Perfectly good guitar: on growing up acoustic

About a month ago, I took my dad out to see Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt in concert together at the Michigan Theater.  One of the things I'm most happy to share with my dad is a love of music; it's something he instilled in me when I was very young, and something that we've maintained to this day. We share playlists, put albums on for one another, and generally act like the the music nerds we are.

My dad was never a musician. He's fifty-two now, and my brother and I--with my mother's help--just bought him his first guitar this past Christmas. Despite this, I grew up in a musical household. I have very few memories that aren't colored with one tune or another. When we weren't listening to the B-Sides of handmade tapes or newly purchased CDs, we were listening to my dad whistle his way around the house, occasionally breaking into nonsense Italian for a bit of pseudo-opera. It's not that my dad couldn't have been a musician--he has a lovely voice and a good ear for pitch--but music in our house wasn't homemade, at least not until my brother and I started piano lessons. Instead, we cultivated what could be called the art of the mental mixtape, collecting songs here and there and forming them into the soundtrack of our lives.

The CD collection amassed by my father tended to be unconstrained by genre or time period. You're as likely to find yourself listening to the Brandenburg Concertos as you are to Miles Davis, or The Beatles or Bruce Springsteen or the Be Good Tanyas. I grew up listening to a lot of music, some of which has found its way back to me over the years. My taste has dovetailed with my father's since high school -- after I got my very brief punk phase out of my system -- and I've revisited a lot of the music of my youth (which is not to say it's particularly youthful music) since then. These days, my dad's got a lot of alt-country and Americana on rotation, and I picked up on that right quick. We don't argue about what to listen to in the car -- when it's not the CBC, it's a mix on my iPod or his. They're usually pretty similar anyways.

About a year ago I tried to make an autobiographical playlist. I abandoned the project shortly thereafter, but there are three songs from the list that are the heart and soul of my childhood, and I've collected them here for your enjoyment:

Something Wild - John Hiatt

It's Not Too Late - T-Bone Burnett

The Wall of Death - R.E.M.

If I was going to make one of these, today, it'd have some Blue Rodeo and some Neil Young, some Gillian Welch and Ryan Adams. It would have Melissa McLelland, and Ron Sexsmith, and Sarah Harmer, and Rufus Wainwright. And yes, a little Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt for good measure. We often think of mixtapes as things we share with friends or lovers (and I do that as well), but one of my favourite people to share music, and the pleasures that come with it, is with my Dad. He was the one who taught me that good music comes in many packages, and that the perfect pop song can contain as much enjoyment as the perfect symphony. So consider this a blog post for for him.

Swing Time

Just got back from seeing Black Swan. Thoughts on the film will come in a later post, but I will say that throughout the movie I lamented the fact that, in order to cover up the fact that Natalie Portman is not, in fact, a ballerina, the camera needed to be movie consistently. I long for the days when the dynamism was in the dance, and not in the cinematography.

On that note, I ended up plunking myself in front of the computer to watch two hours of dance videos on YouTube. A veteran fan of So You Think You Can Dance, I spent a while re-watching some of my favourites, but eventually made the transition to the great dance sequences of musicals past. Although completely different in tone the choreography of Black Swan, you can never go wrong with a little Fred and Ginger on a Thursday night:

Atonement and the art of sound design

I'm approximately four years late on this one -- Atonement was honored in 2007 with an Oscar for Best Original score -- but, having watched the movie again recently, I feel compelled to revisit the film with particular attention to sound design. I'm not usually one to spend a lot of time on the technical details of filmmaking; commentary on cinematography is about the limit of my critical capacities. But Atonement was a film that I came out of wanting to grab people by the shoulders and earnestly discuss the soundtrack and sound editing in the hallway of the theatre (I'm under the impression that many people felt the same way about this year's well-recieved The Social Network). So, at risk of revealing the limits of my knowledge of cinema, here goes nothing.

Atonement, director Joe Wright's adaptation of Ian McEwan's 2001 novel of the same name, is, on the surface, a WWII British love story. Briony, an adolescent upper-middle-class girl in the interwar period makes a terrible error in judgement when she accuses her older sister Cecilia's lover (and the household gardener), Robbie, of rape. The consequences of her actions play out over the course of the film, with devastating results for all involved.

But while Atonement works -- quite well, I might add -- as an interwar, class-inflected tragedy, the film's true power is as a metafiction about the power (and impotence) of narrative. The film, like the novel, unfolds in four parts: a tense and lengthy prologue that culminates in the original lie being told; a melancholic intermission that follows Robbie's years at war in France; a third act that details Briony's work in a Red Cross hospital; and an unexpected epilogue that centers on an elderly Briony, now a successful author, discussing her most recent work. It was this epilogue that many viewers found frustrating, as Briony's novel is the story of her sister and Robbie, rewritten to give them the happy ending that they never had (but that the filmgoer had already experienced as the true outcome of their affair). The metafictional aspect of McEwan's novel, as well as Wright's film, is contained within bounds of the title and the epilogue -- Atonement, both the novel and the film, is fundamentally Briony's story, the writing of which is her atonement for her terrible mistake. By remaking the end, Briony attempts to give her Cecilia and Robbie the happiness her actions denied them in life; it is up to the reader, or the viewer, to decide whether or not the power of narrative extends so far into the realm of morality.

So what does all of this have to do with sound design? The first sounds we hear in Atonement are winding and slow taps of a typewriter. Tick tick tick, and the title card appears on a black screen.






The rhythm of the typewriter recurs throughout the entire first act of the film, sometimes buried underneath emphatic and swirling strings and piano, but always the only percussion apparent in the soundtrack. Moreover, the sounds of the typewriter move between the non-diegetic and diegetic modes, flowing easily from the soundtrack to the sound of the typewriter in Briony's bedroom. Every scene where Briony's perspective overwhelms the narrative, the typewriter arrives, either in the soundtrack or in the film itself. It disappears for the length of the second intermission, but re-emerges when the film centers itself once again on Briony, who works on her novel in the middle of the night.

The shift between diegetic and non-diegetic sound is also evident in the most celebrated scene of the film, the lengthy tracking shot of the army at Dunkirk. Here the soundtrack opens up to make space for the singing of a choir of the wounded as the camera pans across them; as it moves on, their voices fade again into the background.





By the time the epilogue rolls around, the viewer is caught up in Cecilia and Robbie's romance. Do they meet again? How and when? Do they live happily ever after? We are convinced that they must; the lovers must have had more than a few stolen moments in a library all those years ago. And the film rewards this interpretation, at first, allowing us a fleeting glimpse of Cecilia caught up in Robbie's arms on the beach. But the elderly Briony puts all of this to the flames with her revelation that this was the ending she invented for her sister; the real Cecilia died in a subway tunnel during the Blitz, and Robbie died of a fever in France. The frustration for the viewer is palpable, but this isn't a case of the rug being pulled out from under us. While McEwan's novel works clearly as metafiction -- a novel about The Novel -- Wright's film requires an alternative mode to tie together the epilogue with the first three acts of the film. While a portion of this is accomplished through expert editing in the last minutes of the film, the vast majority of it is an achievement of sound design. The film is bookended with the sounds of Briony's story; the early and endless clacking of the typewriter, and the late and endless weaving of her narrative of atonement. 

Stuff I've been listening to

It's the end of fall semester, which means burying myself in a pile of books and holing up until I emerge with two literature reviews and a pile of graded papers for my undergrads. While my go-to technique for dealing with the workload in the past has been to sit in front of a computer screen for 48-hours, injecting coffee into my veins and lamenting my poor time management skills, this year I've taken up the musical strategy. This involves picking at least five CDs and having them on non-stop in the background until you stop hearing the lyrics and start doing some work.

In other words, it involves inordinate amounts of time spent making playlists and the self-deception that this process is actually important for my work. Major players in this year's ongoing war between productivity and my sanity include:



Old Man Luedecke

Old Man Ludecke is the stage name of Chris Luedecke, a definitively not-old singer-songwriter and banjo player from Nova Scotia. His albums Hinterland and Proof of Love fit squarely in the Canadian branch of the folk-revivalist movement that includes performers like Gillian Welch and everyone who showed up on the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack. I'm a sucker for the banjo, and a sucker for the Maritimes, but even if I wasn't, Old Man Luedecke would be worth a listen. Check out a video of his song The Rear Guard here.

Old Crow Medicine Show

In keeping with the first recommendation (I really do have a thing for banjo and bands with 'old' in the name, ok?), Old Crow Medicine Show is another folk revival band based out of Nashville. Their songs -- which combine an old-timey sound with an excellent sense of the modern and absurd -- have been rotating on and off my playlists since 2007, but I haven't ben able to get enough of them lately. Their video for Wagon Wheel comes with healthy doses of irony, Americana, and a Dylan-penned chorus.

The Tallest Man on Earth

The Tallest Man on Earth (Sweden's Kristian Matsson) sounds like an early Dylan who decided to abandon the politics in favour of breezy, melodic tunes and cracklingly sharp lyrics. Like almost everyone I listen to on a regular basis, he clearly spent a lot of time taking inspiration from the American South, and, like a lot of folks coming from the outside, seems to have an ear for what exactly it is that makes that music so compelling. Matsson spent the last few years opening for Bon Iver and Jon Vanderslice, so if that's the kind of thing that floats your boat, check out one of my favourite of his tracks, A Field of Birds.

And lest you think I only listen to men who sound like they learned everything they know on the front porch of their grandfather's Kentucky homestead, never fear: I listen to women who sound that way too.

The Be Good Tanyas

The Be Good Tanyas have been my go-to band for times good and bad since my last year of high school, and I haven't gotten tired of them yet. Their song Light Enough to Travel was the soundtrack (along with Basia Bulat's The Pilgriming Vine) to one of the happiest and most important periods of my life. Frazey Ford's unique warble on The Littlest Birds has been my constant companion on roadtrips towards and away from friends and lovers, and Human Thing is still one of my favourite music videos of all time. But its Ootischenia, with its vaguely feminist lyrics (so tear the pages from the family Bible/it came down upon the women for survival) and its earthy, messy rhythms and harmonies that is the soundtrack to my paper-writing at 4:00 am on a Thursday night. If that hasn't convinced you, I don't know what will.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

So I've had this sort of bizarre theory in the works for about five years now. It goes something like this: songs with the word Virginia in the title are generally good. I have no actual desire to know if this is true, but after five years of collecting musical evidence of this phenomenon, I have finally distilled my playlist down to my seven favourite Virginia-related songs. And so, without further ado, I present you with the Virginia EP, complete with cover art:

You can download the mix here: The Virginia EP. Paintings in the cover art via But Does It Float?

Dance break!

One of my favourite ladies singing two of my favourite songs. Mostly posted because 'Mother of Pearl' starts with the line "feminists don't have a sense of humour" and just gets better from there. There's also a great video up from NPR that give some insight into her songwriting process.