Up next in my personal musical genome project is Mr. Lyle Lovett, in honor of my sister, whose birthday is today. (Happy Birthday, Amy!)
Lovett falls into the ‘COUNTRY PLUS’ category. The “plus” is a designation my nerdy family has used for years to differentiate special movies and songs within certain genres from more generic examples. So Woody Allen’s movies, say, are “comedy plus” while your basic Adam Sandler vehicle is a plain old comedy.
Pandora tells me I like Ben Folds because his music exhibits major key tonality, melodic songwriting and a dynamic male vocalist. That’s how the musical genome project categorizes his music (along with dozens of other attributes they don’t surface, I’m sure). And according to that criteria, I should also like Josh Ritter, Ben Kweller and Death Cab for Cutie.
I don’t know two of those artists and I’m indifferent to the third but I’m sure they do sound something like Ben Folds and probably have some of the same fans. But does my love of Ben Folds necessarily mean that I’ll like people who sound like him? Maybe I like him despite his major key tonality (whatever that means), not because of it.
When I first started the Random Weekend series, I had visions of my kids’ music showing up week after week. Not just the songs they listen to these days (which are mostly by artists I listen to as well) but the artists they’ve listened to over the years.
Laurie Berkner, Raffi, The Wiggles… that sort of thing. Now, you may ask why I still have those albums in my iTunes library now that my daughters have moved on to other things, and that would be a very good question for which I don’t have a very good answer.
Josh Rouse has a way with closing tracks. He’s aware that an album should ebb and flow, and that you shouldn’t be able to confuse the first song with the last.
He tends to favor a quick start and a slow finish, with emotional peaks and valleys in between. This is one of just many ways to sequence an album, but it’s an effective one, and one he has returned to again ad again.
I’ve spent the week looking back on the summer through the prism of sports, television, movies and song, so it’s only fitting that I should close things out with a discussion of the written word.
I suppose the official book of the summer would be Fifty Shades of Grey (along with its sequels) but I have no time for glorified Twilight fan fiction. Another much-hyped book, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, has received much higher praise (including from my wife, who read it in about two days), and I definitely plan to read that one.
Meet Me In Montauk 