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Whole worlds gone mad

Today I just have a quick thought on reluctance and its negative effect on music. More specifically, two of my friends and I have discussed being a three person for literally years. We’ve tried different to name the band before starting the band, we’ve had websites for bands for the three of us that never occurred, and so on. The one issue that has held us back the most is organization of instrumentation. We’ve been an electric guitar, bass and drumkit blues trio, we’ve been a five piece where I played a uke and a drummer and keyboardist joined us…. More or less we’ve tried way too hard for way too long to figure our band out before we were a band.

Amidst our busy weeks and hectic lives, the three of us always just end up jamming acoustically (Alex and Ben are both great guitar players, and I switch between hand drums and uke), and up until recently, we looked at raw, honest acoustic jamming simply as a palet upon which we could build songs for another format. However, Ben recently came to Alex and I and posed a great point. All he basically had to say was “why don’t we just be exactly what we are, and just play already?!”

With that in mind, the three of us played open mic night at Founder’s brewing Co last night with no setlist, no predetermined setup, not even an idea of what it might sound like. The result was actually a ridiculous amount of fun on our end, and a shockingly large applause on the end of the beer swelling patrons.

I guess the point of this isn’t to glorify an experience of mine or even to say “look out for my new band!” It’s more along the lines of this: Worrying about what art will be, before the art actually IS, can only hurt art. This goes for all modes and genres, and other areas of life as well. Just get it all out there, put all of your heart into something and if it sounds/looks/tastes/feels like mush, then its mush. However, the more we do it, the better it becomes. So, long story short, just jam!

Here’s a real fortune I got out of a fortune cookie my sophmore year of college: “Stop wasting time stringing and tuning your instruments… start making music now!” My response was “Touche, universe. Touche.”

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Adjoa Skinner, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, and Summer 2010 Avocado Jungle Artist In Residence.

Our music blogger, Dan Rickabus, had a great interview with one of these special people: singer-songwriter (and Avocado Jungle Artist In Residence) Adjoa Skinner. Adjoa is filled with the kind of genuine exuberance and drive and spirit you’d like to bottle and sell because it would make millions. And while she can’t bottle her energy, she can record her music, and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if that made her millions one day, too—although she talks about her life as if she’s already won the lottery.

Born in Lancaster, New York (near Buffalo), Adjoa grew up in an extremely musical family. Her mother and stepfather were in a band together that played weddings and other events. Her father’s family wasn’t made up of professional musicians, but they sang in four-part harmony at family events. They were, as Adjoa tells it, “kind of like the Partridge Family without money.” She jumped right into “the biz,” making her first on-stage appearance as a baby in the musical Oliver at the age of two and auditioning for her first session work (a commercial voiceover) a seven.

Now, at twenty-eight, it is clear she has lived and breathed this stuff all her life. She compares her sound to contemporaries like Regina Spektor and Sarah Bareilles, but says she’s a big fan of Sting and Peter Gabriel. An agile and soulful singer, a multi-instrumentalist, and a songwriter—in her own words a “jazz soul singer songwriter”—her influences and tastes make lots of sense when you hear the control, the style, and the maturity of her voice. Her step-dad used to make her mix CDs with Joni Mitchell, The Beatles, Ricky Lee Jones, Jeff Buckley, Elton John… not your typical listening material for a girl who went to middle school in the nineties. But Adjoa ate it up, and now these classic sounds are part of the foundation for her songwriting, and for that pervasive note of wisdom in her voice.

A few of my favorite quotes from Adjoa in this interview:

“I listen to people having conversations, and I start to rhyme their conversations in my head. So… I’m kind of a big nerd.”

“The greatest thing that I get back from listening back to all of the recordings [I make], for me, is remembering the moments that I shared with these people that I really love and am so honored to work with.”

“My Mom is so fun to watch. I think one of the greatest things that I hope I get from her is her joy, the way that she makes people feel so comfortable.”

There’s plenty more to hear in this interview—conducted by the ever-amiable Dan Rickabus—including Adjoa’s profound answer to the deep closing question, “What are you searching for?” (I won’t spoil that one. You’ll just have to listen for yourself.) The two seem to enjoy their conversation a lot, and we at the Avocado Jungle are glad to give you the opportunity to enjoy it as well.

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Listen to a song from Adjoa’s EP, Nothin’ More To Say: Never.

Visit adjoaskinner.com.

Now my heart stumbles on things I don\’t know.

The theme here in the butter-pear wilderness this week is success. I’ve discovered, through the combination of deep ponderings and being a recent college graduate, that success is one of the strangest concepts to ever come 0ut of a human mind. I’m sure others have had the same uncertain relationship with this slippery expectation. In terms of music, success typically means that someone is paying you big bucks to make your music, and you can buy your record at Best Buy. However, being the emotional-honesty-purist and societal skeptic that I am, I would beg to differ.

I’m of the mind that musicians should seek only personal creative success, which can be defined through experiences. These can be as simple as hearing back something you’ve done and truly realizing that you would buy your record if you were not you. Is that simple? I don’t know, I’m too simple-minded to figure… or maybe that is generally complicated. Can you actually endure an out of body experience and listen to your own work without a tainted ear? I guess the problem there is that you will always know that it’s you you’re listening to. Regardless, I digress… the feeling of true personal creative success is a step above satisfaction. You can be satisfied, but not happy. You can also be happy but not satisfied.

I recently had a conversation with my father while home for the fourth about this very thing. While he was working hard and pushing on more than needed, someone had said to him, “you’re never happy with your work, are you?” My dad replied “I’m happy, I’m just not satisfied.” At the end of our conversation, though, Dad and I decided that the proper way to phrase his thinking was “I’m usually happy with my work, and I’m often satisfied with my work, I’m just not done working.”

There is a strange assumption that comes along with “success” that you’re done. For example, in music, you have a long career of riches and romping, and then your record label asks you to make a “greatest hits” record. I’m sure many famous musicians have met that request with a big “Woah! Woah! Hold on! I’m not that old!” The thing is though, I don’t think success as an outside standard for an artist can really be achieved… only personal creative success can be achieved: you can be happy and satisfied with your own music, and damn does that feel great. However, if you’re done, then why did you start in the first place? Art is not a means to an end, it’s art. I just recently read a great quote from an author that Incubus’ Brandon Boyd utilized in a letter to fans about his new unexpected solo album, it says:

“Art, like love, is what makes the world fresh and new. However, this revitalization cannot be said to be art’s purpose. Art revitalizes precisely because it has no purpose except to engage our senses. The emancipating jounce of inspired uselessness.”

To top this article off, I will turn to the genius of Alan Watts. In one of my favorite speeches of Alan’s he first makes the statement that the best composers in music are the ones who create the most beauty, not the ones who conduct the fastest and are the first to reach the end of their piece. He then describes the system of success that Western culture has created: You’re in middle school with the intention of making it to high school, high school with the intention of going to college, college with the intention to get a better job and make more money for stuff, etc. He discusses how this process is seemingly a race to an end, when that’s not what life is. In fact, racing through life, moving up and up in “status” until you retire is precisely the opposite of what we should be worrying about in life. Talking of reaching the end of this race (retirement) he says, “but then you realize that it was all a musical thing… and you should have been singing and dancing along the whole time.”

Everything all of the time

Mulling over the topic of truth, I thought it would be interesting to share a story about a piece of music I recently heard. About a month ago, I graduated from college, and then went home to Ortonville, Michigan, for a week long detox that consisted mostly of playing uke in my back yard and diving frequently into the thicket of deep thought. At the beginning of the week, however, I spent some time with my old friend Andy Bird at his house in detroit. Not to be confused with Andrew Bird the whistling violinist genius, Andy is a great guy who carries with him a stark detachment from society, and writes songs/sings/plays guitar for his three piece spacey-surfy-alt-rock band Almost Free. I may have talked about Andy before on this blog but I’m not sure. He’s just one of those people you meet who’s musical perspective is really fascinating; someone who’s songs I can never pull my ears away from.

Anyway, at the end of a night of trying some strange beers and free-form jamming ’til 4 in the morning, Andy sat me down in his living room to play me a piece of music on a surround system. The piece was called “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” composed by Krzysztof Penderecki. To put it simply, when the first chord of this music struck, my only thought was “Oh no…” which was swiftly followed by disbelief that music that foreign and that horrifying can actually exist. We listened to all ten minutes of the piece at full volume with nothing to light the room save for the stagnant “Sony DVD” logo on the screen, which cast a tone of dark blue on us. In other words, I proverbially tried to fight this music off of me as it struggled to destroy my optimism like a persistent murderer. I know that sounds intense, but wait until you hear the piece…

No serenity in threnody

I guess I should get to the point: why this terrifying collection of sounds is relevant to the topic of truth to me is because it exists. After hearing this piece, it proved to me that in music, art, people, and come to think of it, everything, the truth is there is always something beyond. Every concept that any philosopher has ever helmed through the violent waters of persecution is merely scratching the surface when you get down to it, because in the grandest gaze, we literally know nothing. For some reason, it’s a comforting thought to me to know that the universe is so immensely vast and complex that we’ll never be able to compile at a map of it or look it up in a dictionary database, no matter how technologically sci-fi we become.

For me, the truth is that we are the tiniest of tiny organisms caught up in this limitless existence of everything, and that means we can never answer all the biggest questions. To go back to my childhood and quote Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”

I think the key here as to how we can benefit from knowing that there truly are no limits to how deep things can go, is to learn to be able to just simply say “I don’t know.” Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of diving violently into an extremist belief system that causes them to kill others to prove that they’re right, if people who started holy wars simply said “I’m not sure… I think the answers are beyond us. We all just may find out when we die, but until then, let’s try to work this out.” I think if human beings had learned to say “I don’t know” at the dawn of year 1 AD, then the “holy land” that’s been fought over for the entire existence of Judeo-Christian theology would be something more like a technologically equipped mega-hub for all the world’s people to worship whatever and however they please. Or, maybe not. I don’t know.

What I do know is, over-analyzing strange and haunting music is really fun, and I feel pretty damn lucky to have such good friends.

Warning: The following article may be biased, because I am currently working on a new album that is turning out to be sounding quite tribal. I mean REALLY tribal… like my uke and voice are up to their proverbial necks in hand drums. But can you blame me?! What did music start as, anyway? A dude hitting a rock with another rock over and over and over and… well, you get the idea.

Let me backtrack for a minute. I’ve noticed a trend in modern indie, folk, rock, hip hop, and many other genres… this trend can be described as a sudden jump in the percentage of “earthiness.” Big recorded crowds (which very well may be one to three people in a studio) have been chanting wordless outcries, big beats have been yielding big bass drums, snare drums are being replaced with claps, and more and more music listeners have been spotted dancing circles ’round fires. In my opinion, this should continue, flourish and increase even! Think about how tribal-ness (Tribiality? Tribalism? I’m obsessed with music, not grammar) effects a listener, and what message adding tribal elements conveys. I believe it’s the one type of music that every single person on the planet’s ancestors more than likely took part in. Primitive music. Human music.

One great example of can be seen/heard on a DVD I know I’ve sited before, Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds live at Radio City. Dave takes an aside to, like he does, rant about how one of his tunes, this one entitled “Eh Hee” came about. He talks about visiting an African tribe and how they had songs for the different weather conditions and environmental changes, but none of them had any words, because they were songs that were written before words. Before words?! What?! Think about the depth of meaning that exists there, coupled with the pure non-existence of actual language. After really pondering that, try to tell me honestly that you don’t see the beauty in “primitive” music… or as Dave says, “Music from a people who are, in a way, the most advanced people on the planet.”

So basically, I don’t know who started this tribal reprise, but I sure am in love with it. And no, the new music I’m working on isn’t tribal just to capitalize on a trend, I’m doing it because after playing hand drums since I was nine, I’ve been inspired to re-dig up some old roots. It doesn’t hurt that it’s already on its way to coming back though! Tribal music can only bring people together, which is what music should be all about – celebrating what we are. Human!

Be Here Now, Live on BBC

First of all, I apologize for my cheesy rhyming title. Yes, I do realize that it sounds like something out of Hobbit culture, but I couldn’t resist. Anyway, on to business! A couple of weeks ago, my buddy Ben and I performed a Dave Matthews tribute show on Grand Valley’s Campus. The gal who opened for us is an amazing folk singer-songwriter with a pure heart and some serious pipes named Emilee Petersmark, and she played a set of originals save for one cover. The cover was on the ukulele (so it was already up my alley), and strangely, the chords sounded familiar to me right away. Just when I was trying to put my finger on it, Emilee began to sing…

“It’s a great big universe and we’re all really puny, we’re just tiny little specs about the size of Mickey Rooney…”

I was suddenly in awe. It was a song from the cartoon show “Animaniacs,” which I was completely obsessed with when I was a kid. She had dug up a piece of my childhood that I had completely forgotten, and sailed it into the air on soundwaves in such a tiny, yet beautiful way.  Listen to this, and try to imagine it being played by just one girl with a uke:

Great Big Universe

That moment just really got me thinking about this interesting ability that music has to add to the message of words by toying with the scope and scale of the actual song. It’s amazing to me that there can be songs that are so incredibly huge in orchestration and emotion that have a subject matter as small as giving advice to a loved one (such as the Ray LaMontagne song above, one of my favorites) while simultaneously, there can be tiny little “dinky” songs that are about the vast and immeasurable existence that we’re a “tiny little spec” in. And the best part, is that both of them are beautiful. Playing with the scope and scale of the music as a whole vs. the actual message of the song is quite fascinating to me… it’s just one more thing that completely reinforces the true power of  the partnership between instrumental organized sound and poetry.

If you couldn’t tell by now, I really love music.

My Girls

Hola Jungle dwellers! The theme on the site this week is why now isn’t so bad. The answer for this with music is actually pretty simple – and it comes in two halves. The first half is actually right above the text you’re reading now, in fact it’s right in everything you’re looking at – the internet! I wanted you to hear “My Girls” by Animal Collective, so all I had to do was post a link to the YouTube video above. What an amazing tool for spreading music! How would you have gotten into some of your favorite new artists without them having a MySpace? You don’t even have to go to the record store anymore to buy an album! The internet has revolutionized music itself in a great way. We all know that it’s not doing good for the actual music industry, (we know, Lars Ulrich, we know) but it’s doing and has done incredible things for music itself. So the power of the internet is the first half of why now isn’t so bad in the world of music.

The second half has been made possible by the internet. It’s the freedom of our current musical climate, and how it has given such wonderful support to innovation. The condition of the general American public has been subject to a lot of unrest. However, the unrest is actually a good thing when it comes to the world of music, because it causes many to express themselves through instruments and melodies. The current musical climate is so insanely diverse that my excitement for it can’t be contained.  The great thing about all of this is that listeners are hungry for what’s different and unique instead of what they’re used to. Seems like an awesome base for what might happen in the future of music. Here’s an example of the crazy diversity we’ve come to look for in modern music:

www.iamdof.com

Never by Adjoa Skinner.

Adjoa is classically trained in voice, flute and piano, is an experienced jazz singer, and spent years living and working in Africa. Read more about this fantastically talented lady on our Artist In Residence page, or visit her own site at adjoaskinner.com. Find more of her music at myspace.com/adjoaskinner and youtube.com/adjoamusic.

Rise

I was having a conversation with my brother the other day about a new record that came out, and it lead to me discovering a problem I’m continually having with albums released in the last couple years. The issue is, for lack of better terminology, too much stuff! A prime example of this is Coldplay’s new record “Viva La Vida, or Death and All His Friends.” I actually really enjoy this album, and listen to it every now and then, but I’m not in love with it. However, I feel like I would be if the album had recieved a proverbial sonic hair cut before hitting the shelves. Utilizing the analogy of hair being layers of a recording, “Viva La Vida” is quite the shaggy dog. Take, for example, the song “Lost” which is track 3. Here’s the recording on the album:

Lost studio version

Breaking down the layers of the recording reveals that there are three organ tracks, a huge stomp and clap track, bass, acoustic guitar, tambourine, electric guitar, vocals, backing vocals, the list goes on and on… there’s even a pre-made loop of djembe straight out of the mac-standard program GarageBand. I’m not joking, I’ve used that loop before. But using premade loops that the general public has access to instead of hiring a guy with a djembe isn’t the issue here. The issue is more of a question. To convey the message of the song, do you really need all of that stuff? I’m of the school of thought that simple is better. Now check out the acoustic version of “Lost,” performed by Chris Martin on a piano, how it was written:

Lost acoustic

This is personal opinion of course, which i don’t mean to impose on anyone, but I’m going to say the song carries much more emotion and beauty when it’s just Chris alone. I’m not saying the other band members should sit this one out, I’m just saying a little moderation goes a long way.

I’m not trying to give an ultimate rule that stripped recordings are better than layered ones. Some of my favorite records are layered to the max, and being an audio guy it’s extremely exciting to listen to. All I’m trying to do is raise the question of whether or not complicating a song makes the song better. Just something to ponder… and while you ponder it, check out this song as an example of how simplicity can be beauty.

Oliver James by Fleet Foxes