My world on the web
This is the story a song written by Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly around a campfire in 1988. What started off as a casually recorded folk number has become what Carmody calls “a kind of cultural love song”: a foundational entry in the Australian songbook.
This year’s NAIDOC Week theme is “For Our Elders”, so RN’s Rudi Bremer went to speak with Kev Carmody at his studio on Kambuwal Country to gather his recollections of From Little Things Big Things Grow as it started, the story of the Gurindji Walk Off that inspired it, and the many different iterations he’s performed and heard in the last thirty years.
Wik and South Sea Islander rapper Ziggy Ramo, Electric Fields vocalist Zaachariaha Fielding from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands and Adelaide producer Michael Ross, and Zillmere State School Year 7 Class of 2003 student Tonii-Lee Betts join Craig Tilmouth to talk about their interpretations of the song that Carmody says “belongs to everyone now”.
From Little Things Big Things Grow, as performed by:
Kev Carmody, Paul Kelly and the Tiddas from the 1993 album Bloodlines
Paul Kelly & the Messengers from the 1991 album Comedy
Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly live at the national memorial service for Gough Whitlam, 2014
The Waifs, from the 2020 album Cannot Buy My Soul: The Songs of Kev Carmody
Electric Fields from the 2020 album Cannot Buy My Soul: The Songs of Kev Carmody
Ziggy Ramo, from the 2021 single From Little Things
Zillmere State School Year 7 Class of 2003
Paul Kelly & Jess Hitchcock live in 2019 on the album People
You also heard Kev Carmody’s song Thou Shalt Not Steal from the 1988 album Pillars of Society, and the opening of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (‘Choral’), performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Wilhelm Furtwängler.
Carmody compares the various covers to “the embers coming off the fire”. This is interesting to consider alongside Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘the translation as a tangent‘. Carmody also says that as a song it “belongs to everyone now.”
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Tribute album to The Go-Betweens
Disc 1 recorded February and March 2007 at Sony BMG Music Studios, East Sydney
Limited edition version featuring bonus disc of live tracks performed at Triple J’s Tribute To The Go-Betweens concert; held at the Tivoli, Brisbane; November 30 2006.
This is a reminder of how good, and unconventional, the Go-Betweens were as songwriters (it would be good if fans of these younger artists went on to discover the originals). Plus, there are good versions here: Patience Hodgson from the Grates has the teenage energy Robert Forster originally displayed on Lee Remick; Youth Group capture the right tone of weariness of Grant McLennan’s Dusty In Here; and Glenn Richards of Augie March gets the edge of anxiety Forster gave to the fabulous House That Jack Kerouac Built.
I felt that the album highlights the legacy left by the band. Some cover albums can highlight how dated the music has become. However, although this albums plays it somewhat safe, it feels like their music could have been released now. Here I am reminded of Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the task of the translator.
The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect [ Intention ] upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original. This is a feature of translation which basically differentiates it from the poet’s work, because the effort of the latter is never directed at the language as such, at its totality, but solely and immediately at specific linguistic contextual aspects. Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one. Not only does the aim of translation differ from that of a literary work-it intends language as a whole, taking an individual work in an alien language as a point of departure but it is a different effort altogether. The intention of the poet is spontaneous, primary, graphic; that of the translator is derivative, [76] ultimate, ideational. For the great motif of integrating many tongues into one true language is at work. This language is one in which the independent sentences, works of literature, critical judgments, will never communicate – for they remain dependent on translation; but in it the languages themselves, supplemented and reconciled in their mode of signification, harmonize.
With this in mind, I wonder what a tribute album might sound like today? Other than Jen Cloher and Laura Jean, I wonder what other artists might be a part of the bill?
Tom Breihan from stereogum.comThe American recordings are a slightly misleading legacy. Johnny Cash wasn’t the mythic poet of darkness that those Rick Rubin records made him out to be — or, rather, he wasn’t just that. Cash was an entertainer. He could be funny and pious and corny. For decades, Cash thrived within the Nashville studio system; he was never an outsider artist. But those American records, American IV in particular, tapped into something powerful and primal about Johnny Cash’s voice and presence. They gave him a different kind of life. And that dark-specter version of Cash might be the one that people remember best today. Maybe that’s not fair to Johnny Cash, but Johnny Cash doesn’t care. He’s dead, and his legacy was secure long before American IV. In some of his last months on earth, Cash gave the world a profound meditation on loss and mortality, and even if the album only captures one side of Cash, that one side is heavier than heaven.
On the other side of such covers is how the original artists appreciated the covers. I find Trent Reznor’s response pretty funny:
When Reznor first heard Cash’s version, he still wasn’t sure what to think: “It felt like I was watching my girlfriend fuck somebody else.” (Trent Reznor isn’t always articulate.) But when Reznor saw Mark Romanek’s video for Cash’s “Hurt,” he immediately understood that “Hurt” now belonged to someone else.
Mark from prettymuchpop.comIs re-playing or re-recording a song written and performed by someone else an act of love or predation?
Mark is joined by Too Much Joy’s Tim Quirk, the Gig Gab Podcast’s Dave Hamilton, and the author of A Philosophy of Cover Songs Prof. P.D. Magnus to talk about different types of and purposes for covers, look a little at the history, share favorites, and more.
For more, visit prettymuchpop.com. Hear bonus content at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by subscribing via Apple Podcasts to the Mark Lintertainment Channel.
Sponsors: Find a top-rated doctor by visiting ZocDoc.com/PMP and downloading the free ZocDoc app. Check your rate for a loan at upstart.com/PRETTY.
Music from your past, present and future
Music is different from all other artforms because it alone is an expression of itself rather than something else. Notes and melodies, unlike phrases and colors, do not try to represent anything but can instead be appreciated simply for what they are. Rather than representing the Will through indirect means as depictions of its real-world manifestations, Schopenhauer believed music was a direct manifestation of the Will itself.
11 track album
5 track album
Pondering how Tom Waits seemingly created the perfect tune for other people to sing. Major rock stars were fighting with one another to cover “Downtown Train.”
“‘Downtown Train’ bought Tom Waits a swimming pool,” Stewart told Ultimate Classic Rock in 2013 as he was about to release a new album. “And ‘Picture in a Frame’ will pay for a new roof on his house. Really, I can’t say enough about Tom—he has such great imagery, which is an area in which I could do a bit better.”
A close cousin of sampling, interpolation is less of a direct copy-paste of a song and more the borrowing of melodies and lyrics to create a new tune that sounds… wow, just so familiar.
Appearing on Radio.com’s New Arrivals show (via Uproxx), St. Vincent explained that she was “dead set” on creating a “heavy record” as the follow-up to 2017’s ‘Masseduction’. “Like just heavy the whole time – like, ‘Hey kids, you like Tool? Well, you’ll love the St. Vincent record’, you know?” she said.
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I also am intrigued if Jack Antonoff had an part to play in this recording or if St. Vincent simply self-produced it?
Mailbag time! We’ve got listener questions about Madonna earworms, National piano parts, Breath of the Wild music, online vocal teachers, the French horn, The L…
This reminds me of a conversation between Annie Clark and the late Andy Gill about structured music and free-form music. I am also reminded of my experience of seeing Aphex Twin and the misconstrued expectation that there would be any semblance of the familiar. I guess if you want a particular sound, go listen to the historical record, whereas if you would like a conversation, see the performance?
Everyone who’s had to dress up as a historical figure for a school project knows that history is just a bit more understandable through reenactment, whether it’s through a biopic, a famous site where people in period costumes walk visitors through the past, or a battlefield reenactment. It also …
Fearless (Taylor’s Version) is the first re-recorded album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on April 9, 2021, through Republic Records. It is a re-recording of Swift’s second studio album, Fearless (2008), and the first of six re-recorded albums Swift plans to release, following the dispute regarding ownership of the masters to her first six studio albums.
In some respects the new tracks, produced by Antonoff and Dessner, feel like a continuation of the work done on Folklore and Evermore.
Dessner and Antonoff’s production believably reframes these Fearless outtakes as folklore deep cuts. It’s proof of how thin the line between a twilit country radio ballad and shimmery indie-tinged folk-rock can be.
Ben Thompson compares the exercise with what Dave Chappelle did when he asked them to not wqtch his show. Thompson wonders if she will or even needs to remake any more of her albums.
It’s easy to see how this plays out going forward: Swift probably doesn’t even have to remake another album; she has demonstrated the willingness and capability to remake her old records, and her fans will do the rest. It will behoove Shamrock Capital, the current owner of Swift’s masters, to buy-out Braun’s share of future upside and make a deal with Swift, because Swift, granted the power to go direct to fans and make her case, can in fact “change history, facts, and re-frame any story [she] want[s] to fit with any narrative [she] wish[es].”
While this popularity may expose classical music fans to the sometimes overwhelming, occasionally terrorizing music of Aphex Twin, the exchange also flows the other way. “It’s a gateway to Debussy, or some of the other amazing piano pieces that are out there,” said Reitzell, the music supervisor. “If you like that piece, man, I’ve got 30 more for you. That is the most beautiful thing about music. That song will probably outlive Richard’s entire catalog in a way.”
But Moran hears an even more fundamental reason modern listeners have turned a haunting piano piece with minimalist influences into a digital era phenomenon. Before our interview, she transcribed “Avril 14th” again to refamiliarize herself with it. Holding up the piece of paper, she noted its chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure. “Honestly,” she said, “this is like a pop song to me.”
ᔥ in Of portals and pansies ()
I grew up with The Living End’s cover:
I wonder if it is one of those great songs where every generation has its own translation or cover?
The history of the great works of art tells us about their antecedents, their realization in the age of the artist, their potentially eternal afterlife in succeeding generations. Where this last manifests itself, it is called fame. [71] Translations that are more than transmissions of subject matter come into being when in the course of its survival a work has reached the age of its fame. Contrary, therefore, to the claims of bad translators, such translations do not so much serve the work as owe their existence to it. The life of the originals attains eh~ to its ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering.
The re-recording, which has already topped the U.S. iTunes chart, certainly marks another instance of pop culture’s obsession with nostalgia paying off. Many similar industry efforts—TV reboots, extensions of film franchises, covers of childhood favorites—service fans through cameos and casual references without meaningfully considering the original work’s impact. But Swift, through her stronger vocals, engages with her younger self, scrutinizing her lyrics. She joins in on the act of being a Taylor Swift fan.
For many music producers, a loop is often the starting point of a new composition. But how can you give a loop-based composition structure, add tension and release, and turn it into a performance? In this Ableton artist documentary we meet Binkbeats, a music-maker whose whole approach has grown out of answering these questions.
I came upon this video (and artist) while looking for different covers of Aphex Twin. His unravelling of Windowlicker is amazing in the way he jumps from one instrument to another like an orchestra of one.
In a video for Ableton, he unpacks his live setup. This includes his use of Max for Live to create aspects of automation.
This music reminds me of Kawehi.
From Bandcamp Fridays to Verzuz battles, these were our silver linings from a strange, stuck year in music.