Beauty

Check out this definition of music: “vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.”

Nice try? Pretty close? It’s difficult to write about music.

The trickiest part of that definition is “beauty,” isn’t it? Who is to say what is beautiful? Some music is beautiful to some and repugnant to others.

I have made a lot of recordings in the last twenty years. I have learned the truth of this quote: “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” I thought Abraham Lincoln said that, but apparently it was John Lydgate, a 15th century English monk whose day job involved writing poetry for Kings Henry IV through VI.

Some things don’t change. At least not in six hundred years.

This week for the online residency I had requests for two of the four songs on “It Doesn’t Matter Why It Is, It Doesn’t Matter If It’s Wrong,” so I decided to play the whole thing. It’s hard for me to have a favorite of the many albums I have made so far, but this one is very special to me. People have told me they love it, people have told me they hate it, and people have asked a lot of questions about it. The year I put it out, 2008, I had a big time meeting with a big time music manager in a big tall building in Hollywood. Among other things, he told me not to put out so many albums. I imagine he was trying to prevent releases like this one? He did not become my manager, I remained unmanaged, and this album was the result.

As I was playing it during the livestream, I felt many conflicting emotions. Since I know it makes people feel weird, I was conscious about that. It’s impossible to gauge or manage audience reaction in this strange new medium. There are some bad words and I was concerned about children so I hope I gave enough explicit lyrics warnings (I gave several). And I kept thinking “am I losing people?” and “do people hate this?” I looked up periodically and the same amount of people were tuned in, sometimes more (five fewer people like my Facebook page after this broadcast). And I must to tell you: I was mostly thinking “this kicks ass” and “I love this.” To me, those songs (and the way I produced them) are the perfect expression of how I thought and felt about the George W. Bush years. I did the best I could, I made the thing I wanted to make, and I stand by every choice.

If you don’t find it beautiful…isn’t that the beauty of music?

This album became the first in a series of quadrennial recordings that I release every presidential election year in the United States. Part IV is due this year sometime. The way things are looking, I think I’ll wait until November 4th to make it and see what comes out.

Monday Online Residency // 5.11.20 Rings on Ring Fingers / Too Many Ghosts / Disneyland / After Love After All / Super Duper / Pissin’ On Plants In The Suburbs / Charlie / Ned / The Ballad of Wallace Green and His Dog / Sanctuary / It Gets Bad, But It Gets Better

You can please some of the people some of the time…