I absolutely love this post, just love it. Your ability to think deeply has always been something noticeable about you, but as you continue to live and grow, you get more polished and proficient at the task of expressing yourself all the time. You’ve provided much food for thought today.
You said,
“The fun thing when I write about new music is that I usually know nothing about the artist. I can’t speculate on how their personal experience influenced their work. I can just listen to their music and tell you what I like.”
Despite the fact that there’s a tremendous amount of people who love to know all the details about a singer/songwriter’s life, I think people will still tend to view their work as your statements I have just quoted reflect. I often think of releasing any art as similar to the act of pulling on the string of a bow and aiming the arrow; I can take an extraordinary amount of time and effort to be a certain as I can that the arrow will hit the target, but once I have released the string, it’s going to go where it’s going to go. It might hit a branch I didn’t consider, wind might deflect the arrow, etc.
I find it as largely the same with art in that once you release the string so to speak, it is up to the person receiving it to interpret it, despite however much they may or may not know about you for your personal life.
(One particularly cringeworthy response was when I heard back from a woman who had heard one of my instrumentals, and she was quite excited about it, told me she loved it, gushed on about how it reminded her “of a Hallmark made for women movie, where the boy and the girl are reunited at last.” Listening to her say that made me feel like throwing up in my mouth.
I heard an interview with Sting a few months ago, where he referred to this very same phenomena. The interviewer described how some people thought Roxanne was a romantic love song while other people thought it was about stalking and in general a very ugly song.
He was nonchalant and took it stride, noting that (I paraphrase) people are going to respond to it how they will and that he finds it basically interesting. (I confess I was not finding that woman’s comment about my instrumental composition reminding her of a Hallmark made for women movie as interesting.)
Thank you for another superlative post, and I look forward to more of the same. Of course your pieces which center around data driven trends, and observations in music are always interesting but the ones I really look forward to are the ones where you share your personal insight and thoughts about a given subject. You have a deep mind and are equally well at expressing what is in it.
Chris, thanks!
I absolutely love this post, just love it. Your ability to think deeply has always been something noticeable about you, but as you continue to live and grow, you get more polished and proficient at the task of expressing yourself all the time. You’ve provided much food for thought today.
You said,
“The fun thing when I write about new music is that I usually know nothing about the artist. I can’t speculate on how their personal experience influenced their work. I can just listen to their music and tell you what I like.”
Despite the fact that there’s a tremendous amount of people who love to know all the details about a singer/songwriter’s life, I think people will still tend to view their work as your statements I have just quoted reflect. I often think of releasing any art as similar to the act of pulling on the string of a bow and aiming the arrow; I can take an extraordinary amount of time and effort to be a certain as I can that the arrow will hit the target, but once I have released the string, it’s going to go where it’s going to go. It might hit a branch I didn’t consider, wind might deflect the arrow, etc.
I find it as largely the same with art in that once you release the string so to speak, it is up to the person receiving it to interpret it, despite however much they may or may not know about you for your personal life.
(One particularly cringeworthy response was when I heard back from a woman who had heard one of my instrumentals, and she was quite excited about it, told me she loved it, gushed on about how it reminded her “of a Hallmark made for women movie, where the boy and the girl are reunited at last.” Listening to her say that made me feel like throwing up in my mouth.
I heard an interview with Sting a few months ago, where he referred to this very same phenomena. The interviewer described how some people thought Roxanne was a romantic love song while other people thought it was about stalking and in general a very ugly song.
He was nonchalant and took it stride, noting that (I paraphrase) people are going to respond to it how they will and that he finds it basically interesting. (I confess I was not finding that woman’s comment about my instrumental composition reminding her of a Hallmark made for women movie as interesting.)
Thank you for another superlative post, and I look forward to more of the same. Of course your pieces which center around data driven trends, and observations in music are always interesting but the ones I really look forward to are the ones where you share your personal insight and thoughts about a given subject. You have a deep mind and are equally well at expressing what is in it.
"Lou Reed recounted many of Poe’s works on his 2033 concept album The Raven."
Albums from the future!