Talking about music is like dancing about architecture… Rotating Header Image

March, 2006:

Falling in love again

Mar 31st, 2006
by Michael Krahn.
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I told Anne Marie this weekend that I think I’m falling in love with music again. With eyebrows raised she said “What’s that going to look like?”

I’m not sure.

This is mostly because of the guys at Paste. I’m a subsciber to the magazine but ironically its not the magazine that is revitalizing my interest in music. I pay for the magazine but its something Paste gives out for free that is making the difference – its their Podcast.

I think Elvis Costello was pretty smart when he said : “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture – it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.” Well, I do enjoy reading things written about music, but usually only about artists I’m familiar with. But I am never going to get familiar with an artist’s music reading about them. The writer can throw in as many adjectives as he wants but eventually its not even dancing about architecture anymore – its more like flailing.

This where the podcast is pretty handy. Things are happening in “real time” and there is less editing. During a interview conversation, you can’t chop it up in bits the way you can the notes from that interview, isolating the killer quotes that will be highlighted on the page as an enticement to the reader to read the rest of the piece. While you might think this would lead to a lot of boring stretches, it’s the humanity of a conversation that shines through. By giving me the whole conversation, I get to decide what the important parts are.

I have actually wanted to sit down lately and write some songs. But then the girls are sleeping and I don’t want to wake them up – or my hockey pool – okay pools – need tending and I neglect the writing again. I think I might come at it a bit differently now than I did the last time I wrote songs regularly.

Maybe its the spring – but I didn’t feel this way last spring. Maybe its the new Brindley Brothers album I’ve been listening to. I have been listening to Lee Morgan’s cool jazz record “The Sidewinder” every week now for about a month and Rachmaninov’s complete cello and piano works too. My tastes are certainly changing; I’d like to think there has been a fair bit of refinement going on unbeknownst to me.
The best thing going at the moment is Josh Ritter‘s “The Animal Years” – that and Rhett Miller’s “The Believer”. Rouse for substance and Miller for fun.

American Idolatry

Mar 23rd, 2006
by Michael Krahn.
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Is there anyone in the room who doesn’t want to be famous?

I was driving to work this morning listening to the CBC as I always do.  But when the conversation turned to what exactly pigs are being fed these days (it turns out that the animated version of “Charolette’s Web” is perpetuating the ugly rumor that pigs eat “slop”) I set out to discover what else was on the dial.  First stop: the local EZ rock station.

[Most of you just read that as "easy rock".  I will digress for a moment here to mention that any Canadian station that sells itself as one that plays the brand of easy listening that this station does should really just break the bank on the marketing budget and use the full version of the word "easy" – or even "eazy" if you must – because anyone who has seen the Canadian version of Sesame Street knows that an E followed by a Z is pronounced "E-Zed".]

I was immediately confronted with a live-sounding, breathy, and over-emotive version of Cash’s “I Walk The Line”.  It was bad – really bad.  Off tune, too slow.  So I’m expecting that this is the station’s gag for the morning – making fun of someone’s bad version of a good song.  Imagine my horror when the DJs cut in with “Wasn’t that awesome?!”

It turns out it was a clip from this week’s American Idol.  Is there no low to which these people will not sink?

People who know that I am a singer and a songwriter ask me why I don’t try out for American/Canadian Idol.  Well, quite simply, it is the antithesis of true artistry.  The people who run these shows are looking for the next beautiful and pliable person that is going to make them a lot of money.  Essentially, when you go onto a show like this you are competing to become the mascot of a corporation.  That’s fine if you’re into that sort of thing but I don’t imagine they’re ever going to find the next Cash, Dylan, or Joni Mitchell by way of one of the contests.

You might say “who cares?” and you would be implying that nobody does.  And I might agree with you if I didn’t know a group of guys who run a magazine called Paste that covers artists who would never and could never have been found by a reality TV show.  And they are selling a lot of magazines.

But those reasons above might just be my faux artistic reasons that hide a few more practical reasons such as:
1. My hairline is receding
2. I write and sing my own songs
3. I don’t wear tight pants

“We all wanna be big, big stars but we’ve got different reasons for that” (Duritz).

I want to be famous as much as any performer, author or athlete does – but there are a lot of things I’m not willing to do to get there.