October Sixteenth

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There’s nothing more surreal than waking up in a hospital bed in a morphine haze, turning on the national news, and seeing the charter bus – mangled by an impact and the jaws of life – that you’d boarded 10 hours previously.

Ten years ago today, I was in college and working several part-time jobs. One of my gigs was instructing front-line percussion for my old high school’s marching band – a decorated, tightly-knit, huge band of bright and motivated kids. The band had just performed at the state championship competition in Whitewater, WI the previous night. They’d performed well, received high marks, and enjoyed a brief, energetic celebration before climbing on the buses. We were scheduled to get home by 3 AM. I took my spot on “Bus 1” and hoped to get some sleep before my college wind ensemble concert scheduled for the next day.

Thirty miles from home, unbeknownst to our bus caravan, a young truck driver a few miles up the road from us over-corrected after his semi started to veer into a steep ditch. The truck ended up on its side, jackknifed in such a way that it blocked all the westbound lanes of I-94. The bottom of the truck, the side without reflectors, was facing oncoming traffic. Based on a later NTSB re-creation, it would have been nearly impossible for our bus driver to see the truck in time to apply the brakes.

My bus, the first in the caravan, slammed into the truck at about 70 mph. Nearly everyone other than the bus driver was asleep at the time. I was sitting in the fourth row of the bus. I suffered life-threatening, disabling injuries. My right ankle and all the bones in that leg were broken. My right foot was dislocated (which is a thing that can happen, believe it or not). I continue to suffer from soft tissue damage that was done to my knee and ankle.  I had a fractured finger, a fractured bone next to my eye, a bad concussion, bruises, contusions, upholstery burns, and – most serious of all – deep lacerations on my scalp which severed an artery.

I was tended to by some brave first-responders and EMTs. When I got to the hospital, I received a massive blood transfusion and careful surgical work which saved my life. In my first couple of hours there, while they were prepping me for x-rays and surgery, the nurses answered my questions. I found out there were many people injured, some hurt as badly as me. I knew everyone on that bus: they were close friends, fellow staffers, former teachers, and students of mine.

I learned what I already suspected: There were fatalities. Five, actually.

Doug Greenhalgh, known to his students as “G”, was my boss and former band director. More than that, though, he was a great mentor and friend to myself and many, many others. He was 48 years old. His beloved wife Therese, 51, and their granddaughter Morgan, just 11 years old, also lost their lives that day. The bus driver, 78-year-old Paul Rasmus, was a retired veteran who had continued to drive our band because he liked working with us so much. Branden Atherton, who turned 24 that day, was a skilled educator, a classmate at my university, and a new friend to me.

Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but it definitely offers a salve. It has been ten years, and it sure has felt like ten years. Three thousand, six hundred and fifty-two days. Sixteen surgeries, performed by six different surgeons. Countless days on crutches and in physical therapy; quite a few mornings when I need to use my cane.

But I’ve been keeping track of other stuff, too. In that ten years, I’ve achieved a BA and an MA. I met and married a great guy. We bought a home and added another kitty to the household. We’ve traveled quite a bit. I landed a job I like in a city I love. I’ve made a lot of friends, tried new foods, and taken up new hobbies. Throughout it all, I’ve had unwavering support from the people who care about me.

To all my other Cardinals today; to all the UWEC people; to my friends, family, and everyone who was touched by this tragedy in some way: May the good of your next ten years outweigh the bad.

And because this is a music blog, here’s a mini-playlist of music that always makes me think of my time at Chi-Hi:

Forever Cardinal Bound.

Tracking Down Publishers

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Wall Street Journal’s Ethan Smith has a good piece today, written with admirable clarity, about some of the difficulties in tracking down publisher royalties. A proposed solution:

“The NMPA is contemplating a proposal simply to apportion the unclaimed royalties based on its members’ market share.”

I think it would be more productive to ask or compel record labels to share publisher/songwriter information for their recordings.

“Songwriter and publisher information isn’t typically included in the “metadata” that record companies include with songs when they upload them to services making it difficult for the service to know whom to pay.”

Labels do have this information for some (if not all) of their catalogs, but since they don’t have to share it, other companies have to piece it together. It would be helpful for services to have this information. In the meantime, companies like mine are working hard to track down every rights holder.

Moored Music

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“When Amazon Dies“, a recent piece in The Atlantic, is an interesting look at one of the biggest hurdles for converting “a la carte” (or “cloud”) service users to subscription streaming services:  Users want to keep the content they’ve purchased. But when a service goes away or an account is deactivated, any content that was saved “in the cloud” disappears too.

Other than books (which I read on my Kindle), I generally prefer subscription services to a la carte and download models for two reasons:

1.) Unlike a download or a la carte streaming service, paying a subscription rate allows you unlimited access to the service’s catalog. I currently have a Beats subscription, which has just about every album/artist/track I can think of. When that service goes away, I’ll be sad, but then I’ll subscribe to another service where I’ll have access to a catalog that is – to me, anyway – functionally the same. I won’t feel like my subscription was a sunk cost, because I’m paying for continued access to a broad catalog, rather than buying access to specific albums which may or may not remain available to me later.

2.) If you’re using an a la carte streaming service, there’s no guarantee your music will always be available to you. In fact, it’s not really “yours”. Depending on the service, Digital Rights Management (DRM) may be in effect. DRM can limit the number of devices to which you copy your music, and any retroactive changes in territory restrictions can mean content gets pulled from your cloud streaming library after a “takedown” is issued. Personally, I’d rather pay for a subscription service. If an album I want to listen to gets taken down, at least I didn’t pay for just that album.

The downside to switching services, however, is the thought of losing playlists. This one isn’t a big deal to me either, actually. I tend to listen to music while I’m working, so I’m a big fan of playlists that are “curated” by someone else, rather than ones I create. It’s nice to hear a variety music I enjoy without having to invest time into setting up the playlist. I may be an outlier – I know a lot of people enjoy crafting the perfect playlists for partying, studying, cleaning, etc.

I think the connection to our playlists goes deeper, though, than the time and thought we’ve put into them. To a large extent, the music we choose is part of our identities, especially when we share our tastes with others. Most people remember the first physical album/tape/CD they purchased. Everyone loves to play DJ at parties. Vinyl collecting has been enjoying a resurgence for years, partly because records can be arrayed on shelves in the living room for everyone to admire. When we lose that ability to curate and show off music, we lose part of that connection. Music becomes fully intangible.

So how do we incorporate an interest in media ownership into an increasingly digital world? Possibly a playlist-porting service like Soundiiz has potential, but I’d like it better if it was fully independent from any existing service – i.e., if it wasn’t owned by a streaming service.

Perhaps sharing what we’re listening to on social networks is the way of the future, but that’s exactly what put me off Spotify in the past. From what I remember, in Spotify’s early days, an account had to be linked with a social media account, and by default it would update your Facebook page with the music you’d been listening to. Beyond the added clutter, I never liked that feature because there was a whiff of trying-too-hard. It’s “cool” for people to accidentally notice you’re listening to Morton Feldman at work, or to casually mention you’re listening to the perennially-hip Miles Davis while cooking, or to namedrop on a blog. But when you’re developing the “perfect” playlist to push to the news feeds of all your friends, it’s just not interesting anymore. Plus, there’s always the chance of accidentally admitting Mariah Carey is sometimes your jam.

What’s the answer, then, to our ownership dilemma? I think it’s some combination of playlist portability and social media sharing, or possibly just one or the other, but with better execution than previous attempts. I think time will tell.

Last Week’s News

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Here are a few good articles from last week:

The Verge: How Spotify’s Discover Weekly Cracked Human Curation at Internet Scale

I’ve been following advances in music “curation” technology with interest. Ben Popper’s interview offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the industry’s current wunderkind, The Echo Nest.

The New Yorker: What Kind of Genius Is Max Martin?

I had a passing familiarity with Max Martin’s influence, but John Seabrook’s bio piece is well worth a read. Martin’s songwriting forTaylor Swift adds a layer of complexity to the discussion about Swift, Ryan Adams, and gender bias in music reviews.

Grantland: How Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ Kicked Off the Streaming Revolution

Steven Hyden’s piece on Radiohead’s Kid A as a milestone in album-length streaming is interesting, though it doesn’t match my own experience of streaming music’s history. Despite Hyden’s assertion that Kid A blazed a trail of leaked albums, it wasn’t hard in 2000 to find streaming music online. I don’t know if Hyden is being revisionist here, or if he simply means this was one of the first albums (if not the first) to be leaked by a record label itself, but leaks were common all through the ’90s (Stephen Witt’s book shares a fascinating history of music availability online – a history that meshes better with my own memory of the ’90s).

Radiohead did shift the paradigm with a later album, In Rainbows, which was released online as pay-what-you-want after their dispute with EMI.

Why Metadata Matters

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Check out the blog post I wrote for my company’s Medium account. I used a few examples to show how important it is that we receive correct metadata for our catalog. In a way, it was an answer to articles, like this one from NPR, that complain about the way streaming services handle classical music.

Edit: This article has recently been picked up by Hypebot as well. There are a couple editing issues, though, that aren’t present in the original post on my company’s blog, so I’d recommend reading it there.

Best Summer Music 2015

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Summer (unofficially) ends today, though here in Seattle it seems to have ended a couple weeks ago. It was a good summer for music, at least. Here, in no particular order, are my favorites:

 

The Chemical Brothers: Born in the Echoes

I love the polyrhythms in “Reflexion”, but my favorite track on this album is probably “Taste Of Honey”. It’s just so weird and wonderful. It’s based on a slow, micro-tonal groove, overlaid with buzzing. Listen to it through headphones or earbuds, and you’ll hear the buzzing alternate sides. If strange bee sounds aren’t your thing, check out “Go” (which is a contender for best song of the summer) and “Born in the Echos”. And, of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend listening to “Wide Open”, which features Beck on vocals.

 

Jamie xx: In Colour

The best tracks on this album may be the ones which feature Romy: “Seesaw” and “Loud Places”. “Gosh” has a weird, frenetic quality that’s somehow perfect for summer. “Obvs” is fun because of the way the steel drums drift back and forth between straight and swung eighths, leaving it with a somewhat lazy, vacation-y feel.

My favorite from the album, though, may be “The Rest is Noise”. It starts out with a weird sample that has two phrases of the following beat groupings: 10, 11, 11, 11. The percussion entrance around 0:30 makes us reinterpret that beat structure – the clap on 2 & 4 create a well-defined meter of 4/4, over which the opening sample is recognized for the (roughly) quarter-note triplet it really is. (That interplay is a little easier to hear after 3:42.) Forty-five seconds in, the piano joins and alternates tonic/dominant every other measure, reinforcing the square 4/4 meter we hear through the percussion. At the point where the piano joins, we also get a very catchy rhythm in the bass drum. Altogether it’s a fun groove with a lot of forward momentum.

 

Alabama Shakes: Sound & Color

This album has delta blues roots and lush orchestration. There’s plenty of sultry, radio-friendly fodder, while still containing enough depth that it improves upon repeated listens. I love the vibraphone on the title track, but my favorites might be “Dunes” (which always gets stuck in my head) and the gritty, 12/8 ballad “Miss You”.

 

Veruca Salt: Ghost Notes

I was never all that big into Veruca Salt, but their first release in nearly a decade hits the nostalgia button. “Laughing in the Sugar Bowl” is basically a late ’90s hit written two decades late. This album is fun, and I can only hope that Letters to Cleo follows suit and releases a new album.

 

Tame Impala: Currents

The first time I heard “Let It Happen”, it was on my local indie station, KEXP. The station plays music from all eras on all types of media, so it’s not uncommon to hear an old CD start skipping, typically followed by silence and an apologetic DJ frantically searching for something else to put on. When I heard this song, I wasn’t sure if it was something old or new. (Tame Impala, often compared to The Beatles, has moved into their Sgt. Pepper phase.) Halfway through the track (around 3:30), it seems like the quality is deteriorating, and then it gets stuck on one skipping section. Just when it feels like you’ll hear the DJ cut in with a new song, or when your ’90s self is trying to find the CD player, you hear a rich entrance in the low strings, and the new skip groove is incorporated into the rest of the song. It makes for a very neat “cold” digital vs. “warm” analog feel.

 

Honorable mentions (meaning I haven’t listened to them much yet):

Dr. Dre: Compton

FKA Twigs: M3ll155x

Beach House: Depression Cherry 

New Wave Morning

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Do you ever happen to hear a few songs in a row that all fit together, like the universe has created a playlist for you? That happened to me this morning.

Many mornings, I get coffee from a place near home that I like to call “Hipster Coffee”. They don’t serve chai (but other teas are okay), their WiFi never works, and their outdoor benches are full of retired 30-somethings. (Although, let’s be honest, I like this place enough to buy coffee there a few times a week. The baristas are nice and the coffee is good.) I’m always interested in knowing what record they’re listening to. This morning it was the Talking Heads album Remain In Light. The 1980 hit “Once in a Lifetime” was playing when I walked in, setting the scene for a new-wave morning.

After I got back into my car, KEXP played Tame Impala’s “Let It Happen”. It’s from their July 2015 album Currents. That track has been getting a lot of play on KEXP, and I have to say, it has grown on me quite a bit. Its sound lies at the intersection of ’70s disco, ’80s new wave, and current house music. KEXP plays music from all different decades on various media, so when I first heard it, I wasn’t sure whether I was listening to something old or new. Then, in the middle of the song, it started glitching out like a badly-scratched CD. I’ve heard CD skips that station before (as recently as this evening), usually followed by an apologetic DJ frantically digging for something else to play. I expected to hear that sort of interlude, but instead, it came as a shock to realize (spoiler alert?) that the skipping-CD-sound is actually part of the song. A warm entrance in the low strings brings a nice contrast to the digital CD-skip sound. The glitch then gets worked into a new groove to finish out the song. I encourage you to listen to it, though anyone who remembers the ’90s will have to fight the urge to stop the imagined CD player to clean it.

After that, KEXP played Cut Copy’s “Lights & Color” from their 2008 album In Ghost Colours. It has that same new-wave sound as the others in my mini-playlist. It was fun to hear how three songs written over the course of 35 years fit together so perfectly.

For your listening pleasure, here are all three songs.

Odds & Ends

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Happy Friday! Here are some things I read this week and wanted to share:

  • The Every Child Achieves Act is working its way through Congress. It passed the Senate and will be up for a vote in the House soon. If passed, this bill will ensure that music and arts are part of the core curriculum for elementary schools in the US. Having seen the effects of music education underprivileged students, and having enjoyed the benefits of a solid music education myself, I’m excited about this one.
  • My company’s blog has a good explainer this week on high-def music. For anyone interested in more “plain English” information on audio compression, I’ll recommend the book I’m currently reading: Stephen Witt’s How Music Got Free – which contains a surprisingly fascinating background on how the MP3 came about. Basically, a bunch of audio obsessives worked on compression using methods like auditory masking. For their research, one of the songs they listened used as a benchmark was Suzanne Vega’s 1981 song “Tom’s Diner”. The thought of them listening to such an insanely repetitive song repeatedly makes me think of Ravel’s Boléro and Anne Adams’s Unraveling Boléro.
  • Speaking of Stephen Witt, he wrote an interesting piece this week on Grooveshark‘s downfall and the sad, mysterious death of its young creator, Josh Greenberg. (Though I will have to disagree with Witt on one point: this field still feels like the wild west at times!)
  • Record labels have always served as marketers and tastemakers. In the age of social media marketing, I guess we have nobody but our collective selves to blame for Jack & Jack.