The Christmas season is the perfect time to talk about ideals vs. reality, for surely there's no season in popular culture where we embrace the Platonic ideal of peace on earth and goodwill to everyone more than the winter holidays. (And I say "winter holidays" not just 'cause I'm woke, but because the idealized good cheer of the Christmas season now really permeates from mid-October onward.)
This is the first of two holiday songs I've composed for this season and both are interrelated. This one is called "Artificial Christmas" -- not only to point out that the ideals we strive for can be too easily to reduced to signs and symbols and the plots of Hallmark movies, but also because the song itself is written based on prompts from the popular A.I. program ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of 10 popular holiday/Christmas tropes, and then asked it weave those ten tropes into a Christmas song. The results were -- as usual -- mixed. (ChatGPT seems to have real problems with meter; the lines usually rhyme, but you can't necessarily fit all the words into the right number of notes.) So, I took what ChatGPT had written and wrote my own song around it. Your goal is guess which parts are written by a human and which by a computer!
Likewise, the images are all A.I.-generated, using prompts like "Christmas village," "Thomas Kinkade," and "Snow globe."
Merry holidays.
Week #38 of the "53 Songs" project is another holiday number and closely related to the previous week's entry ("Artificial Christmas": https://youtu.be/4FzfbKT7W8I).
This week, I asked the popular A.I. program ChatGPT to give me 50 words or phrases associated with the holidays. I then tried to weave as many of them as possible into this number. I think it's a keen reflection of how certain words and symbols have become shorthand for all we hold dear during the holiday season. The video -- also, as usual, A.I. created -- features various designs for wrapping paper that include the same lyric prompts.
Ho ho ho, indeed.
This week's song is based on Act V, Scene 1, of Hamlet -- my all-time favorite play. This is the scene where the gravediggers are excavating Ophelia's grave and keep stumbling upon the skulls of previously buried folks, including Yorick, the king's former fool.
The gravedigger sings a little ditty while he works:
"A pick-axe, and a spade, a spade,
For and a shrouding sheet:
O, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet."
It turns out Shakespeare didn't write this. It's lifted from a poem called "The Aged Lover Renounceth Love," that was popular in the Elizabethan era. The original lines are:
"A pickaxe and a spade,
And eke a shrouding sheet,
A house of clay: A house of clay for to be made
For such a guest most meet."
As you can see, the gravedigger doesn't get the lyrics quite right, so I took the liberty of altering it even further for my waltz. Maybe this will go in the Hamlet opera* I keep threatening to write.
Enjoy!
* by opera, I mean "sung-through musical," but that doesn't sound grave enough for Hamlet, if you'll excuse the pun.
Week #40, "Spruce Head: 1884," is a meditation on fog, a common occurrence off the coast of Maine.
It begins with a bassoon and double bass mimicking the sound of a foghorn, followed by a motif that is intended to evoke an image of a row of 19th-century schooners working their way through Penobscot Bay in the pea-soup fog.
For a brief moment in the middle of the piece, the tune turns slightly more cheerful -- perhaps that fog is lifting? -- before returning to the original motif. If you are familiar with foggy Maine days, you know that some days the fog gives you false hope that it will dissipate before coming back with a vengeance.
Song #41 in my "53 Weeks" project is dedicated to my late friend Larry John. Larry and I used to talk about movies quite a bit. He loved going to see films on the big screen -- even the bad ones -- and took particularly delight in the convoluted logic that filmmakers sometimes have to take to rescue their characters from perilous situations.
So, on one level this song is about the long history in books and movies (beginning with Edison films, featured in this video) of plot twists. But it's also a dance song -- literally a twist. Did you know that between 1959 and 1964 there were at least 75 different variations on the the Twist? Has there ever been a dance craze that's inspired so much music?
Most people know the famous songs -- Chubby Checker's "The Twist," (originally by Hank Ballard), The Isley Brothers' "Twist and Shout" (later covered by the Beatles), the "Peppermint Twist" and so many more. But take a deep dive into the canon and you'll find twist songs about everything: "Transylvania Twist," "Twistin' in the Jungle," "Twistin' at the Waldorf" (b/w "Mama Don't Allow No Twistin' Here")...the list goes on and on. My version is inspired by all these plus the Traveling Wilburys and 1980s-era Bob Dylan in general.
[For a compilation of some great twist songs, go to https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO79HX00z8KXK43ZYka02WQWiXtWWchE-&si=52qVr_2hVxfqwl-_)
This is the oldest original song in my repertoire, written over thirty years ago for my wife (then girlfriend) when we were living half a world apart from each other. I normally play it on the acoustic guitar, but since it was originally written to the chord progression of Pachalbel's Canon in D Major, I thought I would release this new version using a string quartet as the only acommpaniment. As per my usual m.o., the images in the video are created using generative A.I., which does some pretty nifty watercolors but still can't seem to get the hang of faces, which are more cartoon-like than I think an actual watercolorist would make them.
This piece is heavily inspired by the work of John Cage and the Fluxus movement. Like many of Cage's works, this composition is different every time it is created, and notation for this piece isn't sheet music, it's a set of instructions, as follows:
1) Take Pachalbel's Canon in D Major and select random bars based on how much their waveforms appeal to you. Do this without listening to the music. 2) Reverse some of those clips so that they play backwards 3) Layer these frontward and backward clips on top of each other, switching at random intervals. Again, use the felicity of the waveforms as your guide. 4) End after exactly 4 minutes and 0 seconds.
You may create this piece yourself with a simple DAW and a download of Pachalbel's Canon. I'd love to hear yours.
The video is also somewhat random. First, I asked a generative A.I. program to give me 15 words that described Pachalbel's Canon. What I got back was:
I then asked an A.I. art program to create images that incorporated those 15 words. I took the results and dropped them into the video in (mostly) random order, sometimes with (mostly) random video effects applied.
Shangri-La is a meditative piece based around Middle Eastern instruments (primarily the oud) and some Asian strings. It is recorded entirely on a single key and entirely from samples/loops (except for the vocals). I was inspired, in part, by Pete Townshend's original instrumental loops for the song "Baba O'Riley" from the album "Who's Next." (There a treasure trove of new material that been released recently by Townshend as part of the "Who's Next"/Lifehouse project archive and if you are fan of the band, you should totally check it out.)
That the lyrics reference the Three Wise Men and the song comes out at Christmas is, I think, entirely a coincidence.
This song started out as a sketch for a longer piece -- for which I was going to write some lyrics -- but as I was working on the backing track, I decided I preferred it as an instrumental.
The interplay between guitar and keyboard makes me think of the band Ivy, one of the many projects of the late Adam Schlesinger. Adam died of COVID at the very beginning of the pandemic and the world was robbed of a true music genius. His work with Ivy, Fountains of Wayne, on the TV show "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," and in so many places is amazing and if you aren't familiar with his oeuvre, it's totally worth seeking out.
The video, released just as we entered 2024 -- and the countdown to the final songs in this project -- is, appropriately, a fireworks display with some digital augmentation.
Like (seemingly) everyone else, when I heard that F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby" was entering the public domain I set to work writing a musical adaptation. I haven't progressed very far (though a different Gatsby-inspired work *is* nearing completion), but I did write a couple of songs, including this one.
My Gatsby musical is very meta: it isn't a straight adaptation, but rather tells the story of a group of people who are attempting to write a Gatsby musical. This song is sung by the two lead male characters who are vying to be Gatsby if they ever get to mount the show they're concocting.
Musically, the song is inspired by many different composers -- many of which I can no longer recall -- but as I was recording it, I was reminded a little bit of Help!/Rubber Soul-era George Harrison, so I double-tracked the vocal in the bridge to sound more like The Beatles.
The video, meanwhile, is pretty straightforward. As usual, the images are created via A.I. I used the lyrics as prompts, only tweaking them a little, and asked the computer to paint each scene in the style of a Wyeth painting. I meant N.C., but the computer thought I meant Andrew. Fair enough.
This week's song is influenced a lot by Paul Simon, a little bit by Talking Heads, and I'm not sure what else is in the mixture.
I had the first verse knocking around in my head for a few months, but didn't quite know what shape the song would take until I actually sat down in the studio to record it. I finished up the lyrics one morning, wrote the basic rhythm track that afternoon, and then overdubbed the guitars and loops until I achieved the sound I was looking for.
The sound is most directly influenced by my three favorite Paul Simon LP's, The Rhythm of the Saints, Hearts and Bones, and So Beautiful or So What. (It says something about Mr. Simon's prodigious output that his most famous solo album, Graceland, isn't even in my top three.)
The video combines paintings of famous saints with A.I.-generated stained-glass windows that fit (mostly) with the lyrics. The ability of generative A.I. to create what I want has improved by leaps and bounds over the past 47 weeks, but it's still maddening sometimes how it misinterprets some of the prompts.
Way back in Week no. 23 of the "53 Weeks" project, I wrote a song called "Morning / Present / Evening," the final verse of which references "a tape in the back of my desk drawer" that I was too afraid to play.
This was a real cassette of mine, recorded when I was 17 years old, that featured all-original compositions. The titles of some songs seemed very familiar and others didn't ring a single bell all these years later.
Well, I finally screwed up the courage to digitize the tape and decided to re-record what is probably most well-known song from that era, "I Am a Soldier."
But here's the twist.
Using a very similar A.I. program to the one Peter Jackson used to create the "new" Beatles single, "Now and Then," I took a recording of 17-year-old me singing "I Am a Soldier," stripped the vocal away from the back track, and inserted that into my new recording. So, on verses two and three of this song, middle-aged me is performing a duet with high school me.
The video -- A.I. generated, as usual -- is abstract minimalist takes on the lyrics. Some are great -- some are head-scratchers.
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