Lee Barry's Blog, page 21

Pseudonymous Creativity

In the early days of Facebook there was a group where people created fake album covers based on fake artists, wherein you would create a title and all the song titles. I thought this was an interesting idea from a creativity standpoint, as very often songs start with titles. In the Tin Pan Alley days, this was one of the primary creativity tools, and typically the titles were the chorus lyric. So

Why We Can’t Quit Guitar Solos

  Re: the NYT article: Why We Can’t Quit Guitar SolosThis is the opposite of the article that pronounces something dead like "photography is dead" or "representational painting is dead". There is something to a really good guitar solo but from a musical standpoint they can't go on for too long. With solos, coherent musical ideas are difficult to sustain over even 16 bars. What I like is the 8 bar

Thought Trains

 On sorting through high and low contexts.High and low context was one of the main points in anthropologist Edward Hall's book Beyond Culture, and I frequently come back to it. The Smith Slap was high context in some ways, but mostly low context.  What you're seeing is a clip or frame without the other things around it (at least initially). It's like fragments of overheard conversations in a bar

Historical Sweet Spots

 
While Lennon and McCartney were writing the She Loves You in the dining room of Paul's house, Paul's father was in an adjacent room and overheard them singing "yeah yeah yeah" and suggested it should be "yes yes yes", and harrumphed that there were too many Americanisms that were bleeding into English culture. American culture is "slang" in many ways. In the recent article in the New Republic,

How Long Did It Take?

  This is a question I'm frequently asked.A 7-minute song can take at the shortest 7 hours to record, or 7 days! An album of 7 songs which is 49 minutes long can take 7 months.  The idea that something takes 7 minutes to make from start to finish with an asking price of $700,000 has to be stunt. But that's not to say it's not interesting, clever or cunning. But how many times can you do that?  I

Trapped in SciFi Worlds

As Charles Mingus once said, "You have to improvise from something--you can't improvise from nothing". Inevitably, you need some type of map eventually, as the mind is wont of them.Characters in SciFi are always trapped in the worlds of their creators. In my Reset 2046 story (2013), Chelsea Clinton ran in the general elections of 2024 and 2028 and won both. In the 2040s, people were still injured

Anodyne

Photo: Linda McCartneyAfter 9/11 people used anodyne of different kinds to escape. My current escape is the 2-volume, 20-pound collection of lyrics and photographs, Paul McCartney, THE LYRICS. Taken as a whole, you have to realize that Beatles are a part of the postwar zeitgeist, and if history repeats or rhymes, there will be another Beatles, perhaps in the 2040s. There's always some kind of

Talking Shop

 Stones at Gibson Factory, July 1975 [More] When I watch music-related videos on YouTube I'm reminded of "soulcraft" and "tinkering" from not so long ago (or ancient history—2006) when Matthew Crawford wrote the Atlantis essay, Shop Class As Soulcraft which was the basis for the book released in 2009. The timing of it was interesting because those ideas were already in the air while we were going

Lag of Creativity

 When I work on new pieces of music and arrange them from ideas which emerged from a guitar, or even from words and rhythm, they take on stylistic worlds of their own. Once a track has been tracked and mixed they sound like records from decades ago. On a recent piece, the first mix sounded like a session from George Harrison's All Things Must Pass circa 1970, then late 70s Steely Dan, then

Photocopied Histories

Third-Generation Photocopy Social commentary in songwriting rides the waves of the generations, and is driven by what young songwriters experience in the world when they are in their 20s or 30s, when the world seems more hostile.Sting was in his early 30s when he wrote Russians, as well as They Dance Alone, both which have traveled well in terms of historical themes. He was a strong voice for