Tunes

"I hope tomorrow is like today."

-- Guster, "I Hope Tomorrow Is Like Today"

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Had a good time with the cast today. Sometimes the best grip, loosened, is better.

I made a Guster mix (began with Ganging Up on the Sun, then pulled from Lost and Gone Forever and Keep It Together) and they liked it. Played some Mae after that, and rounded out a long day--seven hours total in that rickety, squeakety white van--with some Alison Krauss.

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Krauss, I have learned, is the winningest female in Grammy history, with a total of twenty-six. (She is third overall.) Though her band, Union Station, has been around for two decades, she likes to say that musically, they are just beginning. That they have not yet begun to play, in other words.

In bluegrass, work and life, everything starts today.

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There is something unsettling about a band who only makes songs you like. At once it is a feeling of hearing music made for you, and then it is a realization that it is you, not the music, that has been conditioned to be liked.

A high-school friend once said that he loved the Rolling Stones, except for some of their songs. "I don't know what the fuck they were doing," he told me. "I think they just made some shit up to sell some vinyl. But they're still my favorite."

"Why?"

"Well, you can't say a band is your favorite unless you hate at least one of their songs."

True. And that sinking feeling is love, when you hear a different sound from the same band. Love is what you feel when you realize, without saying it aloud, that your favorite guys (or gals) have sold out.

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A note about tune and tone, briefly:

Both are nouns and verbs. And you can tone a tune as well as you can tune a tone, but an atonal tune will be tuned out by more people than an untuned tone.

Or, as the symphony hall of dreams would beckon: Play it, and they will hear.

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Now, this doesn't go to say that Krauss is the best female musician in history (dame Aretha cringes), or that atonal music is bad. What it does say is, music is really beyond me to comprehend in any pliable sense; that is, I seem to lack the knack to do it myself, aside from singing in the shower, or worse, on a stage. Keys, strings and stops are out of my throat and out of my talent range--but I like what I like. It is the one performance art with which I can only barely identify, but which I still consider part of my identity.

I think I like "good music," but then again, there is some boring shit in my iTunes.

My girlfriend once said of a popular song, "I like it, but I feel like I'm supposed to like it, like someone in a studio was like, 'This song needs to be liked,' and then made a song that was likable but didn't say or do anything. That's why I don't like it: I feel like I've been engineered to like it."

Poppy trillers and acoustic nasal singers take note: You are as numberless as the records you sell, but the underground knows the truth, and it forgets you in the thud of stampeding feet and ca-chinging registers at the record shop. The most popular radio stations are afraid of silence.

It is silence that makes the music necessary, the thinking that begs for artistic noise.

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It is the same with the stage.