Skip to main content

Music Matters


Music Matters
Talking about Music – the Albums that Matter most …
Felipe’s List
Two close-to-perfection contributions from the fab 4 – ‘Abbey Road’, their last and best, and ‘Let It Be’ (naked) without Spector’s luxuriant production.





Steely Dan’s ‘Aja’ – with Larry Carlton assisting Becker and Fagen, and who can recover from Steve Gadd’s drum solo – and ‘Gaucho’ despite its ambition and imperfections. 





‘The Game’ by Queen – when the band fired on all cylinders – with all members contributing radio-friendly songs, arrangements, musicianship and ego – and the cool German at the console mixing a grittier, live sound – May somewhat intoxicated when he recorded the solo for ‘Dragon Attack’ (one of his best) – if only he did more of that.



‘Toto IV’ because it epitomises the west-coast sound that went on to sell the biggest thing in recorded history – Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ could not have happened without the Toto boys – Quincy went looking for that crossover sound – the Porcaro brothers on drums, keyboards and a stand-out song (‘Human Nature’), and Lukather on guitar (he told Quincy to procure a definitive blue eyed solo from Eddie Van Halen) – ‘Rosanna’ rises to greatness with Al Schmidt, and that lush and punchy horn arrangement. We remember the song, but not the muse – it was Rosanna Arquette ...



80’s resurrection for Yes with ‘90125’ – that compulsive perfectionist Trevor Horn at the controls, and the inclusion of wunderkind Trevor Rabin on guitars and songs credits.



Just warming up …

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Levine's Acid Rage - They Lion (lie and) Grow

  THEY FEED THEY LION by Philip Levine (1968)   Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow.   Out of the gray hills Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties, Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps, Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch, They Lion grow.   Earth is eating trees, fence posts, Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones, "Come home, Come home!" From pig balls, From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness, From the furred ear and the full jowl come The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose They Lion grow.   From the sweet glues of the trotters Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower Of the hams the thorax of caves, From "Bow

From Academy to the Street, From Poetry To Prose

From academy to the street, from poetry to prose - Nicanor Parra – ‘My own antipoems use this blank verse. I’ve often been asked what an antipoem is and the most frequent response I’ve given, without realising  what I was saying is – “an antipoem is quite simple a dramatic utterance”, and a dramatic utterance, we would have to add, is a Shakespearean blank verse. Or rather, it is a hendecasyllable that lengthens and shortens, and that oscillates between the academy, the street and the fairground.   I’ve always worked with these elements: I’ve even managed to combine verse with eleven syllables and one with one syllable, and verses with prose. I thought it was a great invention of mine, but the Elizabethans were already working with these methods – Shakespeare used them in King Lear , where a large percentage of the work is written in prose, without us fully knowing what is verse and what is prose. This is very important: we could say that they are prosaic verses, or poetic verse’

The Strange and Compelling Inner Life of Clarice Lispector

Dedication - Cuando a la casa del lenguaje se le vuela el tejado y las palabras no guarecen, yo hablo When the house of language has its roof blown off and words do not shelter, I speak - fellow Latin American writer and contemporary, Alejandra Pizarnik, "Fragmentos para dominar el silencio” (Fragments to overcome silence)   ---   “ALL THE WORLD BEGAN WITH A YES. ONE MOLECULE SAID YES TO ANOTHER MOLECULE and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort” - From The Hour Of The Star (1977)   ---   When I read Clarice, I’m reminded of Montaigne - "I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself” Maurice Merleau-Ponty described Montaigne as someone who put "a consciousness astonished