You don't have to look far to find songs about sadness. Popular music of all genres has trafficked forever in lyrics that tell terrible tales, suggest dark motives and essentially insist that we all live in a vale of tears.
The nice thing is, there's usually a catchy chorus and, if you listen to psychologists, this is all good for us. Earlier this year, an article in Psychology Today noted that sad songs let us understand shared difficult experiences of "rejection, loss, unrequited love, misfortune or other themes," and which gives us a perspective on others' problems. We might have had similar experiences, which give sad lyrics a new resonance, but regardless that empathetic understanding is what helps us grasp our common humanity and, down the road, perhaps overcome our own troubles.
Not that we're thinking about this when listening to songs like Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" or Metallica's "Unforgiven." But music paired with thoughtful lyrics has a way of worming into our conscious in a way little else can: We play our favorite tunes over and over, and even talk sometimes about how some snippets become earworms we can't eradicate so easily.
While I'm a fan of a good, sweet pop tune like Pharrell's "Happy" – I think anyone who isn't must be a little dead inside – I get much more long-term traction from a tune that takes a seriously dark turn. Maybe it's the aural equivalent of picking at a scab – it's questionably good for you, but the itch you reach by listening again and again is deeply, instinctually, satisfying.
And a good dark lyric can even overcome some of my lack of interest in the music or artist herself. Take Kelly Clarkson's "Because of You." She's just about as mainstream as you can get, from her "American Idol" success to her chart-topping hits, Clarkson doesn't seem like the sort of musician who would write a song about being abused – and being forever changed by that abuse. But in "Because of You," we get:
Because of you I find it hard to trust not only me, but everyone around me Because of you I am afraid
Damn, girl.
Dark lyrics are often best approached when we're in our darkest, loneliest times – when we're teenagers. We may have friends we can talk to, but when the right song sinks its teeth into your spine, it's hard to ever lose the feeling entirely. I'll always know exactly how I felt when The Smiths' "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me" hit home the first time:
Last night I dreamt That somebody loved me No hope - but no harm Just another false alarm Last night I felt Real arms around me No hope - no harm Just another false alarm So, tell me how long Before the last one? And tell me how long Before the right one? This story is old - I KNOW But it goes on This story is old - I KNOW But it goes on
In that short space the band acknowledges that we've all had that dream – waking or asleep – in which we felt totally secure and loved, only to wake and find it was nothing but smoke. Then, at the end, the terrifically brilliant bit: the self-awareness that it's an old story and maybe boring, but it never truly ends.
Noted Psychology Today, hearing those sad songs and thinking them through is like an exercise: We can imagine terrible real-life occurrences without having to literally experience them, and "such mental exercises can promote an attitude of problem solving and a safe venue for hypothetical testing of possible choices," said the article.
This "music-evoked imagination," at least in my case, sometimes went further than the artist may have intended. When I interviewed Juliana Hatfield about her 1993 single "My Sister," she insisted it wasn't actually about killing a wicked sibling. But I have my doubts; the song begins:
I hate my sister, she's such a bitch. She acts as if she doesn't even know that I exist
She spends the rest of the song talking about how awesome her sister is … but then sister vanishes.
I miss my sister – why'd she go?
Because you took her out and wiped your memory of the incident! Or maybe that's just my imagination going wild.
Whatever the reasoning, I've always been attracted to lyrics that twist and bend, or take us in different directions than just acknowledging how damn happy we are. Whether the surreal (Robyn Hitchcock's "My Wife and My Dead Wife") or epic (Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald") or surprisingly frightening (The Beatles' "Run for Your Life") or literary (The Beautiful South's "Woman in the Wall"), those tunes stir the darkness within year after year.
And, perhaps, make the real world a bit more understandable. As PT notes, "Music-evoked imagination can encourage us to reach beyond our troubles to help others. Compassion for others can comfort us and help us find our own healing."
The world teaches us to think that life is full of limitations The world tries to make us think that there are loads of limits — “Conditioning,” Howard Jones
Two things happened in the world of music during the week of March 23, neither of which had anything to do with one another – unless you happen to live in my head.
Zayn Malik left One Direction, a band I do not listen to. And I went to see Howard Jones, a musician I fervently listened to when I was the median age of most of 1D’s fans.
In this column, I generally address great (and poor) writing on TV and in movies. But when I was a teenager, all the words in the world that mattered to me came not from TV or movies – or even books. I was voracious in my consumption of of music and spent hours flipped on my stomach in our living room parsing the lyric sheets of albums by my favorite artists, explicating every line for deeper meaning.
Music lyrics do that to us. The music is the bird that pokes holes in our conscious; the lyrics are the seeds it leaves behind, and they flower all the rest of our lives. My mentors never spoke to me directly, but left behind legacies of words put to a good beat you could sometimes dance to that still conjure up adolescent memories even today. When I was 14 and 15 and 16, I wanted someone to give me guidance about what the hell was going on in the grown-up world, and pop tunes did that for me.
Here I come now got no time to frown Nothing in my way now nothing can bring me down Feel that surge open the doors around Higher and higher the world is my hunting ground — “Hunt the Self,” Howard Jones
So 1D fans, I know none of your band’s lyrics and can hum none of their tunes, but I feel your pain: Your bedrock is crumbling and everyone around you who isn’t a fan is laughing. I’m way, way old and I’m not. Because I remember that whether the words are deep and meaningful or shallow and simply-rhymed doesn’t matter; as long as you’re listening to them, they are the scaffolding on which you are hoisting yourself to the next stage of life.
I listened to a lot of bands and took in a lot of words in those formative years. Howard Jones was never No. 1 on my top list of bands but I put him quite high up in a rarefied position, thanks in part to the words he wrote – he was a guru to me. Legendary rock critic Robert Christgau may have vilified Jones’ first album Human’s Lib for being self-help twaddle, but I wasn’t listening to it as a grown up; I heard it as a kid.
So when I listened to some of those songs all over again some 30 years after hearing them for the first time in New York City the other night I confess: I took a little side trip in my head and remembered all the things I had learned from my guru, and the places those lessons took me.
Places like these:
Veganism and Taoism.
Howard Jones was the first person I ever heard of who was full-on vegan. He did it hard-core in the days before the world ever heard of a Boca Burger and even wrote songs about the cruelty done to animals in the name of feeding humans (“Assault and Battery”). So I went vegetarian. And had some eggs. And fish. OK, I was terrible at being vegetarian, but it was a blow for independence at a young age.
In addition to being a vegan, Jones referred both directly (with a B-side song title) and indirectly to the Tao Te Ching, a religion/philosophy/book/way of thinking I’d never heard of before. I still don’t know if I fully understand what “the way” really means, but it has a lot to do with letting go and understanding that you are just a speck in the river that carries you along.
Professionalism.
I’ve never met Jones (other than waiting hours in line outside Tower Records in 1985 only to have him sign my “Things Can Only Get Better” 45 record sleeve “To Mandee”), and it’s not important that I do. But early on in my journalism career, I interviewed him over the phone – in the most irritating way possible. I peppered him with dozens of nerdy fangirl questions until he finally asked, “Do you think we’ll talk about the new album soon?” which was of course why we were here in the first place. I went scarlet. I scrambled, recovered, did the job I was supposed to do and learned a hugely valuable lesson. You really do often learn best from your mistakes.
Acceptance.
When I went out to visit a friend of mine I’d been pen-pals with since she moved away after we were in kindergarten together, I was 16 and crushing hard on a guy in school who was still two years from coming out of the closet. He gave us ladies some hope by, well, dating us – but we knew the truth even if we (and he) didn’t want to admit it.
Meanwhile, my pen-pal had begun a deep dive into evangelical Christianity, and when I told her about my hopeless devotion to my uncertain friend she became first sincerely concerned for my soul. Then, when she couldn’t convince me to abandon my friend, she wrote me a letter quoting the Bible extensively and explaining that she could no longer associate with me.
It begged for a response. So I went to a different bible for my recourse: I shot her back the last letter we ever exchanged, covered with my own favorite lyrics about equality, tolerance, what is natural and what is not – Jones’ lyrics.
I have always felt good about that.
You don’t know I don’t know Nobody knows This is an answer to every question This is a place to begin — “Always Asking Questions,” Howard Jones
It’s easy to mock pop lyrics. Easy to say Taylor Swift’s words are all about the same thing, or that the guys in One Direction don’t even write their own lyrics. But teenagers don’t care – they’re still listening hard, still using those lyrics to ascend into adulthood. Pop singers, rock singers, rap singers – those are the grown-ups kids listen to; they are their teachers as much as, if not more than, the ones paid to instruct them in school.
Awards strictly for lyrics don’t exist, so far as I know. Songwriters get prizes for the combination of words and music, but that’s a significant difference. And lyric writers, the good ones, really should get some recognition for a clever rhyme, the hidden pun, the evocative image. A well-turned lyric, aimed at the right person at just the right time, gets under the skin of even the hardest-to-reach young people. That’s a rare power that deserves respect – and love.
So thanks, Howard Jones. You weren’t the only musician who raised me into adulthood, but you were a significant player in the group. Long may you – and the beautiful simplicity of your words – reign.
This column originally appeared at Curiosity Quills.
The array of "Weird Al" Yankovic videos that recently took over the Internet was an eight-day Al-palooza for fans of the parodist — and their devotion was rewarded when his 14th album, "Mandatory Fun," hit the top of the charts. But fans don't yet have to go into withdrawal — there's one unique video left to watch.
Created by TruScribe, the whiteboard animators behind Yankovic's Crosby, Stills & Nash-inspired satire on corporate speak, "Mission Statement," the new video's an audio medley of some of Yankovic's greatest parodies set to images of artists hand-drawing each of his albums, starting with his self-titled debut from 1983.
It's the perfect primer for the deprived folks in anyone's life who aren't familiar with Yankovic's oeuvre; viewers get an earful of tunes like "Fat" (parody of Michael Jackson's "Bad"), "Living With a Hernia" (parody of James Brown's "Living in America") and "White and Nerdy" (parody of "Ridin'" by Chamillionaire and Crazyie Bone), among others.
According to TruScribe's YouTube page, the animation took two days to put together, and all of the music was used with Yankovic's permission. And for doubters who may wonder if there was some CGI sleight-of-hand used in the drawings, forget it: As the company notes in its website discussion of the making of "Mission Statement," "TruScribe videos are 100% hand-drawn, but a few cheats aren't bad."
You were the voice of music for me as a kid. Not literally: You didn’t sing, you didn’t play an instrument. But in my preadolescent days, there wasn’t a single Sunday that went by where I wasn’t glued to the radio for the four hours it took you to work through the Billboard list of American Top 40 tunes.
Four hours! What could take so long? And yet it didn’t feel long, more like an adventure we were on together. You’d start out at the bottom of the list Billboard had determined were the top hits of the day, based on airplay and sales, and work your way up to the very tip top, where things got increasingly more exciting. I was 9, 10, 11, 12 – early in the days of getting how this whole music business thing worked, early in understanding how awesome music would make me feel, and the organization of the whole thing was appealing. Kids like black and white answers: Telling us who was No. 1 each week meant we knew what was good, and what was bad. Music, which had no boundaries, could be corralled and quantified. That was comforting, then.
Interspersed in all of that music playing you ran through trivia, factoids, history and those wonderful long-distance dedications. I took it all in like a sponge; I still can recall details I learned only through you in those pre-Internet days. I wanted to be Casey Kasem when I grew up, a person whose whole job was to know everything about popular music and tell it to the world. (This was before I made the connection to your voice-over artistry, of course.)
It was exciting, listening as the familiar list of tunes raced up the charts – this week, would Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” trump a far worse tune? Would Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” finally give them the No. 1 hit they’d never had but so clearly deserved? And why, oh, why was Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” still at the top of the charts after what felt like months? What was so great about that song any more?
Casey was there to explain.
You weren’t just someone I tuned into every week. If my family was in the car driving somewhere, we’d put your show on. Your rich, mellifluous tones were delightfully cheerful without being saccharine, thoughtful and informative without being overly intense. You had a classic DJ’s voice, in the days when radio DJs were allowed to have a voice, and it washed over all of us in the car as we traveled to my grandmothers, or to the pool, or on errands. It was like you had a place in the family.
And of course once you were a member of the family you were naturally a source of amusement – when we can poke fun of you, that’s how you know you’re loved. My brother and I decided there should be a “Weekly Top Million,” a version of your radio show that never ended (and mathematically could never happen). Once we had that idea, the question was: What song would be so terrible that it would sit at the very bottom of the Weekly Top Million?
“Song number one million,” we’d intone, trying to get your theatrical sound into our squeaky kiddie voices. Then we’d pick a topic that was near and dear and a little terrifying to both of our hearts at the time, since we were in braces and retainers and all kind of orthodontry – a song that had to be terrible yet chart worthy at the same time. That faux tune: “I Love My Orthodontist.” We’d collapse in giggles at a song that was that silly being sung, and never got around to song number 999,999.
It probably didn’t hurt that our orthodontist looked quite a bit like you, a thought that never occurred to me until now.
The fun-poking got a little more meta as we got older, though. We started making up imaginary long-distance dedications, those heart-wrenching letters written (theoretically) by listeners who just wanted to hear one tune that reminded them of a lost loved one, or which could get them over a difficult period, and they wanted to make sure it was shared with the nation. But we started noticing in the late 1980s that nearly every time there was a long-distance dedication that the song was always one particular song, by Kenny Rogers: “Through The Years.” It was sweet and bland and covered pretty much any imagined or real hurt a human being could have.
So we responded: During our “Weekly Top Million” giggle-fests, we’d make up fake long-distance dedications that could be read on the air: “Dear Casey,” we’d begin, “My car went over a cliff and landed on my dog, and I was climbing up a mountain to get help when my leg broke and I hallucinated the image of a chicken wing. So would you please play, ‘Through the Years’ by Kenny Rogers for me? It would mean the world.”
As I got older and started listening to music that either didn’t chart in the U.S. or didn’t chart at all, American Top 40 held less relevance. I didn’t really care about Aerosmith’s ascent or Bon Jovi’s dominance; why wasn’t R.E.M. everywhere in the Top 10? Or anywhere?
But you didn’t mind. You kept listing those hits, plugging forward, insisting even as the music industry began to change and charts fragmented into genres and subcategories to the point where being No. 1 just meant a song or an album was in a rarefied class, not literally the top of any particular heap.
And when you stepped down – not hiring me to do the job, I might add – and the position of American Top 40 host first to Shadoe Stevens, then later to Ryan Seacrest in 2004, I barely noticed. The closest I came to enjoying AT40 any more was on a rare car trip with the radio on late at night where a retro show from back in the day would run down the hits. That was fun, finding out the top 10 from the week of September 1, 1978. But it wasn’t the same. It was just a way to pass the time, hear some classic hits. I’d moved on.
Yet I knew you were out there, even if I didn’t know where. I didn’t know who was hearing your voice or what categories your top 10s were in your later life. And in reading how you spent your last few years, I was sad for you –illness and old age are not something on anyone’s top list of how to end your days.
And now you’re gone; poignantly on this father’s day your children are now mourning your loss, and my sympathies go out to them. But in my head, when I think about how music came into my life I’ll always hear your voice alongside all of the singers and the musicians. You were an artist, just of a different kind, and you’re at the top of our weekly top million this week, and all weeks.
So Casey, will you play “Through the Years” for me? It’s a heartfelt dedication from me, to you. Rest well, and thanks for all the music.
I don't wander out in the world looking to get offended. If you go out looking for a fight, a fight will find you. But sometimes you don't have to look.
That said, I have to ask: Katy Perry, really?
For those who may not know, Katy Perry has a video coming out Thursday in which she puts on a lot of makeup and costumes and pretends to be a collection of the "World's Worst Birthday Party Entertainers." This video is for her new song, "Birthday," which I know nothing about. But because Perry is such a Big Famous Star, she doesn't just get a well-financed music video: She gets a preview teaser video about the video.
So, watch the video.
She's funny in places. It's not groundbreaking, but the princess is pretty amusing and the elderly dancer, that's kind of cute. They're all broad caricatures of people, and okay, that can be humorous. But there's one who stands out from the others: "Yosef Shulem."Appearance-wise, Yosef passes the Semitic sniff test for me; he's not a great big hook nosed Fagin type. So that's a start. But then the schtick happens. And suddenly we have:
the only ethnically-specific character in the video
On top of it all, this is being done by a woman who was raised by Pentecostal Christians, and whose preacher father decided in 2012 that it would be hilarious to tell his own Jewish joke. This is not an insignificant fact. The Venn diagram of those who are Super Duper Religious (Non-Jewish Variety) and those who Want to See Your Jew Horns does have some overlap. There's also a lot of gray area that includes people who believe in lesser, but still sticky, stereotypes.
I don't actually think Katy Perry is racist (as she's been called for wearing geisha outfits). I'm also not qualified to make that decision. Nor do I actually think she's anti-Semitic. But she's got some serious blinders on, and is obviously surrounded by people who don't like to tell her she maybe shouldn't do something. This sort of thing happens when people don't take a step back from their own cleverness and think about how it might be seen by someone outside their immediate group.
But as Entertainment Weekly suggests, it might be time for her to quit co-opting other cultures, and blundering into those gray areas. Doing comedy about people outside your area of expertise means you really should tread lightly. Some would say you shouldn't tread at all. This is such a case.
So again, Katy Perry: Exactly why was it important to do this particular joke?
Life rarely melds together this neatly; if there wasn't video/audio proof of this Louis C.K/Bradley Cooper/Sean Penn connection, I'd have to think the following video was a hoax.
But it goes to prove that you never know where life is taking you next, that one day the handsome nobody in the front row asking the award-winning actor on stage about one of his roles could someday become ... Bradley Cooper.
Awesome.
And, because I'm thinking of "American Hustle," here's Jennifer Lawrence doing some amazing karaoke on Santana's "Evil Ways." Enjoy your Friday.
"American Idol" is back on again, and it really is oh, so easy to look at those people and say: "Shit, I could do that."
And though there's less meanness and crappy singers on than in the Simon Cowell years, it's even easier to say, "Those people are morons. Can't they hear themselves?"
Answers: No, you probably couldn't, and yes, they probably can't.
While I'm not innocent of the poking of the contestants, I've generally reserved my irritation for their family and friends. One of the big problems truly famous or powerful people have is that no one will tell them "no." That's apparently an issue for people in the arts, and particularly in the vocal arts: No one will honestly tell them, "Look, man, I love you, but this is not your thing. You can get some lessons, but this is not singing."
Instead, you see the family and friends and contestants on the show routinely wearing shocked, disappointed faces (though there's always someone in the back with a poker face because they're the ones who knew it was crap and didn't speak up). If I went on and made a fool of myself on television like that I'd naturally be angry with myself -- but I'd also be mad at the ones who say they love me. Love is about protection from your own stupidity, sometimes, too.
I've spent the last couple of weeks trying something new. For about three years now I've sung with the Chelsea Church's annual Candlelight Christmas Choir (they don't mind I'm not of the faith), which initially I imagined would be a highfalutin' version of people singing familiar Christmas carols. There's some of that, but there's also a fair amount of obscure hymns (obscure to me anyway) and big grand gestures like "O Magnum Mysterium." It's been a fun challenge and as (often) the only female tenor I've found it expanded my knowledge and talents.
But that's only a few weeks of the (later) year and I wanted to find something I could do earlier in the year, too. The New York City Community Chorus was fun last year -- we did a whole lot of Woody Guthrie, and the theme changes each season -- but afterward I thought I was ready for something bigger, and possibly with an audition.
So, on to the new thing. Several of M's friends are in something called the "Sweet Adelines," all-female choruses that compete while singing old tunes and show tunes and sometimes an occasional recent-ish song. A Manhattan chapter was only about a year old, I was told, so head on over there. So I did, for the first meeting of the new year.
Wow. It was like deep end diving: These were serious, committed singers who knew shit. I mean, really knew about singing: The first hour of the two-and-a-half to three hour rehearsal was devoted to getting warmed up and vocal exercises -- you weren't even hitting the sheet music until nearly halfway through rehearsal. They knew all kinds of fun tricks to get you warmed up, and threw in all kinds of lingo I simply wasn't familiar with -- everything from tonics to half-steps to a fancy word for when your sound changes as you're singing.
The leader was perfect: This petite blonde with boundless energy and just at the level of enough-but-not-too-much perkiness, who really knew what she was doing (when she let us know she'd once been a character at a Disney Park, it all made sense). With 15-20 of us singing, she could point out when the bass section was off by a half-tone. I was stunned; this was the real deal, and it seemed as though everyone around me had been trained in music theory or singing in the past.
My last official chorus prior to Chelsea and NYC Community had been honors chorus in 9th grade.
Did I mention that this was barbershop? No, I did not. So here's part of the rub: It's barbershop. That's a specific way of singing; the ladies worked with a "Pythagorean" octave scale (another complexity I couldn't grasp) and it wasn't just about learning notes, or lyrics -- there was a performance aspect, endless changing of arrangements (and sometimes lyrics), and then you were expected not to just sing words but to "caboose" them together, so that something like "love grapes" would be "looooooo vegr aaaaaapes."
There were all kinds of different ways to sing but sing differently, and anyone who sits in their room and belts out a top 40 hit into their hairbrush has no idea how all of this works. I don't know if this is solely confined to barbershop, but I was informed that barbershop is a very specific way of singing, and required a lot of technique.
Right, so everyone was cheery and welcoming and just delighted to give you any help you wanted. But there was one thing: The audition. I had thought, well, I'll pick a song in my range and sing it and then they'll know I can carry a tune. No way. Not only do they give you a tune, you have to sing it in your own register, surrounded by the other four that would make up a proper quartet -- who are singing in their own registers. You are the only one in your group of that register. And hey, if you can throw in some dynamics at all the right times, so much the better. They were generous about it: You got three shots to ace the audition before you were allowed in.
It was a deceptively difficult tune; only a minute and a half long, one page on sheet music, but I still thought I could master it. I worked out the tune after listening to a few MP3s of not just the full quartet but also just of my own line, and it wormed its way into my head enough that with a little practice every day, I figured I could nail it. I sang it aloud, it sounded right. But put it in with the other four lines and ... well, it was easy to get lost. I started listening to the others singing around me and went off, then I tried punching the note to get higher up, and then that threw off going lower.
So much for the easy way of getting it out on the second go-around. For number two, I applied myself more diligently, recorded myself and listened back, played with the digital piano we have, and -- really thought I'd improved significantly. Not enough: Second audition didn't pass either. They marked a few places I should work on, and said to give it one more try.
Now, this is not really a complaint even if it sounds like one: Any group has the right to impose whatever rules it wants. If they want 100 percent, and can get it from enough people, then darn it, they should get 100 percent. Some places might just want someone who could improve markedly week to week. I also found I struggled at the audition because it would be held after our 2.5 hours or so of practice; by then it would be fairly late in the evening and not only was I wiped, but so was my voice. Sucking candies and water aside, it was hard to get all revved up one more time. Again: Others passed just fine with these same hurdles, and I'm not offering excuses -- but it did seem rather unfair to have anyone audition after that long of a workout. Then again, you could make the argument that if you audition someone when they're tired and ragged and they still hit the mark, you've got a real talent.
This talent was not me. After number two I had two weeks until the third audition, and was seriously wavering, arguing with my own brain, which wanted to cut and run before full failure was achieved. If you never take the test, you'll never know whether you'd have failed or not. And this didn't feel like the right thing to do, even if I wanted to. I was also reconsidering whether barbershop was really the kind of chorus I was looking for, and the second-guessing that because again, the brain is a deceptive monster and can talk you out of doing anything. If you get punched in the head twice, why would anyone stick their head out once more in case things were different?
But I resolved not to quit. I got someone in to give me voice lessons two times, we worked on the song, she gave me thumbs up that I'd nailed even the tougher bits, she sang along with me on the other parts so I'd have the contrast and I thought, okay, I can do this. There was a moment when I just felt loose and casual, I was trusting my voice to hit the right places, and I could get into the song -- not just sing it. We had a few really good rehearsals, and I thought, okay, I can do this. Still, at the same time, I was also thinking that even if I did pass, I'd have to really think about whether I really even wanted this. These women were so passionate about every inch of this thing -- they had a world of energy and feeling for it that I lacked, and I wondered if I'd ever have. I like singing. They LOVE it. The way I LOVE writing. When they're not singing, they WANT to be singing. When I'm not writing, I WANT to be writing. There are hobbyists, and there are amateurs, and then there are pros. As a singer, I'm a hobbyist, and they're somewhere between amateur and pro. More like pros who just don't get paid. They know how to do this shit instinctively, and I do not.
Last night was the third audition, and it was possibly the worst one I'd done. I was tired. From moment one I just wasn't hitting it, and when the two judges went away for a discussion, I knew they were figuring out a way to let me down the right way. I wondered if I was the first they'd had in this new group to actually bottom out after three auditions, and this was a talk they hadn't had to have before. Either way, I steeled myself and got ready to go, so when they called me in to let me down -- easy, kindly, which is their way -- I was okay with it. I told them I'd had a great time and wished them well, and that they were really just several pay grades above me in terms of knowledge and talent. They did say if I practiced and improved that I could always come back and try again. So all in all, it went well.
The nice thing is that while I didn't pass, I don't feel like I failed. And maybe that's the lesson to take from this: While it sounds a bit Hallmark card-y, the truth is that if you really do your best, and give your all, and still fall short ... that's better than backing off at the first sign of challenge. You still learn something, even if the only thing you learn is what you don't want. In any endeavor, it's the challenge that matters.
Coming home in a cab, a guy next to us, driving a white company pickup truck, was belting out Chicago's "You're the Inspiration." He was really, really into it and while it was easy to giggle a bit at his enthusiasm, after what I'd just gone through, it was also a pleasure to hear such joy. We all love to sing. Some of us do well, and some of us just do it adequately. That doesn't mean we shouldn't stop singing. We are all Peter Cetera in our own heads.
Singing has a checkered past with me. I love singing, I love music, but put me in front of people to do it and things haven't always gone so well. (As a kid I was at a summer camp where we were all asked to perform in a pseudo talent show; I thought I could just sing with a record going on behind me, didn't practice, and got seriously booed. And Todd Fishburne, if you're out there, you're still on my list for throwing a bottle.)
Anyhow, I'm currently singing. I've been in a couple of no-audition, no-stress (except for the work involved) choral groups over the past few years, and thought I might be ready to step up. I'm never going on "American Idol" (and wouldn't want to, even if I wasn't past my sell-by date on that show), but I would like to be able to do something properly, and get some challenge doing it.
Be careful what you go looking for -- without giving too much detail, I'm currently doing just that. But: There is an audition song. At first, I thought an audition song would mean you showed up with a song that worked for you, sang it, and they said, "okay, she's not calling any cats," and that would be pretty much it. There has to be a learning curve, right?
Not so much. On the one hand, this group does give you three shots to get a short song of their choosing correct. On the other hand, they want it note perfect, breath perfect and phrasing perfect. And if you can do a little gesturing to emphasize, all the better. And this part of things isn't going so well. It isn't that hard a song. But when you sing your part (I'm a bass, it's all women) alongside the other parts (baritone, tenor, lead), it's easy to trip up and lose your place or start mimicking other parts. And I can't help but wonder if I've overreached this time: I've come very close to getting it right twice, and have just one more audition. That said: I have been practicing, alone I know I can do the song, but at some point there's no substitute for actually singing it with three other parts and getting evaluated -- you can record yourself until you're blue, play it on the piano or just belt it out a capella alone, but if no one who knows the song is around to hear, you can't always know if you messed up.
There are a ton of places I could go in terms of talking more about this, but for now I think I'm going try to capture what's top of mind now: Here's what they don't tell you when you're growing up -- sometimes you can work hard at something, sometimes you can do your best, and sometimes you still can fail. This is such a basic thing, yet we don't underscore it. We keep saying everybody can do anything they want if they just a) want it enough b) try hard enough. And arguably, if I spent the next two weeks (I can't audition again until February) doing nothing but eating, breathing and sleeping this song ... yeah, that could work. It's not practical.
The thing is that sometimes, Stuart Smalley, you aren't good enough. And as a kid who grew up thinking I could do pretty much anything, at least creatively, which led to my getting to a "you did good!" level and then abandoning many things -- which is not the same as actual talent, unless you count the talent for mimicry -- I bought into the notion that if I put my mind to it, I could get things done.
Life doesn't always work out that way. In fact, it often doesn't work out that way. And all of the mind-trickery and Oprah-isms we can conjure won't change it. So that's what I'm sitting with today. A silly failed song audition probably shouldn't be a referendum on the whole person, but I'm still struggling with a little perspective.
Maybe because I'm always pre-flinching for the next bottle.
Having done this journalism thing since high school -- and now for over 25 years beyond -- it's probably safe to say I've done thousands of interviews. In the recent vast cleaning out prior to a move I finally dumped most of the old ones, recorded on 90 and 120-minute cassette tapes, into the bin, a little sad to lose all of that information, yet knowing I would never, never sit down and listen to it again. But the vast quantity of tapes, crammed with 20 and 30 minute chats, largely over the phone, is a life's work.
The future library archive of my materials will just have to do without. Such a loss! (I kid, of course.)
Interviewing was something I taught myself. I love my alma mater, Boston University, but they never taught me how to interview -- a skill I feel any good journalist should master, whether in school or without. Early on I would start out with a huge number of questions despite the amount of time we were given -- and if I liked my subject's work a lot, I'd get into the seriously nitty-gritty stuff -- until one musician ventured mid-question "when are we going to get to the new album?" and, abashed, I immediately went to the relevant stuff. That was a lesson: Be relevant, and know how much time you've got to ask what you need.
I got a very difficult interview as my very first -- Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, when I was in 8th grade. It was part of a school assignment (interview someone in the profession you're interested in) and while he agreed to do it, he then either unconsciously or by design decided to teach me what it's like to interview a jerk: Every question I asked got a "yes" or "no" answer, and no elaboration. Perhaps that was his way of saying -- without ever saying, by the way -- that one had to follow up with "how" and "why" questions rather than just "yes" and "no" questions, but in retrospect, I tend to feel it was just kind of a dick move to pull on an 8th grader.
Still, it wasn't until I was into college that I hit any actual important, difficult interviews -- that is, interviews where I had an assignment and I had to get answers, one way or the other. The Stone Roses (a band out of Manchester, UK) sat down with me, en masse, in London when I was probably about 19 and then refused to be anything but irritating lads about the whole discussion. I was bolstered by having one more interviewer with me that day, a man I'd just met that day but who would become a lifelong friend, and both of us kept doing double-takes. As in, why bother wasting your time and ours? But that was their image, and they lived up to it.
And in retrospect, they were good teachers: After speaking, or not speaking, with them I started trying to really learn how to counter the jerk interview. But finding books on how to interview tended to lead me to job-search how-tos; that wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to know how to conduct interviews, not be the subject of one for a position, and those were scarce. And in those pre-Internet days, you had to rely on whatever you would find in books. (Today, I reflect I might have tried to get an assignment for an appropriate magazine to pay for my own research, but not then.) I did come across a terrific one, which is unfortunately packed away (the move, the move) and I can't cite here, but it gave me the courage to do interviews properly, providing some of the scripts I needed to counter people who Just Wouldn't Answer The Questions. I'll get into that in another post somewhere, as I'm running out of time to write this morning. But having that confidence to turn the interview into a hybrid conversation ... that made all the difference in what became my freelance, full-time writing career.
All of this to preface that I'm interviewing Robert De Niro today. Wish me luck.
Skipped SXSW, the film/interactive/music extravaganza nuttiness in Austin, TX this year. Didn't miss it.
Even more strangely, I didn't blink much when I learned that The Band of My Youth would be headlining a show at Stubb's, one of the best rib joints in the city, and home to big acts during the madness (including R.E.M. one year). And this is how I know I'm old.
Or, at least not a teen/twentysomething any more.
I got lucky a few years back: Not only did I get to meet TBOMY (okay, it's Duran Duran), I got someone to take a photo of me with them (favorite comment from a friend: "They're touching you!"); a year or two later I met them again this time on a one-on-one basis and realized they're a) people b) not interested in me on any particular level c) not going to remember me 2 minutes after I leave the area and d) I'm fine with that.
I completely get Bieber fever. Not because I'm a Justin Bieber fan, but because I get what it's like. The rush of adrenaline, the frenetic feeling you have when tickets are going on sale or the new album is coming out or some kind of news happens -- or the gut punch feeling when your favorite musician is dating some girl. Like, he hasn't even met you yet!
I remember that. It was horrible, and it was wonderful and it was part of that age. It was bonding for me and some of my truest friends (waving).
But I got lucky. TBOMY not only stuck around, but I got a job where I was able to (briefly) be in their orbit, and closure happened: We all got old, some of them got beards, and that youthful pzzzzow! feeling took a back seat. And you could argue that it's a little sad, being an old fart who doesn't want to stand up for four hours -- after waiting in line outside for another hour -- until the main act comes on to play songs you've heard 1,000 times before -- in a smoky bar in Austin. You could argue that.
On the other hand, it's much more relaxing to think: Did that. Got the photo. On to the next thing that makes my tummy go pitta-pat.
He's getting ready for bed right now.
Writer. Reader. Never enough time for either. Author of collection of short stories "Home for the Holidays" and co-author of "The Law & Order: SVU Unofficial Companion." (Both available on Amazon.)
randeedawn.com
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