He's quoted describing Barack Obama as "an extreme left-wing candidate who doesn't represent the country."

Uh-huh. Exactly which positions of Obama - who's reliably liberal on social issues (as are most Americans) and moderate on economic issues (as are most Americans) - are "extreme left-wing"? Funny how the folks who make such accusations never back them up (nor are asked to: bad enough in a biographical puff piece like this one, but plain irresponsible in political reporting). And that "doesn't represent the country"? Apparently all those folks who voted for Obama in the primaries, and who gave Obama lead in most polls, must not be from this country. And Zucker has swallowed the lie that McCain represents "lower taxes." Here's a chart (whose presentation, from wealthiest to poorest taxpayers, gives casual readers a false impression), demonstrating that for most Americans, except the very wealthiest, Obama's tax plan will lower taxes considerably more than McCain's will.

And, sadly, dirt and grime have at last vanquished their mortal enemy: I refer, of course, to Mr. Clean: the actor who portrayed the eponymous cleaning products spokesperson, House Peters Jr., has died at the age of 92. That New York Times article describes the career of Peters - one of many bit actors who are all but forgotten now - but fails to explain where the rather exotic (for its time) image of Mr. Clean came from. I mean, nowadays bald-headed, muscular guys sporting white t-shirts and an earring are everywhere (although few have the illustrated Mr. Clean's bushy white eyebrows), but back then, that look must have seemed quite bizarre.

petty annoyances, oversensitive ears division

We're watching Season 4 of The Office (US version, obviously: the Brit version didn't have four seasons), and the thing that's bugging me? The production company's little trumpet tag at the end ("Deedle-Dee Productions") is ever so slightly out of tune with the musical tag that goes with the NBC thingy that follows, and it's like being forcefed very sour lemonade every time I hear it.

Dammit, folks: tune to the same pitch!

not at all the same as "bartime pairs"

A few months back, one of the music-related e-mails in my inbox was from a songwriter I hadn't heard of named Bennett Samuel Lin. Lin is the main songwriter for a band called Bobtail Yearlings (whom I also had not heard of), but rather than promoting his band directly, in this case he was interested in feedback on a book he'd just published, called The Bobtail Method for Composing Unique Pop Melodies. (The Method is available both in book form and online as a free PDF file, at the band's website - painfully cute front page and all.) While Lin does have some formal musical training, his method doesn't seem to follow typical songwriting advice or approaches. His main idea is that chord sequences and melodies ought to be composed together, rather than either a melody being written separately (often come up with from the blue sky) and chords built around it, or a chord sequence being written, over which an impoverished, stereotypical melody is improvised.

To this end, Lin walks his readers through the way chords and melodies work and work together. His basic device he calls "the barline pair": "exactly what its name implies: two barlines, signifying a harmonic progression of three bars, with one chord per bar." And what he does with this simple, simplifying device is provide for the musician a sort of puzzle: he leaves the third bar unspecified. So we begin with a question: given these two chords and/or these two melodic lines (he walks us through the construction of both), what chord and melodic line makes musical sense in that third bar? There are, of course, numerous possibilities - but Lin begins by exploring the nature of melodies: their distribution of steps (half- or whole steps), skips (a third or fourth, sometimes), and leaps (generally a diminished fifth or greater), their "points of emphasis" deriving from their intervals, changes in register (any leap defines a change in register), and rhythmic characteristics.

In practice (and probably because to construct a book, you have to begin somewhere), Lin begins with chords, in that he constructs "barline pairs" for every possible sequence of two chords, which chords he's categorized in terms of their harmonic relation, from closest to furthest. Progressing through the book, the reader finds the chords, melodies, and rhythms increasing in complexity and moving away from the harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically obvious.

So how useful is all this? First, I'm probably not his ideal audience: I do have some musical training, enough that it's reasonable when I write songs to proceed more intuitively, confident that I can spot out both the over-obvious and the unduly recherché chordal or melodic sequence. Well, I'd like to think I can, anyway: point is, at first I found myself thinking that Lin's approach was maybe too formalistic, too intellectualized, and that sometimes one just needs to trust one's ears. But (and I think Lin would argue thus), where do one's ears learn what works? Much of the music we hear is, for better or worse, rather clichéd harmonically and, these days, impoverished melodically - so one's ears may well be a poor guide, prone to lead one down only the most worn, well-traveled, and predictable paths. The advantage of Lin's method for beginning musicians is that without being as arbitrary as, say, the twelve-tone school, he doesn't privilege particular chord sequences but shows readers how each one might be made to work reasonably well, in certain contexts. And I suspect that such methodological order might help such musicians get a handle on the unruly array of possibilities a keyboard or guitar presents to them.

I'm not sure about some of Lin's quirks: nearly all his examples (at least in the early part of the book) are in 6/8 time because, he says, this "is an optimal [meter] for creating an interesting melodic contour that feels neither too sparse nor too crowded [and which] ... provides greater flexibility for consolidating a fluid melodic pace when different barline pairs are assembled into a single musical work, which can then be converted to common time (four quarter notes per bar) all at once." Maybe...I'm not entirely persuaded. I was also concerned (as I said above) that the musical exercises that would result from "The Bobtail Method" would be logical but uncompelling musically (that is to say, emotionally). Some of them probably are...but then, they're intended as exercises and examples in some cases, while others are drawn from his own compositions. Fortunately, nearly twenty Bobtail Yearlings tracks are downloadable from the band's website, and they go some ways toward answering the question of how well Lin's ideas work in practice. My first impression is fairly positive: they generally begin from a folk-like texture, but their variety is broader than "folk-like" suggests, and while they are more diverse harmonically and melodically than most pop music, they're not egregiously or clumsily so. In practice, at least, Lin wears his theoretical approach lightly and gracefully. That cutesy splash page does characterize the music to an extent: if you're one of those people who requires a heavy dose of obvious angst and heaviness in your music, you'll probably be disappointed. (Me, I think being boringly dark all the time is easier than the opposite, yet somehow critically more accepted.) Also, banjo.

My only real criticisms of the book are both trivial: I wish the print version had been made available bound such that it could lie flat, to make it easier to rest on a music stand and play the examples. (Perhaps future editions, if they come to be, can be bound this way. You can always download and print the PDF version however you want, of course.) I also think it might have been helpful, when Lin demonstrates the effects of particular chord sequences, to have provided examples from well-known songs rather than just his own music. While copyright no doubt prevented him from reproducing the notes and chords of such songs, he could certainly mention them (as in the well-known mnemonic - a bit outdated but still effective - that to remember a melodic interval of a rising augmented fourth, think of the first two notes of Bernstein's "Maria" from West Side Story, say). This would allow readers to "hear" in their heads the effect of such chordal sequences even if they're away from an instrument, and it would also illustrate (in conjunction with the examples from Lin's own songs) that the same chord sequence can result in sometimes dramatically different effects, depending upon other musical components (which melody and rhythm are chosen with those chords, texture, etc.).