Here's some of the songwriting stuff that's been making me think lately. (The post is overdue, but I logged about fifteen hours of solo performance this week on top of the two day gigs, and I'm just happy to be putting anything here.)

• Ted Gioia on Sappho and the badassery of love songs. God, this is awesome. One thing Gioia mentions is the contempt that critics often have for expressions of emotion, despite the bravery and vulnerability such expressions require. (He doesn't get into the causes of that contempt, but I would bet there's a healthy amount of neo-Platonic sexism involved, the same bias that considers physical expression vulgar and dismisses the pop that teen girls enjoy.)
• Lyrics or music? Where does your ear go, what do you write first? I like hearing from other musicians on this. I rarely write a melody that doesn't come from a line of lyrics. The music is so tied to that meaning for me that I'm always a little awed when I encounter someone who can work on a melody without needing the words.
• An example of one of those people: The NYT Amplifier blog compiled a playlist of Eno tracks. (I have not yet seen the Eno movie, whose contents are digitally shuffled into different orders at different screenings. One of the most interesting classes I ever took was on narrative structure—how the order of the telling, a.k.a. fabula, influences our understanding of the subject—and I suspect I could spend a year analyzing this thing.)
• The Guardian discusses whether lyrics can ever be literature when they are divorced from their music. I tend to think of this sort of a question as a trolley problem—interesting in the abstract, pointless in practice. It's largely irrelevant to the working artist. Still, I'm gratified to know that critics do consider it, when a lot of listeners ignore lyrics entirely. 
• Art Levy breaks down writing an album, song by song. Levy's music incorporates visual art, and his experimental approach makes me feel as though my own long, roundabout process on Posthistoric might not be quite as dysfunctional as I tend to assume. (Coincidentally, he did much of this work on an Ibanez Artcore, the same guitar I usually play live. It's a lovely, versatile instrument.)

Last, this isn't a songwriting link, but writer Sarah Gailey has compiled a thorough list of resources for political actions Americans can take against the continuing genocide in Palestine, as well as ways to donate to victims, refugees, and communities. Here's your reminder that music is one of our strongest weapons against despair.

Thanks to the great karaoke experiment, I have been thinking a lot about the hidden workings of cover songs. You don't have to read that post before this one, but it might clarify a point or two.

In 2016, I was part of a loose ensemble that played tribute shows every so often. As November approached, we were rehearsing a set of TV theme songs. It was silly but fun; many of the songs represented fond memories from childhood and adolescence, even if we knew as adults that some of the shows weren't actually all that good. 

The show was the Friday after the election. I went into it thinking I didn't want to do it at all. It was time for punk, the harder-edged art of outrage and resistance. But as we played, people began singing along, and it could not have been clearer that they were clinging to these familiar songs as to a lifeline.

Since then I've learned that people do in fact turn to familiar media in times of depression or fear. (I can't remember where I read about this study. Someone measured it, though.) This seems both wonderful and dangerous. On the one hand: what a testament to the power of art. On the other: well, it's not as though things have gotten any less depressing and scary, and we cannot spend the rest of our lives retreating into the comforts of childhood TV when the times call for new ideas and actions.

In her lovely and terrifying piece "The Great Unconformity" (s/o to Hope Rehak for reminding me to read it), Sarah Kendzior mentions that the current media landscape makes shared experiences more difficult. Various digital archives have been deleted; many people have chucked their physical media; the number of channels and stations has expanded, fragmenting audiences into smaller and smaller subgroups. 

Kendzior's beat is fascism, but what she's describing matches my experience in the world of cover songs. Beyond a few obvious hits, finding music that a good chunk of the audience will recognize usually means reaching back twenty years or more. It makes me uneasy for the same reason that the TV gig did. 

Media fragmentation is only part of the problem here. The new songs themselves are fragmented too, popular because they are shared in 90-second clips via TikTok or Reels or whatever. There are riffs and hooks I know solely because they're featured in ads. (I suspect some songs are even engineered to be optimal for these shorter clips—the full songs do not reward familiarity.) So the crowds continue to shout along to "Sweet Caroline," because there is so little to replace it.

Ted Gioia notes that sales of old music have been outstripping sales of new music for a while—not because the new music isn't there, but because the mechanisms of profit currently encourage the rights holders to exploit their existing properties. Anyway—and maybe obviously—the people profiting from the sales are often not the artists; they're the shareholders and private equity D-bags behind the consolidation of media companies. As the money flows to them, fewer artists can afford to make music at all. Eventually, more listeners may have to turn to the old stuff for meaning. If that's the only hard media you own, and the streaming landscape is so cluttered with AI and payola algorithms that you can't find new releases, where else can you go?

In effect, multiple engines of media are pushing us to nostalgia. Kurt Andersen, in Evil Geniuses, discusses nostalgia as a cultural touchstone of conservatism and fascist movements. It helps reinforce the myth of a bygone Golden Age: the era, in fact, of the bumbling white sitcom dad and his eternally patient, eternally hot stay-at-home spouse. 

This is not to say that all nostalgia is bad. Familiarity is part of the pleasure of music, after all. But it can't be everything. If an American nostalgia evokes the music of the 1950s and early 1960s, then it presents a cultural landscape with very few women's voices, one in which the Race Records are safely segregated away from the impressionable ears of white kids. As listeners, as musicians, we owe it to ourselves to ask what familiarity omits.

Andersen credits the architects and executors of contemporary fascism with more intellect than I'm certain they all deserve. I don't believe the executives of Spotify give a shit about any cultural consequences when they engineer streaming royalties away from artists; they just want more money. But indifference and venality can enable fascism quite as easily as genius can. All they ask you to do is sing along.