Finding New Music Part 2

While I was thinking about this post, I read the book pictured above. "Let's Talk About Love" is the title of a Celine Dion album that writer Carl Wilson totally hates, but has sold gazillions, so he resolves to find out where the disconnect is. What is 'taste', and why do you have such terrible taste? How does something I may find totally unlistenable find such a large audience ?  It was an eye (ear) opener for me, though the discussion of the sociology of culture towards the end made my brain hurt. But it was helpful as I thought about how to recommend music.

Here's the deal: I was all prepared to offer my suggestions about where to find new music, until I realized, that's where I go -- you may have a totally different agenda. Where to go? 

Many people hear new music on TV -- commercials, soundtracks to TV shows. YouTube is good, and so is (trade secret) the library. Physically, my library's CD collection is pretty mainstream; mostly current rap/country/pop (minus the copies that were stolen),  new music by established artists that peaked years ago (the 'safe bet'), Jazz? You may have a fighting chance. Classical?   Good luck -- like western paperbacks, it's a market that is shrinking as us old farts die off.

Streaming services? So far, Hoopla is a winner. Use your library card, download complete albums, listen for a week, and deep, deep catalog. How deep? "The Return of The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of", a fantastic collection of  -- no kidding -- 78's from  the 1920's. 

Many, many years ago, I first heard Miles Davis on a record borrowed from the library. That's also how I first heard Debussy, and Thomas Tallis, and the complete "Nutcracker". I try to encourage people to take a chance; if you don't like it, just return it. No harm, no foul. And don't just stick with "current" music -- 90% of music from ANY era is junk, so don't be afraid to listen to something 'old'. I figure, we now have literally a thousand years of music available to us. There's lots of exciting things out there to hear.

Finding New Music These Days, Part One

There was a fine New York Times article by Jennifer Finney Boylan titled "When Music Was Strange" (May 10 -- Google it, the link is way too long to type here). It's about how the search to find new ("strange") music has changed from 1975 when she was a teenager. (Her experience with the Miles Davis album "Bitches Brew" ?-- I'll talk about that in a later post. It won't be pretty.)

She, like a lot of us at that age, had similar avenues then to explore new music: the radio (FM, not AM), and friends in the know ("Hey, you have to hear this!") Independent record stores? Not yet. But now we have online music services that pretend to be your personal radio, programmed, as the Firesigns once said, "with your mind in mind". Did you like that last song? Here's one that sounds just like it! As Boylan says, it's "the musical equivalent of Fox News and MSNBC" -- a closed system with your own taste "reflected endlessly back". 

A lot of the music I enjoy, I liked immediately. But many of my favorites now weren't at first; they were too angular, too many rough edges, too...wrong. It takes work to listen past the familiar, to hear with different ears. Boylan mentions learning to love the difficult music of American classical composer Charles Ives (very much worth checking out  -- again, we'll talk later). Boylan suggests that the online streaming services would block this one -- too weird! -- and what a loss that would be.

I still listen to the radio: KING, KSER, CBC (there's good music to be found there, despite their best efforts to bury it under utter crap), but with the caveat that radio now plays a track without explaining "Yeah, great song, but the rest of the album, not so much..." Friends pass along recommendations, but many times, they're just echoing some magazine's "best of", and that's pretty dicey advice. Like Boylan, my son clues me in to what he's currently listening to, and I'd guess I like maybe 15%. Hey, it's HIS music, more power to him.

But I realized quite a long time ago that "new" means "new to me" -- it's new if I've never heard it before. I've been listening to a few collections of 78's -- yes, dusty shellac recorded in the '20s -- and there's truly great stuff there, including a track by Geeshy Wiley, recently profiled in ... the Sunday New York Times magazine! 

Part Two: Okay smarty, where DO I find new tunes, and not just rewarmed versions of songs I already like?

Terence Boylan? Never Heard of Him...

Working at a record store for a number of years had many advantages, one of which was exposure to way more artists that radio could ever play.

Today's example: Terence Boylan. You've probably never heard of him, and I only did because I got a promo copy of his first album. I liked it well enough, liked his second "Suzy" even better. After 1980, he fell off my radar, but he worked on film music and made demos on his own. "Terence Boylan" was released in 1999, and it includes most of his first album, half of his second, and 3 or 4 new songs that fit right in.

Many albums in the late 70s featured a lot of the same studio musicians and guest stars, so Little Feat started sounding like the Doobie Brothers who started sounding like Steely Dan. Terence Boylan drew from the same stock characters, but his songs always were a bit more East Coast Urban rather than Southern California Cosmic Cowboy. And I enjoyed his slightly more sophisticated lyrics. One of my favorites was referring to a college girl returning from summer vacation "brown as a banged-up peach". And then there's the one that quoted T.S. Eliot -- well, this English major was smitten.

 

I've been weeding my collection more earnestly lately; as I get older, I just don't have time for third-rate music.  Terence Boylan never made it out of the singer-songwriter ghetto, but I've always enjoyed his work, and I'm still finding new things in the production and musicianship. And one song features a Chevy Chase Fender Rhodes solo!