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Author Topic: Musicians Talking About and To Other Musicians  (Read 763 times)
MugginsXO
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« on: October 29, 2014, 10:09:55 AM »

This is something that fascinates and entertains me: musicians you like or admire talking about other musicians you like or admire. It is particularly good when it is someone appreciating/criticising/collaborating with someone who you NEVER would have expected them to know, let alone actively like.

Here are some obvious but pleasing ones and not so obvious and pleasing ones.

A lot of folks will no doubt be aware of this one but it is still one of my favourite examples of two artists who really have a lot more in common than many people on either side of the genre divide can see. It is just so right that Lou Reed, someone who made many provocative things and made many provocative statements should appreciate Kanye West. It is a lovely surprise too when an older musician actually gives a sh*t about new music. Here is someone who has their big fat laurels to live off of and they have that established fan base - many of whom NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER want to hear anything new out of them again – and yet they haven’t succumbed to the lie that they were the last person making “real” music. A lot of musicians and their fans could learn something from this piece.

“Very often, he’ll have this very monotonous section going and then, suddenly —“BAP! BAP! BAP! BAP!” — he disrupts the whole thing and we’re on to something new that’s absolutely incredible.  That’s architecture, that’s structure — this guy is seriously smart.  He keeps unbalancing you.  He’ll pile on all this sound and then suddenly pull it away, all the way to complete silence, and then there’s a scream or a beautiful melody, right there in your face.  That’s what I call a sucker punch.

He seems to have insinuated in a recent New York Times interview that My Beautiful Dark, Twisted Fantasy was to make up for stupid sh*t he’d done.  And now, with this album, it’s “Now that you like me, I’m going to make you unlike me.”  It’s a dare.  It’s braggadoccio.  Axl Rose has done that too, lots of people have.  “I Am a God” — I mean, with a song title like that, he’s just begging people to attack him.
But why he starts the album off with that typical synth buzzsaw sound is beyond me, but what a sound it is, all gussied up and processed.  I can’t figure out why he would do that.  It’s like farting.  It’s another dare — I dare you to like this.  Very perverse.
Still, I have never thought of music as a challenge — you always figure, the audience is at least as smart as you are.  You do this because you like it, you think what you’re making is beautiful.  And if you think it’s beautiful, maybe they’ll think it’s beautiful.  When I did Metal Machine Music, New York Times critic John Rockwell said, “This is really challenging.”  I never thought of it like that.  I thought of it like, “Wow, if you like guitars, this is pure guitar, from beginning to end, in all its variations.  And you’re not stuck to one beat.”  That’s what I thought.  Not, “I’m going to challenge you to listen to something I made.”  I don’t think West means that for a second, either.  You make stuff because it’s what you do and you love it.”
 http://thetalkhouse.com/music/talks/lou-reed-of-the-velvet-underground-talks-kanye-wests-yeezus/

Here is another favourite, Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy) talks to R. Kelly. What I like most about when musicians get together is that it sometimes results in removal of a lot of the music interviewer arse/vagaries around “where did you get the inspiration for that song?” The answer is always God. ALWAYS. With musicians talking you can get some real specifics about the writing/recording process.

“OLDHAM: Just out of curiosity, what time of day do you like to record? At night?
KELLY: Fifty o’ clock.
OLDHAM: [laughs] Is that right?
KELLY: Yeah. It’s ridiculous, man. I get interrupted in my sleep all the time. You know, “Lost in Your Love”—I was going to sleep on my living room couch and [sings] “I want to bring love songs back to the radio . . . ” came in my head and I was awakened. So I’d go down to the studio, and when I go down to the studio, I be in there, you know, I don’t know what time it is. It’s pretty much like Vegas in there, you know? Like, whatever.
OLDHAM: Is there someone waiting there in the studio to push record? Or do you go in, push record yourself, and take notes and things like that?
KELLY: Well, my engineers kind of switch shifts like bus drivers, you know?
OLDHAM: So there’s somebody there.
KELLY: Yeah, there’s always somebody there, and if they happen to not be there, which happens every now and then, I do have a recorder. I got little Dictaphones all over my house. But I can’t hold the Dictaphone, because if I hold it, I will never hear nothing. So I have to pretty much stash them in places and then I have to go get them. That’s what the music does to me.”
http://www.interviewmagazine.com/music/r-kelly/

This isn’t exactly a surprise but it was nice to hear The Weeknd talk about Michael Jackson, Prince and R. Kelly being his three biggest vocal influences. Almost anyone anywhere near R&B/Soul/Pop would be likely to say the same thing but it’s an interesting reminder of how the influence of these three is still greatly impacting new music. 

“It’s that balance of high and low. To start a song off, “She pops that p*ssy on a Monday.” Where is this going from there?

I’m a huge fan of R. Kelly’s. He’s a musical genius, and probably the most prolific artist of the generation before mine. Some of the lines he says, if you say them in a normal voice, it’s the most disgusting thing you could say to somebody. But I can say “p*ssy-ass nigga” in the most elegant and sexiest way ever, and it’s accepted. If I can get away with singing that, I’m doing something right.
All that ignorance on my records—“When she put it in her mouth, she can’t seem to reach my…”—that’s me paying homage to R. Kelly, and even Prince to a certain extent. The things R. Kelly was saying were crazy. You can say it now and it’s nothing, but back then you couldn’t.”
“The only thing R&B about my sh*t is the style of singing. My inspiration is R. Kelly, Michael Jackson, and Prince, for the vocals anyway. My production and songwriting, and the environment around those vocals are not inspired by R&B at all.”
http://www.complex.com/music/2013/07/weeknd-interview-cover-story/page/2


Here is How To Dress Well talking about his influences and in particular the impact of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope on his music. I particularly like that he gives Mariah Carey her due. 

“I mean I’m into ‘80s and ‘90s stuff but to be fair I’m more into like 2000s and contemporary stuff too, just cause it’s more fresh in my mind. There’s some stuff from the ‘90s which I still go to all the time, like Babyface and Maxwell’s Unplugged record, and stuff like that.
"But on the other hand I’m much more of like a Memoirs of An Imperfect Angel guy than a Butterfly Mariah guy. I like her later stuff, especially that [Memoirs of An Imperfect Angel] record because she’s working with The-Dream and I think Tricky Stewart is the producer on that record too. I always post my favorite records of the year on my blog, and if you look at the sh*t that I’ve fallen in love with over the years it’s like equal doses The-Dream, SpaceGhostPurrp, and stuff like that, and Mount Eerie, and Oneohtrix Point Never. I’m not invested on the one hand in pop music and R&B, and on the other hand experimental music—I just love sentimental, affectively charged music in whatever shape.
It might be some string quartet music one day, some Ligeti piano experimentation the next day, like “Hate You” on repeat like all day long. It’s just I love music for this sentimental charge it can have, this affective charge it has when it’s really real. Same thing for like “f*** This Industry” by Waka Flocka [Flame], like when I put that on my headphones I’m like ‘f*** this song is so heavy-duty.’ It’s got a real emotional tenor to me that makes it art period. It’s just about trusting myself and being like I think I have good taste, I think I’m dialed in on something in music, which is something emotionally resonant to me. So if I hear it in whatever—if I hear it in Jimmy Eat World, I’m gonna be like ‘I love this song.’”
I think [I’m influenced by ‘90s music] just cause that’s my backbone. As a little kid that’s all I listened to. It was like, why would I listen to whatever–I don’t even know what rock was popular. I was listening to “I Will Always Love You” single by Whitney. I think I was a little too young to be into grunge. Like it just didn’t touch me at all. At that time I was 5 and I was listening to Tevin Campbell. That just was what was up for me emotionally.
I think that a lot of the ‘90s influenced stuff was just cause of when I was born and what my parents were listening to as well. My dad listens exclusively to free jazz and experimental jazz, and my mom listens to exclusively like, when I was a little boy it was always Smokey Robinson, and Janet and Michael Jackson, Paula Abdul. And this was the stuff that my mom was dancing and singing to in the house, so I just followed their lead on that sh*t. I mean my dad hates The Beatles. This is something that I remember at a very young age, him being like ‘Oh The Beatles suck.’”

“The main thing I took from her is sort of this self-trust, self-care, emotional honesty thing. Velvet Rope is an amazing example. She set such an example for trusting yourself, and following that intuition wherever it takes you. She could’ve made an entire record of “Together Again”’s—eleven of those. But she made a fucking sprawling masterpiece with a song from every genre, and it works. Because you see her discerning taste in every single track, and every single track, and every single choice, every musical instrument. Some songs her voice is all distorted, and in other songs it’s so close to the mic that it sounds like she’s singing in your ear—you can hear her lip-smacking and sh*t. It’s a total statement, This is me kind of record. And I like writing different kinds of songs.
 
Velvet Rope to me became a shining light of how to make an album that’s totally true to yourself, and is about taking proper care of yourself, and paying attention to your spirit, and trusting that it’ll all hang together even if there’s all different kinds of vibes on the record.
 
“Total Loss is a bunch of different kinds of songs on it. I was like, ‘sh*t, how do I make this record?’ Do I pick one and stick with it and write all those? No, that would be truncating this sense I have that all these songs are special and valuable. And so that album [Velvet Rope] to me became a shining light of how to make an album that’s totally true to yourself, and is about taking proper care of yourself, and paying attention to your spirit, and trusting that it’ll all hang together even if there’s all different kinds of vibes on the record. And for me, “Together Again” is infinitely more special because it’s this little gem on that otherwise very different record. If it were a whole record of “Together Again”’s, I’d probably love the song but I don’t know if in the same way.
“I’ve loved the Velvet Rope since it came out. It’s been one of my favorite records for many years. I think when I started working on Total Loss and seeing like sh*t, this fits together for me in the same way that I felt like the Velvet Rope fit together. And I kind of learned over the course of making my record, and really attentively listening to Janet’s record, that it had more of an influence on me that I had even realized. So like, it’s really funny to learn through making a record that I’ve had this record playing in the back of my mind for a decade. I mean there’s some sh*t on the Velvet Rope that’s absolutely next-level—still today. Untouchable.”

http://www.complex.com/music/2012/09/who-is-how-to-dress-well/the-influence-of-janet-jacksons-the-velvet-rope-on-the-album

So does anyone else have some good/illuminating interviews or chat between one musician about another?
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