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Benj Pasek and Justin Paul: In Short
Back for more then? Thanks! Before we get to the Song of the Day, let’s talk about the Youtube Rabbit Hole Effect. You’re probably not familiar with the term (because I made it up), but you’ve definitely experienced the phenomenon. Things start innocently enough. You click on that intriguing video your friend posted to Facebook, or perhaps you went directly to Youtube to watch that hilarious cat video to brighten your morning…either way the ending is the same. One video leads to the next and before you know it, you look up from your device to find the sun is setting. You’re left wondering how you became so easily distracted and how on Earth you missed lunch! Call me Alice, but I love falling down the Rabbit Hole.
Stephen Sondheim: So Many People
My song for you today is So Many People from Sondheim’s Saturday Night. I love Sondheim. His prowess as a composer and lyricist makes him, in my mind, one of the most influential and important artists of the last century. His words are a masterclass in storytelling and his music, while simple sounding to the ear, is often incredibly complex.
Nick Blaemire: Evaporate
Nick is a good friend and sometime collaborator of mine. He’s also a fantastic songwriter and a killer singer. “Evaporate” one of my favorite of his songs, off his latest album Ampersand. It’s a great example of how to fuse acoustic instrumentation with electronic elements/effects to achieve a super-contemporary feeling.
Candi Staton – Another Man’s Woman, Another Woman’s Man
Candi Staton has one of my favorite voices in the history of music (besides Lauren’s, that is!). She sings with such honesty and rawness on this song about an ill-fated love affair. The emotion comes through strong, even when accompanied by a cheesy late-60s-mode “rock flute” and slightly overwrought horn lines. The lyrics—which don’t even make an effort to rhyme—have a straightforward, searching power to them. The fact there are no rhymes somehow makes the song feel all that much more honest. I particularly love the first two lines: “I can’t ignore the way your yearning eyes look at me / Oh darling, I know what we feel is wrong.”
David Bazan: Curse Your Branches
What I love most about this song is the story behind it. David Bazan was raised Pentecostal, and rose to fame as the lead singer/songwriter of the Christian indie band “Pedro the Lion.” Then he had a crisis of faith. He stopped playing churches, he left his Christian label, and he publicly declared himself agnostic. After that he recorded a solo record, featuring stunningly personal confessionals about his loss of faith. It’s basically a breakup album about breaking up with God. This is one of its best songs. I find it fascinating to hear someone sing so nakedly and honestly about doubt, with a such a palpable weariness in his voice. Feels like you can hear Bazan struggling as he sings.
Nick Cave: Love Letter
This is one of my favorite songs in the world. There’s something about Nick Cave’s rough rock n’ roll voice, paired with a tender string-soaked arrangement, that I find deeply moving. I particularly love how the piano is recorded; it sounds so warm and full of life. The suspensions in the string lines create a harmonic tension that seldom resolves until at least beat two of each measure. The resulting feeling, for me, is a bittersweet yearning that beautifully matches the content of lyrics. And then there’s the moment where the drums come in at 2:55… I get shivers every time. Just the perfect moment of release.
Shovels & Rope: Bridge on Fire
One of the reasons I love the neo-folk duo Shovels & Rope is that it’s a...
NYFOS@Caramoor: Day 5
We weren’t sure we’d be able to make it to Westchester today. They predicted a lengthy snowfall with five to seven inches accumulated on the ground by noon. So we made a bunch of contingency plans, and were prepared to load the singers onto a Metro-North train to work at my house in the afternoon. But it turned out to be a fairly benign snowfall in above-freezing temperatures. The roads were clear (and blessedly empty) on the way up to Caramoor, and we managed to stay on course.
NYFOS@Caramoor: Day 4
Something has been missing for me from the last few Caramoor residencies: one-on-one time with each singer, the kind of interaction where mountains get moved and new artistic ideas get planted. It’s mostly been a question of scheduling: when we have a guest coach, the singers are all in one room with Michael and me and the imported guru, and we simply have less one-on-one time. And this week we’ve had guest teachers every day. Until today.
NYFOS@Caramoor: Day 3
Thursday is usually the most intense day—it’s the designated time for everyone to be off book, i.e., memorized. But today—Wednesday, usually a frolic in the sandbox—turned out to be a strenuous day of contact sports. Some of this had to do with the schedule: Marco was to join us in the afternoon, but he could only get there at 3:40. It was our last coaching day with him—yes, he’ll be back for more rehearsals and he’ll play the performances with us, but then he’ll be in his role purely as flautist. So we had a lot to cover in a short period, and that meant the day ended with three hours of extremely concentrated work on all the flute stuff and all the Spanish stuff.
Four Islands
I always used to joke that one of the important things Michael Barrett and I had in common was that we both came from islands: Michael was born in Guam, and I was born in Manhattan. This quip could always be counted on to bring down the house at a NYFOS concert. In recent years, though, I have started to wonder if there wasn’t some truth underlying my flippant remark. Island dwellers, whether urban or tropical, all seem to develop certain traits. We crave the proximity of water, which provides us with a comforting aquatic buffer from the rest of the world. We see ourselves as fundamentally different from (and superior to) our landlocked neighbors. We are often under attack from outside enemies, and must learn to protect ourselves from invasion.
NYFOS@Caramoor: Day 2
Tuesday is traditionally the most carefree play-day at Caramoor. The Sunday concert still seems a long way off, memorization is not making everyone into zombies, and we can still do some real exploration with the singers and the songs. Michael and I have a sense of what we’d like our cast to get out of the week’s project, and there seems to be just enough time. It’s like working with plaster of Paris: there is a certain window when the materials are malleable before they harden for good. We seized the day, all of us.
NYFOS@Caramoor: Day 1
I always look forward to the first day of Caramoor rehearsal, but I also fear the first day of Caramoor rehearsal. This year’s outing, Four Islands, is a complicated show with songs from Ireland, Cuba, Madagascar, and Manhattan in five languages (including Gaelic and Zulu). It has music hall, vocal chamber music, Afro-Cuban heat and contemporary cool. I knew one of my cast members well, and another was a singer with whom I had a short but fruitful acquaintance. The other two were people I believed in but actually knew very little. So was my pianist.
Malamini Jobarteh and Dembo Konte: Cheddo
My choice for the grand finale is this epic, literally, performance of “Cheddo” by Malamini Jobarteh and Dembo Konte, two djelis (or griots, a.k.a. praise singer/storyteller/musicians) who each sing and play on koras, 21-string harp-lutes tuned to specific scales that to ears only acclimated to 12-tone equal temperament might seem somewhat alien but to me sound deliciously spicy. Jobarteh and Konte are hereditary djelis who come from families who have been playing such music for centuries if not longer. Both hail from the tiny West African nation of Gambia, or as some people call it, The Gambia. Since Gambia just recently celebrated a return to democracy through the ballot box (one of the few political things to be cheerful about in these complex times), it seems fitting to listen to some music from there.
The Beach Boys (under the musical direction of Brian Wilson): Surf’s Up
“The greatest rock album ever made”, SMiLE, was scheduled to be released in January 1967 but remained in the vaults in its original form until October 2011. Much ink as well as pixels have been devoted to “Heroes and Villains” and “Good Vibrations,” which were to be bookended on SMiLE, but which wound up instead on the quickly sewn together, though still fascinating, Smiley Smile, which was released in September of that year. But I’d like you to listen to a song that had to wait much longer to see the light of day: “Surf’s Up.”