Several weeks ago, my friend Allison asked about my availability for an "elaborate karaoke scheme." Allison is a formidable observer of media, and she had, it emerged, hatched a plan to evaluate karaoke songs by their own merits, divorced from the merits of the performance. 

As it happens, this idea dovetails with some hypotheses I've begun to develop after several years of cover-song gigs. A number of songs—even giant hits, even by songwriters I otherwise adore—are secretly boring, relying on production magic* or performer charisma.** Throw in a different performer and an unvarnished vocal, and the song reveals itself as a dud. We've all seen people figure this out on stage in karaoke bars, blanching at the realization that there are five more verses exactly like this. 

Allison, though, went farther than I ever have, developing an NCAA-style seeding system and researching the most popular karaoke songbooks. She assembled a group of performers, most of us with backgrounds in theater and hardcore karaoke experience, and she had us all submit lists of our own top songs, the songs we didn't necessarily want to sing ourselves but that we thought were good karaoke choices in general, and the songs we would automatically downvote. ("Love Shack" received the most downvotes, and so was excluded. Most of us quite like the B-52s, but we do not ever need to hear another group of drunk strangers shout that song in the general direction of a mic.) Then she booked a private karaoke room, and we got to work.

There was a play-in bracket, with spirited discussions of the songs in terms of degree of difficulty, perceived degree of difficulty, length, lyrical surprises, opportunities to showboat, opportunities for audience participation, the elusive quality of "keep-pumping-ness," and other merits. Votes determined which songs would advance; a song that did advance would be performed by a different singer in the next round, so that we could consider the song apart from its original performance. The bartender—intrigued, after her initial surprise at our quantity of office supplies***—gave the tie-breaking vote in at least one contest. 

This was a lot of singing and discussing, for all of us. There were props and costume changes. There was dancing, obviously, and there were impressions of Elvis, Britney, and Miley. We winnowed the list down to the Sweet 16; those competitions will happen in another couple of months. 

Even though we do not yet have a winner, we've reached some interesting results:

• Length can doom a song. Allison posits that five minutes is the cutoff point. (Again, standards for karaoke are way different from standards for radio or streaming or albums.) 
• Most of the songs that advanced are on the old side. I suspect that karaoke operates by a different rule of familiarity than pop radio (where hits often adhere to the MAYA principle Derek Thompson describes in Hit Makers, essentially a balance between familiarity and newness). But mainstream pop has also seen a widespread shift from major key to minor, as well as a general slowing of tempos—which means that older songs are just going to do better in terms of keep-pumping-ness. (This is something I've noticed in cover gigs, too; the directive is often "uptempo and fun," and it can be a struggle to find newer songs that meet those criteria.)
• Most of the successful songs were in the alto-tenor vocal range, relatively singable regardless of the performer's gender. Several with higher tessituras ("Dancing Queen," "Party in the USA," "Good Luck Babe") were eliminated in the first round. 
• Often, the better karaoke song is not the better song. 
• There has to be a whole separate bracket competition for best duets and group songs.

So! Further study is needed! But this is a gloriously goofy endeavor. It needs a much bigger dataset. You should probably do it with your friends.

*AutoTune is obviously a big culprit here, as is the recent-ish production technique known as The Surge (creating an exciting chorus through a synthy crescendo rather than a change in melody or chord progression). Mainstream pop in the past couple of decades has also seen a decline in melodic variation as producers try to formulate songs that will game algorithms and feel just familiar enough to listeners. 
**"One Way or Another" and "Brass in Pocket" are both on this list for me, though I know many people who love them, and I am not here to convince anyone not to love them. Different things bore different people.
***Shout out to Thomas, who lent me a lab coat.

Last week I was working on lyrics for a patter song when I hit a sticking point: What was the best way to fill the four syllables in this line?

I texted the band for suggestions of acts that scan like "cauliflower" (i.e., trochee trochee). The thing is, though, that scansion is highly personal—try sight-singing from another songwriter's lyric sheet if you don't believe me. It can be specific to the song and the vocal delivery as well. And I hadn't recorded or shared a demo yet.

Thomas came back with a list:
owl city (great example of how a word that looks like a monosyllable turns into two when you sing it)
yo la tengo
michael doughty
billy idol

None felt quite right. I recorded the demo with "Mats reunion," which also didn't feel quite right but at least let me finish without using cauliflower. (I once sent out a demo with the line "I don't want a cauliflower"; Charlie suggested I was missing the opportunity to rhyme it with "I don't want a golden shower.")

When I sent out the demo, Charlie—with the added benefit of context—replied with his own list, as well as the criteria he had gleaned from the rest of the song:
Jesus Lizard show
Lizard Wizard show
Sleater-Kinney show
7 Seconds show
Mr Bungle show
Stabbing Westward show
Smashing Pumpkins show
Jon Bon Jovi show
Jason Isbell show
Billie Eilish show

(Criteria: 4 syllables, currently touring, loud enough to necessitate earplugs, theoretically popular with undateable dudes)

I can confirm that the last Jesus Lizard show I saw was loud enough for earplugs and full of guys I might think twice before dating. What I cannot do, however, is get that combination of s and z sounds out of my mouth in rhythm. It's kind of a fast song; it needs a hard sound or two.

Thomas, ever loyal to the band that brought us all together, suggested "tmbg"—either the abbreviation or the full name of the band, mushed together—but I don't think I can make that work either. So I'm still looking. I think this may become something we change up in live shows. Might as well open the comments here to additional ideas, yeah?

A few years ago I was chatting with a luthier about various resources for learning string instruments. I forget what prompted it, but he commented, "You never practice as hard as you do in high school."

This is, in my experience, not true. I get it: you have more time in high school, and it feels as though these skills might turn out to define you. (In truth there is no time limit on when or how you define yourself. But teenage intensity is real and urgent.) I did practice some things—vocal music, writing—really hard in high school. But I had my first guitar then, the Gibson LG0 that my mom's friend sold me at a yard sale, and I had absolutely no clue what to do with it.

It took years, in fact, before I knew enough of both guitar and music that I could work effectively on that instrument. Several of my most intense stretches of practice have been relatively recent; they've come on arts residencies that afforded time for hours of daily woodshedding. And I don't feel as though these parts of my work are behind me. The more I learn, the more aware I am of how much I want to do.

My first experience with deep guitar practice was when I took Charles Kim's theory/composition courses. Our main textbook was a huge Hal Leonard compilation of Beatles songs. I played through in alphabetical order, gradually getting my hands used to the chord shapes and unraveling the music I'd grown up singing along with. At about the same time, my friend Jesse was running the weekly open mic at the Holiday Club; I started going with a handful of buddies. I had written and arranged songs before—I was in college a cappella, as well as a folk duo that I hope came off as charmingly lo-fi—but things changed when I was playing for the same people every week. I grew impatient with the limitations of my repertoire and my playing. So I had to write new songs, and I had to practice. 

I should note that there's a distinction between practicing instrumental technique and practicing to learn repertoire. The best practice, for me, combines the two. I can't always apply what I learn from Hanon-style scales and drills, but if I learn a pattern from digging deep into a song, it stays with me. (Simon Callow says much the same thing in Being an Actor: Only the lessons of performance stick. That's not a direct quote, because I seem to have left my copy at the old house. But it's the idea.)

"Half" was a turning point for both songwriting and play. (I think it and "Grace" are the only songs from that era that I've kept and recorded with the Baguettes.) I hadn't done much fingerpicking before, and I really didn't want to mess it up in front of a crowd of musicians. Plus, I liked the song; I wanted to keep singing it; I kept discovering stuff as I worked. I practiced until the tip of my right middle finger, rasping against the steel strings, developed a large, nipple-like blood blister. 

Then I kept playing.

The Blister Test has become my shorthand for whether a song demands that sort of compulsive play. It doesn't mean a literal blister in every case, thank goodness (though both the Gibson and the Telecaster have now been baptized in blood). But if I don't want to keep playing a new song, something's wrong with it.

Earlier this year, my homemade Roterfaden cover gave out (to be clear, my amateur stitchwork has lasted just fine, but the spring in the wallet clip has sprung its last). This has resulted in the music notebook getting a bit banged up. 

Today, in the grocery store, I reached into my bag for my list. I spotted a bit of paper with my handwriting, and I pulled. And then gazed in dismay at the scrap of lyrics I was holding. (Did I succeed in finding the list while I was in the store? No. Did I remember to buy coriander? Also no.)

Most of the pages that have come free represent either completed songs ("Wake," "Who You Fooling," "The Comeback Kid") or pieces I have tried and found wanting ("Hush Hush No No"), so I don't think I have fatally damaged any work in progress. I'm cranky all over again that Moleskine discontinued its hardcover staff-paper pocket notebooks. And part of me is just sitting back and marveling at this. Of course, of course, in a year when it sometimes seemed I was tearing my own life to pieces, I would destroy my music notebook. 

The thing is, though, that this image is perversely hopeful. The notebook looks like this because I refuse to stop carrying it. Music has been one of the few bright spots this year. I haven't given up on it, and it hasn't given up on me.

I sent a couple of demos to the band a week or two ago. One, "Negative," was a song I've been trying to finish since late 2019—some of the Taos songs were early attempts, though they eventually developed into other things. The other, "Swing the Statue," began as a near-complete set of verses in 2020, but didn't have a chorus until now (and still needs bridge lyrics). It was not at all guaranteed that I would finish these, in short. Finishing anything creative has been a pretty massive struggle this year, but these songs were elusive. I was happy to send them.

Thomas texted today, ominously: "I have thoughts on the demos." What followed was an enjoyable, if blunt, disassembly.

(I don't think I do that much with diminished chords—if anything, I default to major too often—but it's good to be in a band with fellow songwriters who'll pick up on your habits. Getting texts about music theory is no small privilege.)

We didn't reach any definite conclusions, other than that playing through both songs with the whole band was the most useful next step. The conversation did help me zero in on a few things that might be in the way of finishing the "Statue" bridge, though. And "We tried subtle and the world got worse" is an accurate assessment of quite a lot of political art.

​And I'm pretty sure that flat ninth is going to stay in the song. 

My work's all over the place this week, my attention divided between our upcoming photo shoot and a handful of demos I need to finish, so this week's post may be a little random as well. Which is actually on theme! 

Tools that have helped me lately:

• I have a playlist that might as well be called "Hey Future Liz, Listen to This." It's where I store song recommendations, artists to whom I've given insufficient attention (this realization is sometimes prompted by a death), miscellaneous new releases I don't have time to listen to right when I hear about them, etc. I try to grab a few tracks from each artist, not all from the same album and not all at the top of Spotify's recommendation, and then let the player shuffle as it will. The idea for the playlist, as well as the name, comes from my old guitar teacher Chris Corsale, who used to talk about exploring music as finding and pulling threads.
• ​A different playlist, the Amplifier's roundup of bands in uniform, was a useful way to think about how we might dress for the photo shoot. (In suits, but make it rock? How do we avoid resembling a wedding band or a steampunk collective? We have discussed Devo-style jumpsuits, but not for this shoot.)
• ​Austin Kleon's piece on creative surrender is lovely, and not just because he cites some of my favorite writing on the subject by Martha Graham and Kenny Werner.* The approach is similar to what Keith Johnstone talks about in Impro, though the mechanics of musical improv are different—and feel, to me, far riskier—than theatrical improv.
• Tarot as a tool of divination can be just as needlessly restrictive as any other superstition, but tarot as a randomized archetype generator is kind of interesting. Since every symbol has multiple interpretations, the real meaning comes from you, so on the days when feelings are murky, this can be a fun way to focus. (I'm obviously not going to link to that site without clicking, and it generated the Wheel of Fortune: this week really is about letting go of control, huh?)
• I'm about to send the band a demo whose bridge contains some gibberish placeholder lyrics, ending with "cauliflower." I haven't been able to get to the right words, so maybe the group can find them. Or maybe the prospect of an audience will make my brain land on the right words about five seconds after I hit Send. Either one works. Gibberish is more useful than it gets credit for.

*Werner's guided meditation hasn't been quite what I've needed to deal with musical performance anxiety, but a brief daily meditation does seem to help. Maybe that should be in the list of tools too.

As a teenager, I spent months drawing with nothing but Sharpie; my art teacher wanted me to get comfortable with not being able to erase. After contour and texture studies, we progressed to working with negative space—that is, defining an object by what's around it. 

I'm working on a song about someone who's not there, and as often happens, the lessons appeared right when I needed them.

Austin Kleon posted this gem about punk artists defining their work by negatives, with a nice quote from David Byrne on how the Talking Heads set out not to do certain things other bands had done. "The only sensible course was to avoid all of it, to strip everything back and see what was left. ...It was mathematics; when you subtract all that unwanted stuff from something, art or music, what do you have left?" Byrne adds that he later moved beyond that approach, "but the dogma provided a place to start."

In a Chicago rock discussion group, someone posted Paul Westerberg's interview with Musician, in which he discusses how artists define themselves in relation to others, whether they're aspiring to be in the in-group or to break away: "It takes a lot of courage to be different but it takes a great deal of hard work to be the same. I think in the end you get the same result but you've got to be what you are." (I've always had the impression that Westerberg had little choice about being different; he's constitutionally perverse. In Trouble Boys he says that if you tell him "White sheet rain," he'll come back with "Black blanket sun.")

What do those things mean for the song? for me as a person? Defining by absence is useful, but there's a point at which it becomes too reductive. What isn't starts to obscure what is and what can be. I was stuck on a refrain of "I won't think about you, I won't think about you" until I figured out that it needed to break so the song could become a whole song, not just an idea. Ultimately the no isn't enough; you need the yes too. Or I do. 

A few weeks ago, to general woe, Café Selmarie announced it would be closing. I've lived a block away for the past eleven years, and being able to wander through Giddings Plaza for a perfect croissant or a cup of veg chili has always been one of the best parts of the neighborhood.

Right after the announcement I took an evening walk down Lincoln. The windows of another restaurant were papered over. The urgent care clinic sent fluorescent light out of what used to be the Brauhaus. By the fountain a familiar cellist was playing a Bach melody I've learned by heart this year. It felt like an elegy for the Square as I have known it, for this whole stretch of my life.

We cling to the illusion of permanence because it provides the even more important illusion of security. Or that's what I told myself as the streetlights came on against a blue twilight.

I moved out last week. This blog is not the place to go into the details, but the past couple of years have been the hardest of my life. Sometimes the difficulty seemed permanent in a way that began to feel secure, which terrified me.

I've left behind the music room where we recorded most of Highway Gothic and a lot of Unswept tracks. The hundred-year-old piano from "Gen X" and "After All" is still in the front room. My sticky-note project is still on the wall; I will collect it at some point, but inevitably pieces will be shuffled and jumbled. It won't be the same. Nothing will. 

Bach is a good choice for an elegy. His music provides a sense of having tapped into a deeper natural order—and I still don't know whether it's an actual natural order or merely the comforting illusion of one, rendered exceptionally well. The cello suite dances on a sharp edge of paradox, offering permanence in a melody, something that vanishes even as you experience it. Perhaps that, in itself, is the natural order.

Lots of songs in progress, nothing quite ready to share. Some things I have found inspiring of late:

• Claire Vaye Watkins's essay "On Pandering" (which I encountered via Men Yell at Me). This gets at a lot of reasons I needed to take a break from writing literary fiction (after, like Watkins, being told my prose was "masculine"). And the clarion call at the end made me yell in agreement: "Let us embrace a do-it-yourself canon, wherein we each make our own canon filled with what we love to read, what speaks to us and challenges us and opens us up, wherein we can each determine our artistic lineages for ourselves, with curiosity and vigor, rather than trying to shoehorn ourselves into a canon ready made and gifted us by some white fucks at Oxford."
• Austin Kleon's musing on middle life. I've linked to Kleon plenty before; this piece is especially lovely, and his Substack is very much worth the subscription. 
• Van Gogh's advice to a young artist (I think this also came my way via a Substack, though now I am no longer sure which one).
• Ted Gioia's enjoyable, if occasionally inadvertent, resistance to AI.
• For the sake of linking to something that isn't a Substack, I'll note that one of my guitar mentors recommends dipping into Songwriters on Songwriting whenever you need a new way of looking at things.
• The Baguettes have had a few recording sessions lately in which we've referred to Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies. Also of use: the Not So Oblique Strategies. I don't know whether it's the result of any official strategy, but last week saw us discussing whether we could incorporate a typewriter into our live percussion setup.

And it's hot. This room is so humid the trackpad on my geriatric laptop has stopped working. The world is melting, and I hope you're engaging in whatever forms of climate action you can, large and small. That's the real point of all of this: let's get rid of what isn't working, and let's make something better. 

I used to have this postcard from Found Image Press taped up over my desk. Sometime in the past couple of years it slipped down behind a stack of notebooks. But I just found it again, around the same time that Austin Kleon posted this discussion of Paul McCartney's process. One of the main points is that Paul and John followed Paul's father's advice, which he shortened to "D.I.N." In Paul's words, "you get rid of the hesitation and the doubt, and you just steamroll through." Equally important was the principle that once they sat down to work, they kept going until they had something.

Plenty can be said—and has been—for deadlines as a motivator, especially if you tend to put off creative work. (Fewer people seem to know about a study that found that a stressful deadline can actually lower your creativity for a couple of days post-project, creating what the authors called a "pressure hangover.") However, I think it's important that the D.I.N. approach, as applied by John and Paul, isn't exactly a deadline. Rather, it works like an improv game: it operates on the agreement that whatever happens here and now will be our material for now. That opens the door to spontaneity and play—which of course you can hear in the best of the Lennon-McCartney catalogue—and it yields a fantastic, if paradoxical, combination of urgency and low stakes.

My favorite music theory teacher once referred to Mozart as an essentially improvisational composer, a description that explains both his melodies and the volume of his work. You can recognize that a-ha spontaneity in many of his songs, and if you've ever sung his vocal pieces, you've had a delightful sense of discovering places your voice wants to go anyway. A lot of McCartney melodies feel the same way.

I suppose I'm coming to terms with the fact that I haven't been writing as much music as I'd like. I've made notes and starts, and then put them off, and put them off, and put them off. (There has been a whole lot of life happening, so it isn't entirely my fault, but still.) Earlier this week I pieced together some ideas—a song that has taken so long that bits of it are in three different notebooks—and sat down to "steamroll through." I didn't get it done done, but I made more progress than I have in a while. Perhaps more importantly, it seemed to throw open the door to other work—the opposite of a pressure hangover!—and by last night I had two new demos.

I'm going to find a new place for the postcard.