👂🏻sounds like: Bill Callahan, thoughts, feelings, teaching, listening, carving, leaving, more silence
🌊 riding for the feeling is the fastest way to reach the shore 🌊
Some of my work is teaching music and leading music workshops, and something that comes up again and again is a particular kind of creative block in students and participants: the idea that there is a correct answer for which note or chord comes next, and if they don’t choose the correct one according to the rules of music theory, then their music will be somehow wrong or bad.
Recently I’ve taken to challenging this with a grammar comparison. We learn to speak far before we learn anything about grammar, and we know instinctively which order to put words in, so why should music be any different?
It’s always a good thing to have more words to describe and communicate your own experience of music with other people. But a lot of times the understanding is already there, and it’s enough to let your ears and your instincts inform what chord should come next. You can learn the right words afterwards. There will be plenty of answers for what chord comes next in theory, but if your ears don’t like the end result, what’s the point?
I’ve been thinking about this in particular around the music of Bill Callahan, the artist formerly known as Smog. In ‘From The Rivers To The Ocean’, which I quoted in my newsletter about Bangalore, he says:
When you were blind
You'd touch things for their shape
Have faith in wordless knowledge
Have faith in wordless knowledge
Well, I can tell you about the river
Or we could just get in
The first time I first heard Bill Callahan was this song on Guy Garvey’s 6Music radio show:
Whether or not there is any type of god
I'm not supposed to say
And today
I don't really care
God is a word
And the argument ends there
Oh do I feel like the mother of the world
With two children
Oh do I feel like the mother of the world
With two children fighting
Why do some pieces of music resonate with me and others don’t? Why did I like this one in particular? I could tell you it’s because I thought the production was interesting, or I liked the mysterious lyrics (He’s not supposed to say? What does that mean?) or I liked his gravelly voice, but all these would be me grasping at straws to try to put words to something I felt immediately before I’d really thought about it. Wordless knowledge goes into writing music, and wordless knowledge also goes into listening to and appreciating it.
Here’s another one of his songs, ‘Riding For The Feeling’:
It's never easy to say goodbye
To the faces
So rarely do we see another one
So close and so long
I asked the room if I'd said enough
No one really answered
They just said, "Don't go, don't go, don't go don't go, don't go"
Well all this leaving is never ending
I kept hoping for one more question
Or for someone to say
"Who do you think you are?"
So I could tell them
What’s he talking about? What situations are there in which someone has to say a difficult goodbye to faces they’ve seen so close, and so long? The first time I heard it, I thought it might be a musician on tour. Emily said it sounded like leaving the pub. Elena said it reminded her of a funeral. In an interview with Alex Denny, Callahan gives his inspiration for the song:
[…] a lecturer who realises he hasn’t in all of his teaching mentioned the really important thing […] I just wanted to write from the perspective of a college professor or something — some guy who goes around giving talks.
This is a familiar experience for me–the Max/MSP class I teach ended this month, and I found myself once again standing in front of a group I’d seen on a regular basis, in this case for three hours weekly over twelve weeks, and wondering what the best thing to say to them was, and how much of a big deal it should be.
The fourth verse of the song describes leaving in a scientific, clinical way, comparing it to natural, inevitable processes:
With intensity, the drop evaporates by law
In conclusion, leaving is easy
When you've got some place you need to be
I'm giving up this gig for another season
In contrast, the next verse has the singer suddenly realise they had not discussed any of the human aspects of leaving, the ones that are harder to boil down into a formula:
I realised I had said very little about ways or wheels
Or riding for the feeling
Riding for the feeling
Is the fastest way to reach the shore
On the one hand: the technical, theoretical, mechanical elements of a subject. On the other hand: how the thing feels, the human elements of a topic, the parts you can only experience by doing, the reasons people engage with a topic at all. It can be hard to strike a balance. I tend to veer a bit too hard towards the latter, in the belief that getting people to feel involved and enthusiastic about a topic is the fastest way to get people enthusiastic enough to learn the other parts. Though I can’t endorse the many terrible safeguarding violations committed by Jack Black’s character in School of Rock, he knew how to engage a music class. On the other hand, I doubt any of them passed GCSE Music.
Bill Callahan has this to say about his own songwriting:
Any talk of "craft" makes me laugh. My music looks outward, it does not gaze upon itself in admiration. Artisanal is for Cheesemakers. I don't know anything about music theory. Every time I approach my guitar it's like the first time. There's no craft in that. Although I do often think of working out a guitar part as "carving." There is the huge block of silence and you carve little bits out of it by making sound.
The year is 1952
John Cage sits on the front row of a packed Maverick Concert Hall
The audience wait with baited breath for the premiere of Cage’s new piece, 4’33”
David Tudor enters, walks over to the piano, and ceremoniously closes the lid, marking the beginning of the piece
For a while, all that can be heard is the rustling of the wind outside the concert hall. The audience stare on, some thoughtful, some confused
Until–who is that on the back row, suddenly on his feet, shredding through the silence with history’s most incredible guitar solo?
Yes! It’s Bill Callahan, who has invented time travel in search of history’s most exciting silences for his new album Carvings.
John Cage smiles to himself, recognising music history in the making
Trying to analyse why you like a piece of music feels to me more like dream interpretation than anything else. The reason something resonates with you might be buried deep in the subconscious, where the wordless knowledge is. I liked ‘Riding For The Feeling’ long before I found out I had any kind of literal connection to its subject matter. But maybe that’s like when you have a recurring dream about a massive dog, and you can spend hours speculating about why the dog keeps popping up, and one day it suddenly hits you that the dog is actually e.g. your primary school headteacher, and even then you can’t be sure that’s what the dog represents. Maybe you just really like dogs, or there’s a dog barking outside most nights when you’re asleep but never loud enough to wake you up. Know what I mean? Alright never mind
What if I had stood there at the end
And said again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again
In answer to every question
Riding for the feeling, riding for the feeling, riding for the feeling
Riding for the feeling, riding for the feeling, riding for the feeling
Riding for the riding, for the riding, and for the ride
Riding for the feeling, riding for the feeling, riding for the feeling
Would that have been a suitable goodbye?
Great question Bill. I do not think it would have been a suitable goodbye, I think it would have annoyed and confused my class. But I think the question is a good one!
📆 Upcoming Events
🦛 Hippo
📍 The Peer Hat, Manchester
📆 July 1st
Super excited to be supporting Garden Centre and Leatherhead with Hippo on July 1st! We’ve been in the studio recording this month, so stay tuned for indie pop bangers coming your way.
more info here
🤖 Climateprov
📍 LalaLand Festival, Amsterdam
📆 July 8th and 9th
ClimateProv is a project I got involved with at FutureFantastic festival in Bangalore. We play improv games with prompts generated by both the audience and AI, with me improvising the music alongside it. We’re performing at LaLaLand Festival in Amsterdam if there happen to be any European readers out there (possibly just Lizzie, hi Lizzie!)
more info here
🌳 Rastrick High School A/V installation
📍 Hebden Bridge Arts Festival
📆 July 13th-16th
I’ve been working with a school in Brighouse to create pieces of soundscape art in response to the local environment. All the pieces are going to be displayed as part of a projection mapped installation I’m currently building which will be up over the festival. Location TBC!
🎸 Hippo + me solo
📍 Nozstock, Herefordshire
📆 July 21st
Hippo are playing at Nozstock festival at 1pm and I’m playing a solo set at midnight, which is WELL past my bedtime, god knows what it’ll sound like. Also looking forward to seeing sets from fab fab acts The Deep Blue and Carmel Smickersgill
📝 Quickfire Reviews from May + June
📚 Crash Space: I saw a couple of people tweeting this short story after the news that Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip has been approved for human study, and it’s a reaaaally good piece of speculative sci-fi fiction, very short, huge recommend
🎷 Colin Stetson: I just cannot believe what this man can do with a massive saxophone, and on top of that, what he can do with a tiny saxophone. Incredible
🎻 Manchester Collective: LOVED their Rosewood show, and nice to see them (as a string quartet) performing alongside a guitarist, gave me lots to think about
🎺Mangorata: Saw these at Brume–really excellent 6 piece jazz fusion band from Leeds
💃🏻 Caroline Polachek: Caroline Polacheck was my most listened to artist last year. Unreal levels of stage presence, I had such a good time seeing her live that I bum-dialled my mum six times by accident.
I also thought this mildly uncomfortable interview with her, in which the interviewer asks her about how ironic her music is and she says ‘there’s no irony’, was really interestingDESIIIIIIIIIIIIRE
(Hey, hey, hey, hey)
A slightly tense interview
–Caroline Polachek📺 The Succession Finale: Oh my GOD. Oh my GOD. Oh my GOD. Pretty good I thought. And led me to this great poem, which is the source of the title for all of the season’s finales.
📺 Eurovision: absolute shitshow in terms of results. Germany and Edgar Allen Poe were robbed.
📽 Business: Short film. I try to resist comparing things to David Lynch, because where does it end? I can’t just go round calling everything that explores the dark underside of suburban American dreams and/or in which something a bit weird happens Lynchian can I? I’d never stop. But I’m going to give myself a pass this time because that businessman’s hair looks just like Ray Wise. It’s like David Lynch directed a ten minute comedy. I originally found this because the lead actor is in my favourite podcast.
📽 Beau Is Afraid: Long film. Reminded me a lot of A Series of Unfortunate Events, but instead of three sad orphans, it’s one sad, anxious, nearly mute Joaquin Phoenix, and instead of a friendly narrator guiding you through a stream of stressful heavy-handed metaphors, the plot shoves you through them with no guidance and the dream logic of one of Haruki Murakami’s odder books, all wrapped in a big weird Oedipus complex. Did it need to be three hours? I don’t know. Did I need to voluntarily spend three hours watching it? No, that was a choice I made entirely of my own free will, so I have nobody to blame. That said, I saw an hour-long comedy show the week after I saw this film, and it was so bad I was itching to leave after twenty minutes, and I didn’t get that feeling at all during Beau Is Afraid, so it must be doing something right.
📽 Tickled: Correct length (almost exactly 90 minutes) documentary about competitive tickling. An unconditional recommend from me!
🍝 Slightly Viral Ruby Tandoh gnocchi recipe: I saw Nigella Lawson tweet about this. The next day, Imelda posted she was making it on BeReal. The next day, I made it. I am extremely impressionable. It’s good!
💋 Ladies Of The Junk Folder: Okay not so much a review as a plug: there is a genre of rare and beautiful poetry which myself and my friend Imelda have been appreciating for some time. This poetry can only be found in the salacious spam emails robots send to humans to ensnare them. Some of them are straightforwardly seductive, and others are incredible works of creative fiction. Many poets have tried, but none have come close to writing a line as laden with intrigue and symbolism as ‘It is evening and you are only hospitalised for surveillance’.
We have been archiving them for posterity. Go see for yourself (NSFW)
Here are some of my favourite Bill Callahan songs:
If anyone has any questions about anything I’ve been writing about here,
Riding for the feeling, riding for the feeling, riding for the feeling
Riding for the feeling, riding for the feeling, riding for the feeling
Riding for the riding, for the riding, and for the ride
Riding for the feeling, riding for the feeling, riding for the feeling
Bye!