When women and girls listen to love songs written by and/or performed by men, we have to filter stuff out, switch pronouns and, often, navigate a sexist point of view. After a lifetime of listening to male-dominated pop music I'm used to making these kinds of adjustments in my head, but I still feel starved for love songs that I can actually identify with and dance to without a power struggle. This drives me to… more »
"Don't wanna be chasin' that rent money for the rest of my life," Dent May sings on Do Things' opening track, "Just need somebody to hold me at night." While the music takes a step toward a fuller, synth-and-beat heavy sound (the titular Magnificent Ukulele of his debut album is long gone), the lyrics hint at the lovelorn loverman persona May has cultivated in his previous output. Aside from the trials and travails of relationships,… more »
Over the course of innumerable sessions in 1966 and 1967, the Beach Boys labored over what was to have been their magnum opus, Smile: a lavishly orchestrated suite of "modular" songs by the group's chief songwriter and resident genius Brian Wilson and lyricist Van Dyke Parks. Smile grew and grew, with hundreds of song fragments piling up — until May, 1967, when the project fell apart. For more than 40 years, there have been rumors that… more »
To finish. That is the unacknowledged trick of great art - completing a journey that begins with conception and arrives at the concluding moment when all decisions are made and chiseled into stone. As Brancusi, no mean sculptor himself, would say: "To see far is one thing, going there is another." In 1966, Brian Wilson tuned his radio telescope to the ends of the universe to craft what would have been his - and the Beach… more »
This year, the Beach Boys celebrate their half century - silver surfers all. Theirs is a family saga that, in the midst of unrivaled siblings and a belief in the transcendental meditation that is music, captures a moment in spatial time that hangs like a wave on 10, the suspension of a board as it rides the implacable power of the ocean, held in perfect balance between the tides. In the creative tension between their… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five… more »
He was the middle brother. The one who lived the life they sang about, the surf and the cars and the girls, not necessarily in that birth order. Since he got to experience it first hand, they hardly ever let him within the inner creative circle, where the harmonies flourished. They gave him the drums, keepin 'the beat, let his voice roughen their vocal blend, hardly took him seriously. Within the sibling rivalries of the… more »
