Some Advance Single Action

"Pipe Dream" from the forthcoming Calculus Affair E.P., Control of Electromagnetic Radiation:

"Viva la Vida" -- Coldplay (Viva La Vida)

Were I a Coldplay fan, this song might make me a little worried. It's hyper-glossy and produced, the edges rounded off, and the lyrics verge on unpleasantly reminding me of Sting when he gets pathologically Sting-y (you know, when he starts singing about churches and his his soul and the epic sweep of something or other).

There are some things to like about it. First off, Chris Martin and his Chris Martin-y voice, which combines the high tenor wail that's been popular for the last ten years (was Jeff Buckley the first one on that field, or just the first person I noticed?) with a little bit of British thickness. The repeated, "that was when I ruled the world," in the lyrics is definitely catchy, and hyper-produced though it is, the bouncy orchestral motif definitely keeps everything moving.

That's not why I'm writing about this song, though. It's the fact that Joe Satriani is suing Coldplay, claiming they stole the melody from his song, If I Could Fly (let it get to about 0:50 and you'll hear the section in question). Musically there are a several things of note here. The two songs are in virtually the same tempo; while not in same key, the chord progressions are almost the same (both are four chord riffs, the first chords differ but essentially one is a jazz-substitution of the other); finally, and probably of most interest to Satriani, the melody that Chris Martin sings indeed sounds perilously similar to the main guitar solo that Satriani plays.

Fronesis, bringing this to my attention, put it this way

I don't make music, so it's hard for me to calculate odds of:

A. Intentional purposive stealing.
B. Accidental 'influence'.
C. Completely independent works that coincidentally sound the same.

I'll say straight off that musically speaking, there's pretty much no such thing as C. Nobody making music lives or composes in a vacuum, and if you're creating popular music, you're actively trying to emulate a particular sound--you're only going to be successful if you're creative within certain, limited, parameters. One of the things that became obvious to me very quickly was that the path to success in popular music is to sound exactly like everyone else who's already popular, except slightly different.

I'll also say that it's not that I think that A. never happens, I think it happens a lot. Whether or not it's okay depends probably on a lot of things. While in writing the line between quoting and plagarism is pretty bright and well-defined, the same isn't true for music. Musical quoting is more in the same family as putting an unattributed quote from Shakespeare in your novel: nobody accuses you of plagarising because it's so screamingly obvious that you did.

More importantly, though, in music everybody is stealing from everybody else all the time. Much of the time they're freely admitting it--musicians call it "having influences." As long as you don't run afoul of the law (which, as we've seen before, has rules about what belongs to you when you write a song that are both sweeping and narrow, specific and arbitrary, and...well, I just hope that I myself never have to navigate them), the rules seem to be simple: only steal from the famous, change it a little bit, and announce to everyone who will listen exactly from whom you're stealing.

As for this particular case, I think it's pretty well impossible to sum things up better than this guy has:

"Somewhere Only We Know" - Keane (Hopes and Fears)

This is the kind of song that I hear and think, "what happened to the days of the great melodies?" I latched onto it after hearing it a couple of times in the satellite radio playlist of our brunch place (I don't listen to top 40, so the only time I hear popular music is when it's playing in the background). And I latched onto it immediately--it's a beautiful melody, with lyrics that actually seem to be talking about the melody itself: "Oh simple thing, where have you gone?" (Mmmm...delicious self reflection). For the longest time, from hearing it at a distance, I thought it was a Coldplay song, and that in fact hindered me from figuring out who and what it actually was. I might therefore conclude that this band sounds kind of generically fin-de-siecle alterna-rocky. And I would probably be correct, but 1) they're doing it with just a piano and drums and some overdubs (and, you know, a lead singer with the voice of an angel), and 2) gauging the sound of the current era and emulating it (if indeed that's what they're doing) is a demonstrably rare and difficult-to-master skill.

Still, man, that's a great melody. And I think the days of the great simple melodies were never here, it's just that the songs that have them tend to stick around.

"Bittersweet Symphony" - The Verve (Urban Hymns)

The write-up for this song is going to turn out very different than I thought it would. If you know the story already, nothing about this is going to be surprising to you, but it was surprising to me.

This was a huge breakout hit for the Verve. It took them from the territory of modestly successful British indie band into the realms of worldwide stardom. It appears on a variety of critical hit lists. All of this because (in my opinion) at the opening strains, it is simply the most awesome thing you have ever heard. It's just totally epic. Nothing else has to happen to make this song a hit, and nothing else does. There's nothing special about the lyrics (nothing wrong with them either, they just are what they are), there's no chorus or bridge--this song is basically just one long verse. The beats are even kind of a misstep--they kind of trip rather than flow. This song is a one-trick pony. But holy hell, it's a good trick.

There's a 1965 song by the Rolling Stones called The Last Time. In 1966 their original manager, Andrew Oldham, recorded an album with his orchestra called Rolling Stones Songbook which included an orchestral version of "The Last Time". It is from this orchestral version that Richard Ashcroft, lead singer of The Verve, sampled the strings for "Bittersweet Symphony" (though it's not a true sample per se, as the concertmaster violin line doesn't exist in the original). At the time of the song's release, The Verve negotiated a 50/50 split of composer rights with ABKCO, the holder of the Rolling Stones' song rights, for the use of the sample in the song. When the song became an enormous hit, ABKCO sued The Verve, arguing (presumably in a more legalese-y fashion) that they had used "too much" of the sample. The case settled with 100% of the composer rights going to ABKCO and The Rolling Stones. One hundred percent. According to copyright law, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger wrote "Bittersweet Symphony."

I'll gladly listen to arguments that Andrew Oldham wrote 50% of "Bittersweet Symphony" (I think that's my opinion on the matter, actually). I will also gladly listen to arguments that The Rolling Stones have better lawyers than The Verve. But the notion that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger wrote "Bittersweet Symphony"...well, the law is just complete crap sometimes. A bunch of clever lawyers took a song and awarded its composers' rights and all of the royalties to two people (and, more importantly, the company that administers their catalog) who didn't write the lyrics, who didn't write the chord progression, and who didn't write the melody.

Lesson: one, single, perfect compositional trick can bring you everything. And also, you know, take it away.

"Everybody Wants to Rule the World" - Tears For Fears (Songs from the Big Chair)

We continue in the quasi-theme of huge 80's hits that weren't written to be singles with this epic ditty. First of all, I don't remember this video at all. Second, Curt Smith is the lead singer on this song? Really? Curt, oh Curt, can we talk about your hair? Can we? CAN WE??? Third, is the reason that I don't remember this video due to the fact that I've blocked it out because of the dancing black dudes at the gas station? Should I be offended by that? I have no idea. I'm not even going to get into how much of a freak the drummer is.

This song was born when Roland Orzabal came into the studio with a two-chord progression that he had in his head--the producer thought it was cool, and told him he should write a song around it. It was the last track of the album that they recorded, they were burned out on recording, and essentially just put their first ideas to tape and went with it. They had already decided that "Shout" and "Head Over Heels" were the big singles off of the album (which, in fairness, they were--just not as big as this song). Lesson: well, what is the lesson? 99.9% of the time stuff you dash off without really putting effort into it or thinking about it sounds exactly that way--like tossed off crap. Somewhere there is some magic in just "letting go" of something, for some definition of "letting go," which nobody actually knows. Finding that magic: hard.

Actually, I do have a larger lesson here. It's somewhat long, and in two parts. Bear with me for a bit. I have read that Roland Orzabal was off-the-hook OCD about the way his music sounded. For instance, he apparently spent six weeks getting the drum track for "Badman's Song" (The Seeds of Love) just right. Now, I love "Badman's Song"--it's probably on my all-time top 20 something-or-other list--and, no mistake, the drums on this track are incredible. But I'm about 94.6% sure that in the alternate universe where they only spent a couple of days on that drum track, I like the song just as much (the other 5.4% of me thinks that I'm wrong about everything and I'm wasting my time doing this analysis and recording music in general, and should just stick to my day job). I would venture to say, in fact, that the only people who listen to that song and hear the six weeks of effort are 1) Roland Orzabal, and 2) the drummer that he tortured for 6 weeks (possibly also 3) the recording engineer, 4) the producer, 5) Curt Smith). I'm a huge (HUGE) believer in the idea that the only person you can ever satisfy is yourself, and so you should do what's necessary until you're satisfied with your efforts. I'm also a huge believer in the idea that if it takes you six weeks to record one track for one song on one album, you need to re-evaluate your criteria for satisfaction.

That was the first part. The second part is related to a recent experience I had doing a song for this forthcoming tribute album. I recorded it and spent a week or so mixing it, and then sent it off to the guy who owns the record label. He said: great song, the mix is a little fuzzy ("woolen" was the word he used), we can probably fix that in mastering, but maybe take another crack at it? So I went back to it, and I worked on the mix off and on for the next two weeks. I was never quite happy with it, and the average listener wouldn't have noticed a lick of difference between my first mix and my second, and it's as likely as not I made it worse. I sent it back to the label anyway, label said great job, let's get it mastered. A couple of days later the engineer sent me a copy of the mastered version and it sounded like a different song. It was all bright and shiny and sounded like something on the radio. Lesson: while your piece of art could always be better, sometimes you reach the limits of where you can take it and have to let it go or hand it off to somebody who knows more than you.

Anyway, this song. Nice beat that shuffles and drives at the same time (they stole it from a Simple Minds song, according to Wikipedia). On the verse the two-chord structure leaves a space for the singer, like they're taking turns: synth plays two chords, singer sings "welcome to your life," synth plays two chords again, singer sings, "there's no turning back," and so on. You don't really get anything concrete out of the lyrics other than, "everybody wants to rule the world." I never thought of that as a universal sentiment myself, but it's catchy. Also on Wikipedia I read this:

Originally the song was called "Everybody Wants to Go to War"

I might be wrong, but I don't think that a song with everything exactly the same except that the they sing "Everybody wants to go to war" instead of "Everybody wants to rule the world," is a hit song. Is that true? It just seems like it changes everything about it. This should tell us something, but I'm not quite sure what it is.

"Don't Dream It's Over" - Crowded House (Crowded House)

Wow. Look at this video. Whereas images of, say, A-ha or Duran Duran are forever frozen in the mid-80's in my mind, I've closely followed Neil Finn for his entire career, so seeing him again in his mid-20's heavily made up like an 80's vaguely Euro pop-star is kind of...just...wrong. I like the smashing tableware, but what's with the tempura-on-a-stick floating across the screen? What the hell is that thing?

So first: it's a huge, timeless, international hit song. It's more than 20 years since it was released, and just walking around in every day life you're likely to hear it playing over the PA in a grocery store, or on some Classics-of-the-80's-90's-and-70's radio station that's tuned in at your hair salon. mtg once asked me rhetorically, "What do you think you have done in your life more times than Neil Finn has performed this song?" Beyond, "get up in the morning," not a whole lot.

I imagine (with only minimal evidence to back me up) that Neil didn't write this song thinking it would be a single. I've always assumed that the follow-up release, "Something So Strong" was originally meant to be the single from the fact that their producer Mitchell Froom is listed in the liner notes as having co-written it. It wasn't even the first single released off the album ("Mean to Me," which didn't make much of a dent anywhere, holds that honor). I don't know what the lesson from that is other than, write and record a lot of songs because you never know.

I forget all the time that the original Crowded House was a power trio, though that's probably because of the prominent overdubbing they always did--here a second guitar (it might actually be the same guitar again with a different effects array) starting in the second verse, and the organ in the last third. A lot of detail in the jangly, chorused, and now totally iconic guitar riff--Neil gets multiple different sounds out of the same chord by hitting the low strings on the downstroke and really ripping the treble notes with upstrokes. Really prominent bass. Thick layered chorus of voices on the Hey Now's from which Neil's distinct wail just sort of emerges. No real bridge, just the organ, and only a very brief turnaround where the chords are any different from the verse. The only thing it (the turnaround) does is sort of "surface" from the organ part into the last verse, but it does that one thing perfectly.

This song sounded totally current in the context of 1986--I remember mentally lumping it in with the aforementioned Duran Duran's and A-ha's of the musical world that I knew then. Part of it was the lyrics--"my possessions are causing me suspicion but there's no proof." They were just kind of inscrutably Euro-cool (though Neil is, of course, a Kiwi--a subtlety lost on me when I was 12). The verses are full of little evocative pockets--"in the paper today, tales of warring and waste, but you turn right over to the t.v. page." That one line manages to paint an entire picture of a relationship that, at 12, I had never experienced, but could nevertheless instantly understand. Then there is the chorus, a chorus that anyone can understand. Plus, as an added bonus, every time somebody says, "hey now..." you think of this song. Lesson: your verse lyrics can be complicated or make no apparent sense if you have a simple, accessible chorus. This is a lesson that I note that EVERYONE in indie rock has learned.

The guitars--that 80's Les Paul sound--is the only element of this song that's really of an era in any way, and while it sometimes sounds a little bit dated and cheesy to me, I never feel that way for long. This song is just so damn good.

"Exit" - U2 (The Joshua Tree)

There are about three hundred million points, strictly musically speaking, to be made about U2. One of the main ones of interest to me is that it seems, on the surface, like they pretty much crap hit songs. I've seen (and heard) direct and anecdotal evidence, however, that they actually work very hard to make it sound like that way--recording full demo versions of songs they're working on, listening to them, taking them apart, figuring out what's working and not working, and putting together a new demo. Rinse, lather, repeat. Lesson 1: there can be an enormous amount of effort put into something that sounds effortless. Sub-lesson: making something sound both effortless and, you know, good is almost always hard.

There are, of course, really two U2's. There's the studio version and the live version. As discussed long ago in this very forum, the latter is literally a communal religious experience, and while I suppose there are ways listening to an album can be transcendent in its own way...well, anyway, that's outside the scope of this discussion. The point being that there are songs that are great recordings and don't translate as well live ("Beautiful Day" being an example, so I'm told) and vice versa (most of the rest of their canon I gather, Bono being Rock Jesus and all).

Here's what U2 is all about, in my opinion: space. Compared to almost all other popular music, there's comparatively few parts making up the song--bass, drums, lead guitar, vocal, maybe one harmony. Very few overdubs (our current example has only a little bit of low, rumbling synth in the middle/end, which I defy you to claim that you would have noticed if I hadn't pointed it out). So, on to the construction of "Exit": First verse: the bass and Bono singing breathy, right up into the mic. Second verse: the same thing, with Bono opening up and singing louder. Some drum hits and guitar filigrees (The Edge is all about the filigree, don't you think?). This is a four minute song (I'm talking about the album version now). This band has three instruments total. For the first minute and a half, only one of them is continuously playing. Then they song kicks in for 45 seconds, and then everything but the bass is gone for another 45 seconds, and the rest of the song repeats that basic pattern again. To make a hack-jazz comparison, it's all about the notes that aren't played.

I think space in music is both literal and figurative. The literal is constructed (at least) of both gaps in the sonic spectrum and with reverb (I read in an article about mixing that you can think of sound two-dimensionally with the stereo pan moving a sound left-right and a reverb pan moving it forward-backward. Things with lots of reverb sound farther away). The figurative is whatever it is that lets the listener into the song--metaphorically speaking there's room for him or her to get into the song. That works strongly here--when the song really starts to rock, you've already been sucked in to the atmosphere and it's that much more potent.

I have a theory that the transcendent listening experience happens because of space, for a definition of "space" that I haven't quite filled out. I actually think there's no real meaning conveyed from the song writer and/or performer to the listener, that instead what's happening is that the song creates a space for the listener to insert his or her own life/experiences/humanity/whatever. That is, the listener is doing all the work, he or she just doesn't know it. You like a song before you know what it's about, in fact you've probably constructed your own notion of what it's about, whether you realize it or not. I always feel kind of sad when I find out what songs are actually about--it's like going from the book version of something to seeing someone else's version of it rendered on film. The picture painted by the song writer is always a little smaller than the one in my head.

"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" -- Daft Punk (Discovery)

Here's a song that, while having absolutely no right to do so, sounds timeless (for a definition of timeless meaning, "could have been recorded any time in the last 30 years." There was no time before that, right?). It would be perfect for the soundtrack of Tron if everyone involved in the production in 1982 had been stoned (as opposed to just the screenwriter and all the people watching it). It also brings up several questions for discussion:

Question 1: Straight-up stealing from other artists: genius, or laziness? Discuss.
Question 2: "Believe" by Cher: is it the single nexus of sound responsible for the nigh-hegemonic, Anteres over-pitch-corrected weirdly post-disco sound found in all top-40 music today? Discuss.

Besides that, what have we got? I find the cheesy synth, casio-keyboard beat concoction of this song to be strangely compelling--it's something I've heard literally a million times before, yet I still can't quite place all the sources. In addition to the hyper pitch correction and other robotic-vocal effects (apparently these guys have gone into interviews and pretended to be robots, in true Tracy Jordan style), there are some neat tricks, both with rhythm (e.g. landing on "never over" at the end of several phrases) and instrumentation (e.g. the portamento keyboard voice, the fingertapping electric guitar voice, both of which I assume are MIDI triggers). 30 seconds of intro with all the dynamics EQ'd out, as if we're listening to tiny, tinny speakers. But the rest of the song doesn't really have a huge dynamic range, and sounds tinny and cheesy by nature, so it doesn't really "pop" when it actually comes in. Is this purposeful/a miscalculation/indicative of the fact that these guys just throw every musical trick they've ever heard at the wall and see what sticks?

What do we learn about stealing?

• Leave a gap--the clever folks and critical darlings making music right now seem to be taking sounds from the late 70's/early 80's, so what's that--25-ish to 30 years (By that calculation we're due for a major popular resurgence of Michael Jackson's Thriller right about now)? You sound like Stevie Wonder's Inner Visions, you're a genius. You sound like the late 90's, you're a no-talent hack.
• Steal outright, whole-cloth. Do what it takes to reproduce the sound of the era at which you're aiming. Don't worry about also sounding current--you seem to get that for free.

"Between the Bars" - Elliott Smith (either/or)

Between the Bars - quintessential guitar and voice ballad (though there are at least two guitars here, and there's some kind of organ towards the end). Robbed of almost all the techniques and tools one would normally use to build a song, how does one pull off the feat?

Option 1: Battle depression, alcoholism, and heroin addiction; turn to music as the only possible expression of your own humanity, each song you write and record a tiny, tiny scream into the vast void of an unfeeling universe; realize upon attaining commercial success that now that everyone can hear you, no one is actually listening.

Option 2: Fake it.

Technically, he does what he does--layering voices and guitars in such a way that it still sounds like there's only one of each. Both elements super up-front in the recording. You're in the same room with him, right next to him even, and he's whispering his song to you. One perfect, memorable line: "People that you've been before that you don't want around any more." Everything about the construction of the song is easily repeatable by anyone else except for, you know, the actual deeply personal and profoundly heartbreaking expression behind it.

"Blue Ridge Mountains" - Fleet Foxes (Fleet Foxes)

(or: surely now I will resume blogging with any kind of frequency at all).

mtg is teaching playwriting this semester, and is considering making her students do a blogging response project, wherein they read plays, blog about what they think made those plays successful, and then read and comment on the blogs of other students who are doing the same. It's an exercise in construction through group de-construction.

Will this work for songs? Who knows? But I'm not blogging about anything else these days, and knowing more about how to successfully construct a good song would be a lot of use to me. The rules will be made up as we go along. So...

Blue Ridge Mountains -- Fleet Foxes' self-titled debut made everybody's year-end top ten list. It would have made mine if I, you know, had one. When this song comes on my machine at work, after thirty seconds I forget what I was doing and start staring wistfully out of the window. It's not just that this song is good, it's transcendent.

• It sounds epic. Dark, cavernous reverb, like we're in a cathedral. Vocal harmonies to match, it sounds almost like a boys choir in the intro.
  
• Interesting, unusual lead instrument. I thought it was a hammer dulcimer at first, but it turns out to be a mandolin doubled with a piano.
  
• Starts simple (and in mono--it's not in stereo until about half way through), and builds to a huge crescendo, but without any of the usual rock-and-roll elements. No electric guitars. No driving beats. No bass guitar at all that I can hear. Shakers, pounding on the piano, bass drum, the same lead riff we heard in the quiet parts, those same soaring harmonies all create the drive instead.
  
• Unusual structure. No verse/chorus per se, there's a first part and a second part that's repeated, and so is chorus-like. Definitely unlike anything you'd hear on the radio.
• Lyrically it seems like there's some mysterious family secret being referred to, but otherwise I have no idea what this song is about. And it definitely doesn't matter.
• Singer with a good and reasonably strong voice with really just a hint of character. Certainly at his edge on this song, he breaks a couple of times on the high parts, but not in a way that sounds unpleasant. He neither carries the song nor impedes it, he just kind of rides it.
  

This song breaks almost all rules of popular songwriting, I have no idea what genre you'd put it in (alt-folk americana or something?), there's no hook, there's nothing about it that's really hummable. And if I were a record exec, I'd sign the band on the spot after hearing it. What have we learned here in lesson one? If you have a totally original and captivating sound you can break all the rules of songwriting and be successful in spite (or, much more likely, because) of it. And probably some other things, but I don't know what they are yet.

Slumdog Millionaire, dir. Danny Boyle

Yeah, I haven't blogged for six months, and I haven't blogged about any of the things this blog is ostensibly about in, like, ever. I had a post about Hawking Radiation (because I know everyone has been dying to know my position on that) and yet another Schrodinger's Cat post (good news, I've totally solved the problem. Well, more like defined it out of existence), but I'm just not in a blogging place these days. I guess the days when the crushing angst of modern life could be filled by frequent posting have passed me by.

Anyway, this movie: Holy. Fuck. If you are currently in a state of having not seen this movie, you should seek the discontinuation of that state as soon as is humanly possible. In fact, you should just stop reading this right now, see the movie, and then come back so we can discuss it. For now, the rest of this paragraph is a generic spoiler, which you should not read if you have not seen the movie: Boyle has made a Bollywood film the brilliance of which lies in continually making you forget that you are watching a Bollywood film. It is a film which at every turn seems to be thwarting the conventions of the genre, such that you the viewer are endlessly surprised when it winds up totally following them.  

Back with me? Good. Now go see this movie. Do it. 

"Gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here"

The Chicago Shakespeare Theater is in the unlikeliest of places. Think of the schlockiest part of the schlockiest beach town you can imagine -- end to end to end cheap, tacky souvenirs, cranky, sugar-hyped children, stupid games and rides, glow sticks, cotton candy, and ice cream of the future (on Chicago’s Navy Pier, Ice Cream of the Future comes in a futuristic pouch. Spoons and cups are so 20th century). Anyway, one slogs through all of this misery, skin crawling, and comes at last to the Shakespeare Theater -- an oasis in the desert, an island in the raging sea, shelter in wilderness, what you will. First, it is a beautiful beautiful theater and space. Second, holy crap, they are good. TG and I saw Comedy of Errors this weekend, a thing I would never have done had I not been just desperate to see the place. COE is (with apologies) not a good play. It is very early. It is not very funny. It lacks interesting characters or compelling narrative. It is the same joke over and over and over. And it makes no sense. Two sets of twins? Sure. Both with the same names? Um, no. It’s not just that this company managed to make the play palatable and entertaining. It wasn’t good in spite of its material. It was just brilliant. Brilliant.

But I’m getting off topic. My question was why put this world class theater doing classical (for the sake of this argument) texts in the middle of schlocky schlocksville? To attract a more diverse crowd? Full price tix were 80 bucks (we got them half price of course), about twice the price of any other theater tix in the city save for the totally sold out national tour huge summer musical extravaganza production of Wicked. 80 dollar tickets does not encourage the bringing of one’s totally hopped up, sticky, cranky, glow sticked children, right? The overlap of these two groups of people -- people who want to see Shakespeare and are willing to spend 80 dollars on it vs. people who want to eat fried dough, buy a pencil sharpener model of the Sears tower, and then go on the tilt a whirl -- is small (limited, perhaps, to Greg exclusively, and even he is borderline). Indeed, the audience was as white, middle aged, and blue haired as usual if a bit less high brow and a bit more touristy (so, then, was the show).

It pandered but brilliantly. Instead of just doing COE, it imagined a film studio making a film of the play in London in the 40s, so we got scenes from COE interspersed with this other play they’d written about these people making this movie. The marginalized ham, used to playing star parts, reduced here to playing a silly servant, keeps begging the director to let him do the St. Crispen’s Day speech from Henry V, a recurring joke that is brilliant on at least a dozen levels, but I’ll spare you these as it’s interesting only to me (and perhaps TG who, as you can imagine, already got the full lecture). Anyway, the ham gets slapped across the face towards the end of the “film” and the light changes and cue I’m-seeing-stars music, and he busts into the speech. About a third of the audience maybe got it, but we few (we happy few, we band of...well, you get it) cracked the fuck up. Genuinely. It was actually funny, not intellectually funny. It was brilliant. It was awesome. It was one of the funniest moments I have ever seen in live Shakespeare. And it cost nothing if you didn’t happen to be familiar with the speech -- the delivery was pretty funny anyway. I cried. Not from laughing so hard (though that too) but because it was so damn perfect and good.

Anyway, I would like to think the moral of this long winded story is something like happy marriage between tourists and academics, candy apples and theater snobs, but I don’t think it is. Shakespeare was not writing for a high brow audience, and his theater was located in a much less savory part of town than the Navy Pier. This isn’t the Globe though, and that’s not what they are going for. What they are going for I do not know. However, I expect seldom to see better theater in a more unusual place for it and never ever to see a better production of the Comedy of Freaking Errors of all things. 

The Revolution Will Be Televised, Edited for Time and Content, and Re-released on DVD With Hours of Never-Before-Seen Bonus Footage

British band The Get Out Clause has made a music video out of footage from CC-TV footage.

Awesome (literally).

Video killed the blah blah etc. blah

My birthday has lately passed and as a gift from Mrs. Transient Gadfly I received a video camera. Putting it to immediate use I have now combined the two favorite things of everyone in the universe: other people's home movies and music recorded in basements.



If, inexplicably, you know me and do not have this mp3 of mine yet wish to, you can download it here. It occurred to me while doing this that I recorded this song ten years ago. Ten f***ing years, man. Also, the fact that Apple makes movie editing software that is so incredibly easy to use that you don't have to read instructions of any kind to make a music video might make you think that designing user interfaces is easy. Apparently though, it is not.

Beautiful Escape: The Songs of the Posies Revisted

The Posies' first major-label release, Dear 23, came out in September of my senior year of high school. My friend Gino and I skipped class that morning and drove down to Cellophane Square to buy the CD; they hadn't put it on the shelves yet, and when we asked the guy behind the counter he gave us this look like, "Oh god. It has started already."

The Posies weren't just a band that had made it big, they were a band from Bellingham that had made it big, and they weren't just a band from Bellingham that made it big, our friend Nathan's older brother was the lead guitarist and singer, and Nathan had been keeping us appraised the whole year before about how they'd been courted by major labels and put up in plush hotel rooms. The Posies were It. They were The Next Big Thing.

There's a whole grand epic narrative that goes in between that day and this one but I'll just skip said narrative crap and say that 20 years later the Posies are still out there rocking, and their lasting contribution to pop music might just turn out to be that while they themselves were never The Next Big Thing, they inspired a crap load of other bands that sound like them. Here are 47 of them, including Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow covering their own songs (not to mention a great cover of "Paint Me" by The Calculus Affair).

Um...

Can somebody explain this to me?

That's "Mr. Nerd Gnome" To You

We're in Wired this (where "this" = next) month. Therein we are referred to as "the nerd gnomes in Beacon Hill." This is, in fact, an improvement. At the beginning of my career in software I worked at That Software Giant in Redmond™ on their initial foray into the internet, MSN 1.0. Wired did an article in which they likened we happy few original web developers to the million monkeys typing randomly on tiny keyboards. So now I am, professionally speaking, a gnome. The metaphors grow ever more humanoid.

There isn't a ton in this article that I haven't already covered here at The Odds Are One over the last couple of years (oh please, Wired: web services hype is soooo 2006). I haven't yet mentioned Amazon DevPay in this space, which is weird on account of in most of the Web Service things I announce the launch of I am only peripherally involved, whereas DevPay took up my entire life until it launched last December. DevPay is a billing application wherein you the developer create a software product that runs on Amazon's Web Services, then we sign up and bill your customers on your behalf. The concept is actually pretty cool, and like the rest of Web Services, if it turns out to be a killer app, the thing it's going to kill is venture capital.

Amazon (and Google, Yahoo, and IBM, who aren't wasting any time getting into the space either) is taking away the big upfront IT costs: you want to run a business that's going to need four high-powered servers just to get going? You don't need to spend $10,000 on hardware and $100,000 a year on a sysadmin just to get off the ground. You rent the space from Amazon for $0.40 an instance/hour and $0.10 a Gigabyte/month. When you want to get bigger, you rent more space (AWS even gives you a volume discount). We are hoping, it seems, to provide the big guns for the revolution, and then to watch the little guys fire them off.

It Came From 1977

The Odds Are One and The Calculus Affair are pleased to announce the release of bad quarto*, a ten and one-half song E.P. recorded for the 2008 RPM Challenge (which has, as will be noted by those of you possessing clever and new-fangled calendar-reading skills, just ended).

The full album will be released in approximately twelve lines of text. Here now is the advance single from the album. Click play. You know you want to.




The Calculus Affair quoteth now from our liner notes as regards bad quarto*:

This album is composed entirely of songs about or pertaining to plays by William Shakespeare. In addition to being The Calculus Affair's effort for the 2008 RPM Challenge, it is also an E.P. which heralds the release of a future album of epic scope: one song for each of Shakespeare's plays (37 or 38, depending upon whom you read). If you are a fan of The Calculus Affair, and you enjoy excessively long albums that sound like they fell out of 1977, keep an eye peeled.

And now, the long (for an entirely abstract and arbitrary definition of the word, "long") awaited (for a definition of "awaited" etc. etc.) downloadable mp3 version of bad quarto*.

1. Duke Of The Stratosphere


2. Every Day


3. Bone & Matter


4. Rude Mechanicals


5. The Archer


6. Prince Of Tyre


7. The Mob


8. Hell & Night


9. Q.E. I


10. Exit, Pursued by a Bear/Your Mother's a Statue


11. Coda (Duke Of The Stratosphere)

This EP also comes with the fun built-in game, "Guess Which Play The Song Goes With." This game may or may not actually be fun. As with all music by The Calculus Affair, we remind you of the following: Unauthorized duplication is strictly encouraged. We hope you enjoy.

OaO Presents: Hilarity for Nerd Sportsfan Rockstar Wannabes™

Picabo Street, if I may digress again, is my second favorite winter Olympics subject, after curling. In my musician days I made up a song inspired by her name: "Peekaboo Street." My baby lived on it. It was writing songs like that that made me the man I am today: a former musician.

-King Kaufman

OaO Presents: Hilarity for Nerds™

From my friend Tom:

I failed my saving throw against charisma and became a die-hard Obama supporter.