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MusicMonday Wk175!! 📣 what’s the best music EVER???
Recorded: May 5, 2025 Duration: 2:00:12Space Recording
Short Summary
In a vibrant discussion on Music Monday, participants explored the intersection of music and crypto, highlighting strategic partnerships, project launches, and fundraising efforts aimed at enhancing community engagement and artist support in the evolving Web3 landscape.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. I'm going to go to the next video. Thank you. Just like a sheep. without a sail without a sail
just like a ship
without a sail
without a sail
but I'm not worthy because I know
I know
I know we can take it
I know we can take it I search for pleasure
But I find pain
I look for sunshine
Yes, I need it
But I found rain
And then I look for my friends
They don't want to wait
More my sorrow Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, What Oh Oh Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
It's not a time to see.
It's not a time to see.
It's not a time to see. it's just like a cheese
But mom knows I don't have a hand
Hey, hey, but I know
I know, but I know we can take it!
I know we can take it! Sorry about that
Sorry about that Sorry about that sorry about that sorry about that
ah yeah hey yeah yeah
what a tune what a tune what a tune like a ship by pastor tl barrett and the youth for christ
and the Youth for Christ Choir, one of my all-time favourite tunes. It's in my top 60.
I have a playlist that I've made up now called my top 60, which is a precursor to me trying
to work out what my top 25 are, which is a precursor to then trying to work out what
my top 10 is. And like you lot,
I'm sure, who've been in music for a long time, actually trying to define what one's top tracks
are. I don't know about you, but I get this. I surprisingly often I get asked this question,
what's my favorite song? I know what my favorite song is because I've made a decision that this
is the answer to that question. It isn't necessarily my favorite song is because I've made a decision that this is the answer to that question.
It isn't necessarily my favorite song, but it is the answer to that question. And it makes it easy to do it because it is one of my favorite songs.
But I think it's impossible to say this is my favorite song amongst all other songs in the world or all other tracks.
My favorite song when people ask me that question is What's Going On by Marvin Gaye?
Because I just love every single aspect and those of you that are regular listeners to music monday will know that
that is my favorite song that is my favorite track my favorite piece of music my favorite
production when anyone has said oh you're in music oh yeah what's your favorite track what's
your favorite what's going on by marvin gay easy bang there you go and then ah yeah great track
and then that starts the conversation because really that's all they do then what they don't want to see is they don't want you to go
well it or if that's a difficult they don't want to hear that they just want to hear this they want
to hear a decisive action we all want decisive actions right because that's interesting that's
more interesting to talk about a decisive action and say this is my favorite song bang there you
go my favorite song is this what's you go. My favorite song is this.
What's going on with Marvin Gaye? Every single thing from the song to the way it was written,
to the way it was presented to Marvin and where his head was at at the time that he wanted to
break out of this balladeer thing to where his relationship with Barry Gordy and Motown was at
that time where Barry Gordy just wanted to be a balladeer and there was this
running battle to everything about it from the musicianship to the strings to the backing vocals
to the fact that there's two lead vocals on there and it was an accident that they were both pushed
up at the same time and the engineer pushed them up at the same time and Marvin went no no I love
that I love that and that then became a sort of bit of a signature sound for the rest of the album
these two sort of intertwining lead vocals that were weaving backwards and
forwards i'm just everything about it and then the fact it's sat you know because of this battle
ongoing battle between berry gaudy and marvin it sat in the motown vaults for a good 18 months
uh before anybody did it because there was a standoff between berry gaudy and marvin you see
this is the one talking what I'm talking about.
What I'm talking about, great.
See, this is interesting, isn't it?
To the listener, it's interesting.
So for me, I think when you're trying to nail down what your favorite song is,
what you're actually trying to do is nail down a great story.
Actually, that's what you want.
Your great example of the relationship that music has with you.
And you can pick any tune, really, within your top sort of 20 or 30 or 50 or whatever
that says that and that got me thinking the other day because I was finding more well so
how I compile my top 60 is whatever tune comes in like if I hear something and I go oh my god
that's great oh my god that's fucking amazing what a great tune that is and I mean I really
genuinely feel like that then it goes in
my top 60 like my top 60 is you know it has people like it has Prince in it of course but it has you
know Brie Springsteen in it it has um Mac Miller in it has Abba in it has Jimi Hendrix Kings of
Tomorrow Genesis James Brown Kanye West Peter Gabriel Davidid bowie uh deep dish and de lacy super tramp the bg's the
jackson sisters donna summer stevie wonder 10cc the beat i mean it's all quite old stuff of course
because i'm an old bugger you know but it's got you know it has got some some modern music in there
somewhere i'm just looking down here to find actually where the modern music is
uh maybe there's not that much because i don't get excited well rally richie that's stronger than ever that came out about 10 years ago that's
as modern as it gets for me beanie i want me back there you go that's five years want me back that's
five years ago that's that's in there um but yeah the whole basis of my top 60 is just if it if it
touches me in a way i'm like oh and it reminds me of a certain period of my life or a certain person or a certain thing you know a lot of the music that's in here I've got a couple of
my tracks that are in here because you know things I've worked on or been part of over the years
because they mean so much they've got some incredibly deep emotional meaning to me of
where I was at the time and that piece of music maybe just happened to touch me at that particular
moment and has stayed with me ever since or maybe when I listen to that piece of music maybe just happened to touch me at that particular moment
and has stayed with me ever since or maybe when I listen to that piece of music it takes me back
to that period in my life when the old something was completely different to where it is now and
where my head was at and you know music should be your diary entry I realized that quite quickly
after I made music was making music and was making music professionally,
that I could use music as a diary, that I could use music, I could go back to periods of my life that I'd forgotten about.
As soon as I heard a piece of music, it would reframe everything, like where I was, what I was wearing, who I was going out with,
you know, it just, like so much of my life would come bursting back, like looking at a picture, you know, like in a picture or a little video or something of going back. And it's just phenomenal the way that music has that ability to just touch your soul. So inspired by my all time 60, and as a nod to Terrence,
because we always have to remind ourselves that this is Music Monday and we do need to predominantly talk about music because we've gone off at slight tangents
over the last couple of weeks. And, you know, I'll always try and bring it back to music.
Tonight's Music Monday is all about music. So welcome to week 175 of Music Monday, the
longest running music and arts web-free show where we talk about music and we talk about web free and we talk about this is kind of interconnection of technology and
creativity and and society and all kinds of stuff like that i'm very excited because um tomorrow
night i'm actually on matt belmont uh we're recording an episode of matt belmont's podcast
and um and so i'm looking forward to doing that and a lot of the kind of things that
i've been thinking about were in preparation of that i do a lot of podcasts anyway people always
asking me to come on podcasts and talk about this this intersection because i'm in a very
you know i'm in a very charmed position i've been in the music industry for you know coming up to
40 years is what i realized and um that that's kind of you know that that's sort of kind of weeding me out
but still anyway that's that's no idea there music industry for up to you know nearly 40 years but
then I've been in this crypto techno world for about 10 years and uh and I'll be in the techno
world anyway for for all my life because I think as a musician and as a music producer and someone
who's immersed himself in electronic music and also the kind of technology that we all involve
I think I don't think we kind of technology that we all involve.
I don't think those of us that use music equipment, we don't realize how techy we actually are until you go, oh, right, yeah, you know, actually I do know about things like compressors
and I know about how to program stuff and, you know, and reverbs and diffusion and tails
and, you know, gate times.
And, you know, you actually realize quite and you know you actually realize you realize quite a
lot that you've you actually are programmed in quite a techie way and and i was doing a i did
another interview this morning for somebody for for uh someone's sort of like college thing and
i was trying to explain to him that we forget i think how non-techie the rest of the world is
you know it's only like sort of 5% of the people
on this planet that understands a lot of the things that we just kind of completely take for
granted. Like AI, like how many people are really genuinely using AI, like really deeply? I use AI
on, I use, I use perplexity and chatGBT for like everything now, like everything I'm thinking of.
I don't use Google at all anymore. I use those two things.
And I'm all the better for it.
And it's helped me with productivity, all kinds of stuff.
But so I think we also have to remind ourselves
that we're not particularly techy.
And we go back to the music.
And the music at the heart of it is like,
what does a great song mean?
What's the best music ever?
And that's why I thought we'll do that tonight.
We'll talk about what we think is the best music ever and that's why i thought we'll do that tonight we'll talk about what we think is the best music ever and but before we do that of course i want to say thanks
very much for coming please share your favorite song down the bottom there top bottom right
let's get it uh we last week's show we were talking about engagement and i was saying that
ever since i'd called elon and artsy my engagement had fallen off a cliff on this uh very platform i wonder why um and uh so i've been asking people to um to retweet this uh space
tonight and we've got a few more people in which is great um and so please retweet the room of
course let's get some more people in let's only talk about music i I took Terrence's advice last week.
And so for the last week,
I have been entirely engaging just with music tweets
just to see if it would shift what I was seeing in my timeline.
And in some ways, I'm happy to say,
to say and in a ways rather sad to say it hasn't it hasn't shifted at all i still get an entirely
and in other ways, rather sad to say,
it hasn't.
It hasn't shifted at all.
barrage of mostly right-wing extremist rubbish that i have not engaged in whatsoever whatsoever
at all mostly nonsensical garbage that comes from the same kind of world that certain people
who happen to be in government uh are government are spouting at the moment.
And so I'm a bit disappointed about that.
I was rather hoping that I would have a bit more music.
I mean, I would say maybe I get like maybe 5% more music in my timeline, but not that much.
So anyway, I'm going to keep it going.
Terrence, you'll be pleased to hear.
I shall keep it going to see if this experiment works
and see if we can shift it a bit more over to it.
Maybe because I've been so nonsensical with it all over the last however many years.
Maybe not nonsensical, but so sort of belligerently anti a lot of that sort of rhetoric.
Maybe it's ingrained in my profile and it's impossible for me to get.
And it's like, it knows I'm trying to game it.
Oh, you can be retweeting music all you like, mate.
I know who your true colours are, it says to me,
that bot inside Mr. Musk's head.
But anyway, I want to say a massive hello to Genzo.
How are you, mate?
Welcome to week 175. eating musk's head uh but anyway i want to say massive hello to genzo how are you mate welcome
to week 175 uh i'm not quite sure what the 175 number really gives us or anything but how's your
uh how's your it's been a holiday here today so we've all been on holiday and uh and i went to
an amazing festival over the weekend which i'll tell you all about but how are you mate you good
had a good weekend yeah man um i'm good kaya finished up her freshman year and is back home uh just in time for
her birthday so we had a little birthday oh my gosh a little birthday celebration over the weekend
and we went running through uh the fields running through the fields no actually tunnels believe it wow running through tunnels
uh and filming with an action cam shooting test footage for a music video we're going to shoot
are you um are you in the in the world of shooting things are you a gimbal man or a non-gimbal man
i it all depends what it's for but i mean own three gimbals, if that answers your question.
Look at you, Mr. Gimbal Man.
I've got a gimbal, and I've never really been able to get my head around it.
It just never does what I want it to do.
I mean, I could always use a fourth, so send it on over.
What am I doing wrong?
I have no idea.
What kind of gimbal?
Is it for like a full
size camera or is it for just... No, it's an iPhone.
Oh, then I have no
idea. I actually don't have that. I mean,
I've only got ones
where I put full size cameras on them.
Oh, look at you. Okay. Sorry.
Sorry.
That's fine.
Sorry, mate. Just put me in my place. It's fine.
My iPhone 16, you know, Pro.
I mean, you know, it's got...
People make whole movies out of that thing.
It's got the stabilization built in.
So if I pull out my iPhone, I'm just like trying to be steady with it.
That's all.
I don't stick it on the gimbal.
And that's enough.
Okay.
Then you can have the gimbal, mate.
It's fine.
I don't even know where it is, actually, to be honest with you you i think the best thing about it is is you can you know use it as
a stand that's quite good i can't like that and then you've got the the actual you've got another
thing well of course you can't use a remote on your phone because you're already using your phone
so do you remember it i actually i bought it with me when we were at nft nyc last year. Do you remember? Oh, no. I was not aware. I totally forget.
Yeah.
Anyway, so that's great to hear about Kai.
She's back.
Yeah.
So she has a vocal lesson tomorrow with a woman who is kind of a local legend here in Seattle.
She worked with Alice in Chains and people like that to teach how to safely scream.
She's got some lessons
set up with her. We're going to be
shooting three music videos this summer
and they've got 15 shows booked
so far. It's going to be fun.
We have someone on
the stage who could have
done exactly that,
taught her how to scream.
She screams pretty much every night almost
right emily how is how is your voice how is it holding up it's fine
there you go you know it's a technique if she wants to learn how to scream just get her the
art of screaming by mel Screaming by Melissa Cross.
It comes in
a bunch of CDs that you
can get.
She can go through the exercises
and read the book
that comes with it.
She'll be screaming in five minutes.
It's all
about just where you place your larynx.
What's it called again
everything's the zen of screaming it's by melissa cross yeah it's by melissa cross and you can
follow her online she also has online courses too she also has video zoom courses as well but
i would suggest just buying like audio book, whatever thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Totally.
I'll check that out.
It's like $30 or something like that.
And literally, she'll be doing it in a day.
It's not a way that's cool.
Yeah, she works or responds well to in-person stuff.
So this woman, Susan Carr, again, she's worked like pretty much every band that came out of Seattle and had
screaming that she's probably worked with them.
So we're going to at least have her do a couple sort of in-person things and
then, but yeah, that might be a good resource after. Thanks.
Yeah.
We'll cross on everybody from like, as I lay dying to under oath.
So like, I to brewing the horizon.
I mean, Melissa Croft is kind of known in the heavy
metal world as the person you go to
to scream properly. She taught me
when
she discovered me at an Under Oath
show and backstage
she was like, who are you? I was like,
oh, you know, I'm on a band
and this is before the morning. And she's like, you need to be the Gwen Stefani of metal. And she was like, who are you? I was like, oh, you know, I want to band. And this is before Saturday morning.
And she's like, you need to be the Stephania of metal.
And she's like, I want to teach you how to scream.
And I was like, oh, I don't have money for your lessons.
She was like pretty expensive.
And she's like, no, I'm going to do it for free.
I like you.
You're cool.
And so I literally, it was like a New York moment. And that's how I learned how to scream.
She's an amazing human being that's so cool that's so cool that she taught all these people and then saw in you
something really powerful i mean i can imagine because there aren't that many women doing what
you do right so as a woman herself she's probably like you know what we need more like women to be
doing this shit so i can i can totally see why she'd want you to be more involved you know what we need more like women to be doing this so i can i can totally see why she'd want
you to be more involved you know to be to help you to do it and and do you still did she give you
like um obviously exercises that you do before and after the gig because this is the other thing that
people always forget about doing exercises afterwards to help your voice kind of calm down right like no or not maybe not exercises but certainly
regimes so to speak pull off exercises so she has in the course she has like warm-up exercises um
can pull cool down exercises that you that you do for performances she has like a whole set for
performance and then a whole set for just like, you know, standard.
I used three different vocal teachers
in my warm notes and cool notes.
I used Don Lawrence, who is more of like a pop person,
but like I learned with him when I was a pop.
He used to train like Britney Spears and stuff like that.
So like I learned from him when I was like a teenager.
And then I learned from Roger Love,
who's kind of like a Maroon 5 sort of like cleaner guy.
And then I learned from Melissa, who does, you know, the screaming.
So I use those three vocal teachers
and I kind of combine their lesson program.
And then I use those for my warmups and my cool downs.
My fat fingers again.
That's so cool, isn't it?
Isn't that cool?
I fucking love that.
You don't think like that.
You don't think, oh, yeah, of course, that makes sense.
It makes sense that you would have, you know, that kind of, you would need to have that kind of level of
warmup, right? Well, it's also like where you place your larynx, right? Like, I mean, like,
that's like a huge part of screaming, but it's also a huge part of like hitting higher notes
and things like that too. So like the exercises that I do set up my larynx to sing a certain way.
And then the other exercises set me up to scream a certain way.
And the thing about screaming is when you're doing it right,
you're not doing it very loud.
It's actually like not loud at all.
And you just let the microphone do the work for you.
And you should be doing that anyway when you sing,
but like, especially when you scream.
Yeah. Yeah. That's what I mean.
And, and I, and i and yeah god this is
it's such an art form isn't it it really is you just you know you kind of realize i mean i remember
when i worked with some deaf uh deaf metal bands and and the guys who were just doing the grunting
stuff and i was absolutely absorbed into how they were getting this sort of sound you know as someone
who comes from a very sort of traditional singing style,
and it's an incredible thing where you really, like, delve deeply into it.
It's a whole different way of using your voice
that is not in any way, shape or form connected to any other kind of musical style, really.
You know, it's just that.
Isn't it? It really is.
Yeah, and it's interesting because there's different types of screams.
I mostly stick in the mids to high fry scream.
It's called a fry scream.
And that's where I feel comfortable and I like my voice when it does that.
There are also, you can do the death metal stuff, which is the lower, like gruntier, like bassier sort of tones, like that, you know,
like there's Spirit Box does some of those,
like the girl in Spirit Box who was in I Wrestled a Bear once.
She does that sort of stuff.
Like, I mean, there's different types of screams that you can do
and you can master all of them.
You know, it just takes a little bit of of work but um i tend to stick in a certain realm because i like it with the music
that i do and stuff like that so that's so cool i love it i love it see maybe this is music monday
we learn a new thing every day and we learn a new concept, you know, and, and the different things, this is what it
should be all about. Um, I want to say a big hello to Terrence. How are you, mate? You've been out,
uh, you've been out surfing today. Is it, is it surf, is surf for up?
I'm good. I was just thinking my ex-wife is a screamer. She did it naturally. She's Sicilian, you know.
So I'm back.
I'm back.
Boom, boom.
So I'm back in Canada.
So I'm back on my skateboard doing laps down to the beach and back.
Yeah.
But I just wanted to say that my favorite song, bar none, without any contest, nothing even comes close, is Even Now by Barry Manilow.
Is what?
Even Now by Barry Manilow.
How does that go?
And the reason I stole it from Genzo.
I give up I give up
I give up with this man
This is nothing you ever say
Makes any sense at all
Genzo understand
I do
I got you Terrence
Does he understand?
Do you understand me?
Genzo got me
I do
I don't know which interview
Was it with Kirk or something like that
But I spoke of this song
Even now by
Barry Manilow as life changing
For me because it was
One of the first pop songs I ever heard
And it like made me
Obsessed with Barry Manilow for a little while
Yeah I like Barry Manilow for a little while.
Yeah, I like Barry Manilow.
I got some time for Barry.
I actually, I was just pulling Genzo's leg there.
But for me, I don't know that it's my favorite song,
but it's the one that I think about. No, that's the word you've chosen, Terrence.
So there is a song, and when I was a kid you know i had a transistor radio
and i'd call into the radio station every morning and request it you know the am radio station
and there were two in toronto so i i'd call both the radio stations uh before going to to camp and
request the song and the song is these eyes by uh the guess who and i was just like obsessed with that song
and so that i don't know that it's my favorite but it's definitely it's one that whenever i hear it
i i'm back in that place i'm back in my house my my childhood house you know getting ready to go
to day camp in the summertime you know know? I think this is, okay.
So let's start this off, right?
Let's start with, I want to say, before we do,
let's say hi to Tara.
And Tara, how are you, my love?
You good?
Hey, everyone.
Doing pretty well for a shitty Monday.
Shitty Monday.
Shitty Monday. A lot of stuff on my plate this morning.
So, yeah, just trying to mull through everything I have going on.
I kind of had exciting news.
I was asked to be a tour manager once again in my life, which I thought I retired and got away from it all.
Once again in my life, which you know, I thought I retired and got away from it all but
one of my old business partners has a venture that has been an ongoing thing for about 10 years and
Can't make a few dates. So asked me to step in and then the funny part is I found that it's a cruise
That one of the dates is a cruise. So I accepted all the other dates. I refused to get on a cruise ship.
My husband was Coast Guard.
I was Navy.
It will never fucking happen.
No matter who it is, what it is, where it is, or what's going on.
So, yeah.
I'm going to bow out in the middle of the dates and go, yeah, I'll be on land and see y'all when you get back.
But, yeah, a little bit busy around here.
Busy is good for me.
It keeps me out of trouble.
I hope everybody's well.
We were actually, Genzo, we were looking at homes out in your neck of the woods the last few weeks when we were trying to decide if we were going to stay or going to go.
And we were looking for like edge of the world places that if we stayed, we could manage, but we, we decided against it.
We're going to stay put where we are for now and see what goes on.
So we should have been named.
That's the beauty of America though, isn't it?
In such a huge country, you can just go, yeah, fuck it.
Let's go live somewhere else.
I don't really feel, I mean, we have that in Europe or certainly in the UK, we had it when we were attached to Europe in a legal way
that made it a lot easier for everybody to travel.
Now we don't have that.
But it's still, you know, they're talking about re-entering that kind of level
so people, at least young people, can travel.
Because I still think that's really important.
But that's the beauty of America.
You know, I love that kind of concept that people just wrap sticks and go stick stuff in a u-haul and go into a different
part of america because you never feel like you're really moving do you always in america that's the
thing you see so but you can we bounce around a lot we've moved a lot like we don't stay in one
place for more than four years matt well i've heard i've heard tara there's there's it's all
over the local newspapers when you're off you know know what I mean? It's like, you know, we've got rid of them.
Thank goodness they've gone. They say.
That's exactly what it is. The neighbors have parties after we leave.
But yeah, we found that actually Genzo might know where it is.
It's Puget Sound. It's called Anderson Island.
We found the house that we loved and my husband found the job with the,
the local government out there in
sustainability and they wanted them and we were all ready and I was like you know what it's really
cold there and compared to where we are and it's a lot to move everywhere it's cold compared to
Miami mate everywhere it's cold you're in Miami aren't you Tara you're in Miami right I'm actually we were over on that side we
are now over on the Gulf of Mexico side um in Venice we're right below Tampa Gulf of USA
hey listen if you want a uh an island I hear Alcatraz is kicking off again you could go and
live there how exciting hey sounds good
uh let's say hello to uh let's say hello to sean sean nice to meet you welcome to music
monday week 175 have you been on before sean i can't remember oh yeah yeah we follow each other
it's all good i'm sorry i'm not a regular i like you know i i come in and listen a lot during the
time so it's all good well it's nice that you've jumped up on stage.
Welcome.
How has your Monday been?
Is it a Boomtown Rats I Don't Like Monday,
or is it just another Manic Monday by the whatever they're called?
I can't remember that girl's band.
It was a Manic Monday.
That's the vibe.
I think, yeah, just another Manic Monday.
It's not going to go, Go's, is it?
It was it.
It was.
Was it Lauper?
Who was it? It wasn't Lauper. It was, um, was it Lauper? No, who is it?
It wasn't Lauper.
It was,
I mean,
it's Prince song,
but it's, it's the ones who did walk like an Egyptian.
Bangles.
Bangles.
Thank you again.
Yeah.
Is there any other songs on Monday in the title apart from those two?
There must be more Mondays.
I can't think of one.
Monday,
Monday,
Monday,
Monday,
Monday,
Monday,
Monday.
Thank you. Yeah. That could can't think of one. Monday, Monday. Monday, Monday. Thank you.
Yeah, that could be so good to me.
And also, finally, let's say hi to Walt Dears.
Hey, Walt.
Nice to have you back here on Music Monday.
How's your Monday been so far?
You know, it's raining, but I'm going to count my blessings.
Like, I've dodged it the whole time.
I love the discussion.
I love me some music.
And there were some, I thought about your message over the weekend, and there were so many different songs, but some of them that kind of popped up in my head was, like, some of the older songs,
like Nat King Cole, Unforgettable, or Sammy Davis Jr., um i've gotta be me those are great freaking songs
i've gotta be me that's a tune there's they are and the thing is it's interesting isn't it because
the way that music has framed us as a as a as a race you know you've got to remember that we're probably
one of the reasons why we even started the concept of music was because we were echoing
our sounds in nature you know and why did we do that i mean obviously from a protective point of
view maybe you know this like like teaching our young like if you hear this sound you know
you know that's a wolf or something or whatever,
you know, steer clear of that, you know. But then also things like birds tweeting and
the melodies that they give out and then sort of things like the wind and sea and all these things,
you know, and our ability to kind of mimic those sounds has obviously, you know, I'm talking
hundreds of thousands of years ago, of course, you know, sort of led us to the idea of starting to sort of recreate those things in our heads
musically. And then from that, you know, we've created, we created divisions and music, and
then we worked out ways of writing it down. And so we could share it instead of just sort
of singing it to people and copying it. we invented musical instruments, of course, that would allow us to accompany our voices, you
know, starting with drums and then with the, I think, I think if my right term, if my memory
serves me, I think the, I think wind instruments were like the first kind of instruments that
we like sort of, you know, like making like pipes and stuff like that were the first things that we made.
And then I think there's one of the oldest musical instruments, I think if not the oldest musical instrument ever, ever found is like something like 30,000 years old.
And it's a, it's a flute, it's a type of flute.
Um, and then I think, you know, it was later on, obviously we got into Garton and then much, much later on, we got into metal instruments.
And by metal, I don't mean, I don't mean Emily emily metal i just mean metal i just mean brass and so forth um and so you know what
what how we we've created music has always been determined you know as people always forget music
is a tech industry because these all those things are tech and the technologies that we have invented
that help us to create music in the first place in instruments.
And now, of course, in the last 120-odd years, recorded music
and how we've used that to sort of, you know,
not just make the most incredibly different things
that we could never have done naturally by multitrack recording
or effects or kinds of stuff like that,
but also distribution of music as well,
an incredible ability to take music and let it go all the way around the planet.
I'm always, even to this day, 40 years in the industry,
marvel at the concept of making something in my little room
and then sticking it up and then getting an email
or a message back from someone in Finland saying,
my God, I love this, it's great. You know, it's quite incredible, you know, to have that as a
concept. But defining then what makes great music, what is a good music? I think, first of all, let's
go around the houses, let's go around the, what we call it, the stage here whatever we call this thing here let's go around this i've
been doing this for fucking four years i should know uh let's go around and we'll start with we've
done this before kind of but this is this one's slightly different because i want to talk about
best ever like how do we rank what we think is the best ever personally and maybe as a society
and there's a reason why I want to do this
and I'm and it's kind of there is method to my madness there is a reason why I want to talk
about this it's because I find myself asking this question so much these days is that are we on the cusp of the concept of the value of music changing before our very eyes
in the sense that if we as a society value and I've asked this question I know a number of times
on Music Monday but if we as a society value creativity and craftsmanship and by craftsmanship
I mean someone who's prepared to spend a huge
amount of their time and energy and effort devoting themselves to doing something really
specific really and in this case you know maybe in emily's case it's screaming and performing and
and creating this incredible character that she takes on stage with her that takes a huge amount
of time and effort to not only put together but to source the clothing and to get ready every night and do the makeup
genzo years and years and years of studying musical composition and production and learning
and learning and learning how do we differentiate between that kind of craftsmanship and just
someone who's literally got an iphone and puts together a beat
on garage band and sticks it up on on tiktok and gets 100 million views how do we define and
and do we should we so when we talk about best ever i think there needs to be that framed in it
because every single track that i think is in my top 60 this is my best ever top 60 right best ever
track every single one i look at those artists and i think those people you know i know enough that I think is in my top 60, that is my best ever top 60, right? Best ever track.
Every single one, I look at those artists and I think those people, you know, I know enough about all of those artists because I study music as much as make it. And I study it because I'm,
you know, I'm engrossed by people and their ability to make amazing music. And you want
to find out more and more and more. And I always did that from a very early age. But I would like,
every single one of them you can say is a craftsman every single person on that list every single band artist not just the artists themselves but the people that made
the records the people that produced it that recorded it the artwork blah blah they're craftsmen
they are people who clearly have studied and made incredible strides through effort, hard work, toil, dedication.
That's craftsmanship.
So when we talk about that, is it possible to have a best ever track that isn't that?
I think is, you know what, that's what I'm coming around to.
Is it possible for us to appreciate something that we think is the best ever,
or within our top 50, top 20, whatever,
that could have just been made by Billy,
who's sitting in his sitting room with his iPhone and whatever.
I'm not knocking any of that.
I love the democratisation of music.
I love the fact that anybody can make music with their phones now.
It's fantastic.
But should we be differentiating
it? You're seeing it in the industry where the industry is trying to begin to make that
difference, that quantifiable difference between crafted music and sort of, you know,
generate AI as an example. AI, quickly, I make it, write a couple of prompts, blah, blah,
blah, blah, send it off to Suno. Suno fires me back a tune that's pretty half decent,
I make some adjustments, make some changes,
fires me back another one which is an improvement on what I had before,
and I'm like, yeah, I'm happy with that, throw that out.
That's not crafting, is it?
That's not craftsmanship, is it?
That's just me coming up with a couple of different things.
So let's go around the stage,
and first of all, we'll start with a tune that we've already touched on a few of these,
so thanks very much, but we want to flesh this out a bit more.
Tunes that really mean something that you think are really well crafted in that respect.
I said, for me, what's going on?
I'm going to throw out another one now.
Here we go.
What a Waste by Ian During the Blockheads. There's another one that's in my top 60. If you don't know that tune, go and Here we go. What A Waste by Ian Dury and the Blockheads.
It's another one that's in my top 60.
If you don't know that tune, go and check it out.
What A Waste by Ian Dury and the Blockheads.
An incredibly important band to me when I was a kid.
Wonderful combination of all different styles of music
that is quintessentially British.
Fronted by a man with polo who couldn't walk properly.
But was one of the greatest poets of our of our of
the last you know 50 years in this country um that's craftsmanship to me that is real
craftsmanship they you know they they all the musicians that are in there are absolutely
phenomenal musicians um so yeah let's go on that let's go and have started with you agains
agains a tune that you would say is one of your favorite tunes that's really really well crafted
uh preaching the end of the world chris cornell Gens, a tune that you would say is one of your favorite tunes that's really, really well-crafted?
Preaching the End of the World, Chris Cornell.
Yeah, I mean, Chris Cornell, man.
Can't go wrong with Chris Cornell, can you?
That is a man who really, like, totally took his vocal and singing style,
not, you know, just to a different level you know that's what i think you know i'm not a massive fan but i know i can appreciate every time i a tune of his comes on
and i don't know it i'm like fuck this is great who's this and it's it's chris cornell yeah i mean
again like you i'm i'm not sure there's obviously a million songs that I could pull out.
But there's just something about that one when I hear it.
And it comes down to not only his performance,
but also the production is just a little bit strange for the style.
And then the chord progressions are fucking bonkers.
Like, it's just...
And not that, like, that makes anything necessarily good.
I mean, I love songs that have two chords, but, I mean,
there's just something about that song that hits me on all levels, you know.
Oh, that's a great point.
Do you think that, you know, there's one of the things that I've taught
when I've done my teaching and mentoring with songwriting
is how there are amazing songs with just like one chord, like Chain of Fools by Aretha.
It's one chord all the way through.
And then there are great, amazing songs that are just two chords.
And obviously there are millions of amazing songs that are just three chords.
And there's whole genres, blues, for example.
And so, you know, what we're talking about when we talk about craftsmanship,
I think it's not necessarily complexity.
I mean, complexity is great, but it's like it needs, you know,
like Johnny Hook is a really great example or Muddy Waters.
These kind of blues guys, you know, that I was obsessed with
when I was like sort of 15 16 you know and i was obsessed with them because they were doing
something that just seemed musically so wrong there were so many mistakes in it but it got
somewhere in my soul that i'd never gone before it you know it's just i mean partly i think i
think there's a sexuality an awakening of sexuality
of course that hits you and sort of at that age that blues seem to just get right it really got
me and but but something else something else about it so it's not a complexity thing it's just
i think i'm actually not a fan of complexity in general like Like, I mean, as much as I can appreciate even like jazz or whatever, like I don't find
myself listening to it for pleasure.
You know what I mean?
If anything, and most of the songs I think I write are probably only three or four chords.
But I think that's another reason why I love that song so much is it didn't even strike
me as how complicated it was.
It's done in such an effort.
It's kind of like Stevie Wonder, man, where like the melody is so nice and simple and
holds it all together.
And it's so singable that you almost don't notice how fucking complex the chord changes
are, you know?
And, and it, it, it, you see that's, it's, I suppose, because that's how we should define
complex.
Because to me me sometimes I
listen to the Beatles or or like you say or Stevie and you listen to it and you think gosh that's
really really that's so simple you know and then you go no it's not it's actually wonderfully
complex but it's just it's that's part of its appeal is is that it is craftsmanship of the highest order but it is wonderfully
there's there's a complexity to it but it's it's it's done in a way that if that doesn't feel
overly complex it doesn't sound overly good word for that tommy yeah is elegant yeah that's a great
word great right it's like it's cleverly simple right yeah like that i think the best that's the
best stuff is like that you know i think anyway the catchiest stuff and you know with the with
the really catchy melodies there's um a wonderful concept by these two i think i've mentioned this
before but but so apologies if you heard this, but me say this before, but these two very famous advertising execs, and I can't remember
their names, I'll try and see if I can find it, they have this concept, which is called,
um, universally, uh, uh, what's it called? It's called universally, um, personal, universally
personal. Andally personal.
And the idea is what makes a great idea?
What makes a great idea?
A great idea is something that is universally personal.
And I think you can put this to music.
You can apply this to music.
Something that is universally personal is something that everybody in the world can understand,
but then they can personalize it.
So a good example of that is an iPhone.
So everybody in the world can understand an iPhone, right? They can take an iPhone phone
and they can turn it on pretty much. And then they can work out what it does. But the beautiful
thing about the iPhone is you personalize it. You fill it with your own music, with your own
pictures, with your own apps. You organize the screen so it's your stuff, you know what I mean, you can turn off notifications
or turn them on, you can really personalize the thing too, so that it works and really fits around
you and your lifestyle, and that is a great, that's why the iPhone was so, so, so, it ended
up being so successful, and of course being copied by many, many other companies um is the concept of university
personal and and i think music has this i think you know like if i look at the titles of my top 60
tunes for example you know i'll just pick out a few here right like like calm the storm, come back to earth, dancing queen, finally, forget-me-nots, heroes.
Do you know what I mean?
Instantly, even when I just say those words, it fills your head with something that you personalize.
You know, even if I just say something like, I feel love, immediately your head is filled with an image.
Could be someone that you've loved or something that you are loving, or it could be something different.
It could be a plate of food that you've got in front of yourself. Do you know what I mean?
And the fact that it's the word feel as well, when you connect the word feel and love, it's instantly an emotion.
I feel love. You know, I hear emotion. I feel love. You know,
I hear love. I see love. I taste love. You instantly connect an emotion, one of the five
emotions, with that word love. And now we've got a picture. I mean, you could say, I am love.
That would be different to I feel love, wouldn't it? You see? You see what I mean here? So instantly, concepts around simplicity, but complexity or rather personalized complexity
become very, very, very powerful, even if it's just a title. Terrence, a tune that you think is, you know, uh, uh, is a, is an absolute banger,
but is done in, in crafted in such a way that, that you really admire it.
Yeah. So for me, the, the top of the heap there is, is, uh, I think, you know,
Steely Dan, they had, you know,
they always got the best musicians and their stuff was impeccable.
I really like Josie for me is one of those.
Because, I mean, it's a pretty simple rock tune, but it's just done so well.
And, you know, the opening guitar riff, Larry Carlton.
And I don't know.
I just love that tune.
I love the story, too.
I mean, you know, you just want to meet Josie.
Like, who is this? I mean, she sounds like a riot whoever she is so that that'd be mine i have these occasional moments where um where i have a day of just listening to steely dan
uh because they are one of those bands that like you know like the beatles or whatever
they have this have been gone down particularly for our generation as being you know this
they transcend music you they're an effortlessly brilliantly cool band and and they are
quintessentially american that you know you couldn't steely dan could not
have come out of them of the uk in the way that e-and-year and the blockheads could not have come
out of the u.s i listen to steely dan and i hear america i hear jazz i hear soul i have funk i hear
you know all the amazing things that america has contributed to music. And they are quite rightfully, you know, one
of the greatest, greatest bands ever. And it was really difficult for me to think about
what song I would put of Steely Dan's. I can't, I can't, I try and try not to double up. So
it's like, well, what's my, what's the song that i would put in my all-time 60 that steely
dan song and it's like i love haitian divorce i love that tune you know i kid chalamet i love that
tune in the end i picked my old school because i just it's such a happy song i mean i put that
song on and i'm like the horns i love the horns i love skunk baxter's
guitar solo i mean he is such a genius guitarist for me and then he went on to design nuclear
bombs for the for the the pentagon that's the mad thing and then he's got back into music again
i mean what a life it's a great story too what, too. What do you mean it's a story?
What story?
What, his story or the song story?
My old school.
What's the story?
I don't know.
I don't know what the story is.
Tell me the story.
It's basically a guy, you know, a broken heart.
It's a broken hearted guy.
That's basically the story.
What, you mean the lyric?
Yeah.
Right.
Well, I mean, who knows what the fuck goes on in Donald Fagan's head
when it comes to lyrics?
Because he's out there, man.
He's out there.
I love it when they got back together.
I can't stand it.
Doing what you did before,
leaving like a gypsy queen in a fairy tale.
Fucking great lyrics.
Anyway, I love the story that when they got back
together they were so they were so off their heads on heroin when they did half this music
they couldn't remember how they played it so they had to get a musicologist in to sit down and work
out what the chords were they played and they had they went for about 10 musicologists trying to find people
who could work out what the chords were i love that story uh it's great great track great track
uh emily what is the tune that you think is you know it means something to you personally but you
believe has a level of craftsmanship in it that means that you know suno couldn't have made it
you know couldn't have made it i don't know it's getting pretty good tommy i don't know um
no um isn't it isn't it just it is fucking amazing it really is i know it's really getting
scary and like it's so funny when people are like oh you, it's never going to be able to like replicate human
emotion. And I'm just like, of course it is. Actors replicate human emotion. Like, of course
the machine's going to be able to do it too. It's just chemicals in your brain. god um that's a tough one tommy i mean i mean it is isn't it this is the
thing this is this is this is i i felt like i've been asked these questions so many times and it
was like i thought i need to put some thought into this because I hate kind of thinking about music in a flippant way, you know, particularly my all completely different and diverse and you know they the way that they lateral thinking and and unnatural thinking all comes together and you
know we've all been us people that make music we've all been in rooms full of bizarre bonkers
people making music that you know you know for a fact would never have come out of your own head
personally if it just been up to you and that's the beauty of making music is it is a collaborative process and all of that has been fine up to that point until the last couple of years where we've
seen ai just charge forward and the whole question of craftsmanship and the whole question of oh yeah
i mean sorry less than that sorry more than, you know, because I would argue really since apps and music and started to really accelerate, you know, maybe from the last 10 years that we've seen more and more.
And the culture around the sort of there's no culture around craftsmanship, not not the same way as when I was growing up, I think.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you in a way about some of those points.
I just think I was having a discussion with a friend of mine a few nights ago after the show about music and about the devaluation of music.
Because everybody in this room knows how much I drone on about that.
But I've recently had like an epiphany about that and I really don't I now have switched my narrative a
little bit so it's not really the devalue devaluation of music anymore because music is
tied to consumption of of the said you know of of music so So to me, it's not really, it's not about that anymore.
It's actually about the artists, themselves.
I think that the narrative is going to switch more towards that.
It's not going to be like the value of music,
but more or less the value of the artist.
Like you were saying, Tommy, myself, like, you know,
I've had 10 years of touring,
like nationally, internationally with this band. And like, there's like a craftsmanship
that is in that. And when I take the stage, and if you ever see me live, you know,
that that's 10 years of touring, you know, that's like, I, you know, I control a crowd because of that.
You know, I write the songs I write because I've had that, you know, you know, that, that craftsmanship.
So my artistry and, and my valuation is based not just strictly on the output of the music that I make, but the cumulative, you know, work that has been put into
myself, my art form, and also just living life. Like a lot of, a lot of people forget that
a lot of artists, and there are some that don't do this, but a lot of artists write about things that have happened to
them or their friends or, you know, like crazy emotional responses that they've had to life's,
you know, failures or wins or whatever. And you have to live in order to write those things, you have to fucking live. And a lot of people don't really put a lot of weight in that.
And so all of that together, I think, makes the valuation of the artists themselves my main concern.
How do we keep valuing artists themselves? And that leads into your AI discussion
of like, AI isn't an artist. Well, I mean, we can go into that too. But like, but, you know,
what is the difference between the valuation of the artist and their life and everything that's
put into this one piece of work or these multiple pieces of work
versus like, you know, this AI machine that just like threw it out there.
So I think that we, for me, I'm focusing more of how we keep valuation towards the artist
in everything that they do. Because I just think that music in itself,
we listen to a song,
you listen to a song,
you say, oh, that's a piece of music.
But when I listen to a song,
I hear the music, obviously,
but I also hear the emotion.
I hear the life that went into that song,
the story that went into that song.
There's all these other facets that are buried underneath that.
And I think that we tend to just be very like
service level with shit like this.
And I think that as we go forward with AI and technology,
I think there's going to be a return to the artist,
an evaluation of the returns of the artist that is going to be really great for the industry in itself.
Sorry to turn off, but yeah.
You know what, though?
I agree with you because I was thinking about this because I always use the analogy of food, right?
I always think about, you know, food and music are really, really two similar things.
You know, they, you know, okay, we don't need music in the way that we need food.
But, you know, arguably you could say we do.
And, you know, because of the impact it has on our mental health.
In fact, I invested in a company that uses music as pain relief.
that uses music as pain relief.
They've worked out incredible technologies for algorithms
to understand how music can be, you know,
playlists can be put together, of music that we all know,
but they can be used in a way to help people
who are going through terrible things,
like pain relief with cancer or whatever.
A great company called Medimusic.
And, you know, it's like understanding
how we think about and how we care about music.
And the thing is, do we care about it?
Maybe there's enough music that's been made.
Maybe we don't need to make any more music.
Maybe we've got 50 years of recorded,
you know, really high quality recorded music.
Maybe we don't need any more.
Well, you know, maybe that's it.
But then future generations would miss out on having music
that they can claim to be their own.
And of course, we know anybody that's got kids,
but also ourselves as human beings,
we know how much music helps to define us when we're growing up,
when we're sort of entering into adolescence and things like that.
It helps to deal with those periods in our
life when massive change happens. And we use music to frame things, you know, your happy
birthday song or your getting married song or your first kiss or these kinds of things.
Music has these incredibly important things. And do we look at music, do we just need to
keep music that's already made and we don't bother investing? Because this is the word as a society do we keep investing in music yeah but
what you just said about dude analogy like i say that that music is is basically nutrition
i think reading is nutrition i think all this stuff is nutrition, right? And as we grow with technology and as the
world evolves and expands and as our psychology of our brain changes, because it is changing,
we are changing because we're interacting with computers, with technology. So our brains are
slowly shifting. So yes, we need to keep creating new music because our emotional response
mechanisms are changing. So we have to keep up with the emotional response mechanisms because
those things are what are the nutrients that fuel our nervous system and our brain, um, vis-a-vis,
like through music. Do you understand what I'm saying
So like it has to evolve
Alongside of that
Yeah I think that's great let's come back to
To you know
To people sharing
Their
Tracks that they feel
Have been crafted
In an incredible way
That means something to them I want to say hi
to Ninja because Ninja is here for the first time on Music Monday. Hey Ninja, how you doing?
Welcome to Music Monday.
I'm doing well.
Yeah, tell me, what is your tune?
Yeah, well, you know, it's hard to nail down one, but when I came in, y'all were talking
about Chris Cornell, so I gave myself the framework of the 90s.
And one track that's really got me lately has been Lithium by Nirvana, just a beautifully written song.
And Nirvana is interesting.
So I was born in 87, and I remember when Kurt Cobain died.
And I was always into Nirvana, but I wasn't like over the top
with them but recently there's been kind of a renaissance uh for them and I and I've gotten
kind of re-gotten back into it I remember my parents were into them and just you know the
the power and the beauty of those of the songs that he wrote it's just unbelievable and I would
probably put that one at the top for me personally
that's a wonderful a brilliant brilliant piece of music and but from a brilliant
bad band and another wonderful example of three complete bonkers individuals that just seem to
come together and make this insane sound i'm always a big fan of three pieces we've talked
about three pieces three-piece bands on on on Monday, you know, quite a few times and the, and the difference between
a three piece band, a four piece band and a five piece band and how there's something
very interesting about a three piece band because they haven't got that fourth sound,
you know, that, you know, like the backup guitarist or the backup keyboard player or
whatever. So the guitarist or the keyboard player has to be do a lot you know they have to create a lot for for me think of that like the doors they're a
four-piece band but you know really they just were a three-piece band you know and so you've
got Phil Manzareiro having to do a lot of the bass parts as well as doing his keyboard parts
as well so you know things like that that will that end up defining the sound and I think
Nirvana is a really interesting one because
they they had this whole large you know quite loud thing quite laughing that they stole from mud honey
but really really made it their own that they then that everyone then copied of course and um but but
there is something very intrinsically brilliant and totally different and new about kurt's writing that i like when i first heard
nirvana i was like i i don't these kind of semi-tone chord change kind of things that he does
and these kind of monolithic not monolithic monotone kind of vocal things it's like i'd
never really heard anybody do anything like that. And it just completely blew me away.
Yeah.
I mean, I feel like once in a,
you know,
once every decade or so you get a songwriter like that,
that just like,
you know,
excuse me for cussing,
but like fucking has it,
you know,
like he just,
he really had it.
Another one from that era that I like a lot too, and there's still, you know,
there's tour rumors, but I think that we should mention Radiohead here too, you know, like
Paranoid Android is kind of the classic example. But that was another one in the 90s when it came
out when you're just like, holy shit, I know we're moving away from three piece now. But again, just like very, very.
And what's cool about, you know, these examples is like the songwriting has to be unique and different.
And Radiohead certainly had that and has it.
Yeah, again, I totally agree with you. A really hard one to work. I mean, as a British person, been with Radiohead from day one and met them a few times and they are another one of these bands that you look at and go, how did they do that that how did they come up with this stuff you know and the
the beauty of radiohead is the incredible diversity that a five-piece band i struggle to think of
another band that is diverse sonically as radiohead you know everything from fake plastic trees to
kid a to weird fishes you know to but and all of them yet sound quintessentially Radiohead-y.
King of Limbs, too.
King of Limbs, exactly.
Okay, Computer.
Yeah.
Yes, I mean, I was in the middle of recording an album
in a residential studio in Wales when that came out,
and I played it in the studio everyone had gone
to bed and it was sort of about four in the morning and I played it in the studio really loud
what's beauty of being a being a music producer is you can basically be in a studio with the best
hi-fi in the world and play anything you want and I just sat there with a very nice bottle of red
wine and and and a spliffiff and listened to this whole album.
And then it was in Wales, this studio, a beautiful part of the UK and very picturesque in the
middle of nowhere. And there was a river at the end of the garden where the studio was
and I literally just took the bottle of wine and another spliff down afterwards and sat
by the river staring at the water going, that's changed my world.
My world, I feel, has just fundamentally changed
since listening to that record.
And it did, you know, because I think after that,
I never looked at producing again.
And Nigel Goodrich, who's a good mate of mine,
became a good friend of mine is you know became a good friend of mine
around that period and then and then I've seen him you know met him on a number of occasions and
we've hung out together on since and you know Nigel's a really sweet guy and a very very
unassuming guy and and I'm I'm such a fanboy around him because I'm almost like how did you
get that sound how did you do that sound and he's again you know he's like I don't know we just you
know messing around with some boxes
and that came out of the sound.
And it's the wonderful sort of innocence
of music making,
which for anybody that makes music
will know that a lot of the time,
most of the things one does
are not premeditated.
They just happen.
There's this combination of what you do
and what other people do
and it all coming together
and something about the way the technology seems to work at that moment and the way the stars are aligned and so on and so
on and so on you know and it's it's just it's an incredible thing and one of the most beautiful
things about making music is is that you kind of throw shit out there and something comes back and
it's not what comes back is not what you expect you Sometimes it is, and most of the time it isn't.
And that's the beauty of making that.
So two great choices, Ninja.
Thanks very much for that.
Tara, on to you now.
Same question.
A great crafted record or piece of music
that you think has touched you in some way.
And also, I like the fact that we brought
the kind of concept of where we're going with AI and all these things into that.
So something that you really feel it will be quite difficult, you know, I think we'll leave
the options open for an AI to be able to, and maybe to recreate because it's there already,
it's there already but to have come up with it that's the thing the thing to come up with these
but to have come up with it, that's the thing. The thing to come up with these type of things,
type of things for ai to be radiohead or to have that kind of thing i don't agree to make music
that sounds like radio yeah of course but not to be not to come up with stuff in the way that that
that intrinsically works i can't see that working so tara yeah what you got i have one but i saw
emily on mic did you want to say something first, Em?
I just wanted to just add Deftones into that conversation that you guys were having. Because when I heard Diamond Eyes for the first time, Deftones, I was just blown away.
I was like, what the, like this, I don't know.
That band to me is Chino.
And the way he uses his voice and the way his voice just is naturally and the way he lays back on the vocal and like how he plays with it.
It just, I don't know.
It's just, and the way the guitars sound and how washy they are and like, and you just feel like you're just like swimming most of the time that you're listening to Deftones.
You're just in a body of water just being pulled and pushed around. I don't know.
It's weird, but yeah, I got that feeling. And also with Nirvana, I think a lot of times we forget,
we forget the use of space in music. And I think what Nirvana and Kurt did really well,
um, was use space between the guitars, the drums, the, like the notes he was choosing,
how simple it was, like where he placed the vocal, the cadence of it notes he was choosing, how simple it was, where he placed the vocal,
the cadence of it. There was space there. And it seems like in more modern music now and now,
more and more, everything gets crushed and crushed and crushed and crushed. And the space
tends to get away from us all. And then if you listen to things from the 90s and early 2000s and mixes even, they're not as crushed.
There's more space.
There's more places for your mind to fill in the blanks.
And it was weird.
I was reading something about color the other day.
Like purple isn't like isn't actually a color.
Purple, when we look at purple, our mind makes the color between different colors and it makes purple and we view it as purple.
But it's really not even a color.
So, like, I mean, your mind fills in blanks.
And I think the beauty of music is where your mind can fill in the blanks, because that makes that makes a lot of songs very special to you because only you can fill in those blanks a certain way.
Anyway, that's
all i want to say you know that miles davis said it's not the notes you play it's the notes you
don't play and i think that's so fucking cool i can't remember someone else i think it might be
miles he also said you know that the space in music is where god is it's like that concept it's like that's that's the bit
where you can't quite fathom you know whether you're religious or not it doesn't matter it's
the concept it's like that's the bit where the magic is it's that bit around the music i totally
love that um brilliant choice though brilliant choice deft yeah. RX. Was it RX? What's it called? RX?
Queen.
That's my Deftones tune of choice.
I fucking love that tune.
Amazing.
You're my girl.
That's all right.
That's a fucking tune.
Wow.
Yeah.
His voice on it.
Do you know what?
That's got to be in my top 60.
It's like honey.
Fuck.
That's got to be in my top 60. Fuck. That's got to be in my top 60.
That's really hard.
It's now my top 62.
There we go.
Brilliant.
Brilliant choices.
Got to switch it to a top 100 now.
Yeah, that's really hard.
Tara, you were going to come in.
You were going to come in you were going to come in with with with your choice yeah mine um is actually like it's personal but it's also
like I've been fucking with the AI music and I've been playing around with the guy who was
the engineer for you know our record label for a long time and he makes everything analog so i'm making ai he's making analog we're putting it
together and we've been putting stuff out um and asking like people we know you know who know music
pick out what the ai made pick out what i made you know from scratch like go back and forth through this. And we're trying to blur the line so that there isn't one so that nobody can tell.
So far we can tell.
A lot of people can tell.
But yeah, we're trying to erase the line where you can tell.
But anyway, mine is, I've mentioned it before in this space.
It's Cyndi Lauper's True Colors. I was there when
the song was written and Eric Bazilian and the Hooters used to record in my cousin's studio.
So when that was being written, it was also the first time that I met Allie Willis and who I, as a human being and as a
creative, just fell head over heels in love with.
I didn't have a good relationship with my parents and I met her and I was like, always
wondered why she couldn't have been my mother.
I was so fascinated with everything Allie did creatively and the songs that she wrote and the vision she had for how things would be.
So, you know, when they were writing True Colors for Cindy, her voice was never taken into account.
Her personality was and what that song would project and who it would actually mean things to
and you know at the time I was a teenager in a really shitty relationship with my parents and
it took on a meaning for me as I heard it being written and being sung by, you know, everybody who was writing it.
But then when I heard it sung by her with her tone
and her speech impediment and her imperfections,
it really did something for me that it hadn't up until that point.
And I fell in love with the whole process of writing over that song,
you know, and watching people work together and seeing what actually I had loved music
since, you know, I was born, but seeing the whole thing made me fall in love with the whole process
of music and making music and the people behind making it and the stories that they were telling,
you know, while they were and what they dreamed of seeing that song mean to other people. And it
has been anthems for, you know, love songs and women's movements and LGBTQ community and
charitable events. And it's been used for aids you know and you name it and that song
has transcended and I don't think that AI can match that just because of everything that came
together to make that piece of music all the people that were involved the creativity the experience the life stories
the imagination of what it would become and then her singing it and seeing what had it it's 35
years of that song and it's timeless and it can go with, it could be your wedding song. It could be, you know, a foundational song.
It's crazy.
And it's got so much.
Every time I hear it, I think something different.
I don't ever think the same thing.
Like music for me, the whole Dick Clark, you know, it's the soundtrack of your life.
That song is not.
Like that song, every time I hear it, means something different to me.
And I think the uniqueness of that, you know, just doesn't exist very often.
Do you think you would have the same attachment to it if it wasn't for the fact that it had been written in your presence
and you knew the people that wrote it?
Do you know what I mean you'd you'd seen the gestation of that song and then it's it's it's
sort of you know the way it had been adopted by Cindy and turned into hers do you think a personal
level no obviously I wouldn't have a personal connection to it but But like I just said, that the different ways that I think about that
and I can hear it maybe on the radio or something and think like not of them or the process or
having been there or around that, but of something totally different, a memory, something,
Of something totally different, a memory, you know, something, a conversation I have with my son, you know, about being an individual or whatever it was.
Like every single time I hear it, it's something different.
Yeah.
And it's just like, you know, I have a hundred that I love and probably like that island, you know, you take a hundred songs you can't live without, easily fill that up.
You know, you take a hundred songs you can't live without, easily fill that up.
But that one for me, just because of everything it encompasses and how many different directions it takes me when I hear it is mine.
And I love that. I love that, Tara, because it's similar to my what's going on feeling, which is there's a personal connection that I have with that song.
Obviously, there's a professional connection I have to the song in the sense that I make music.
So I love someone who's made an amazing piece of music.
I'm interested in the way it was written,
in the way it was produced, performed, all of those things.
And then the kind of business side of it,
how it came to be, how it came to come out,
the marketing of it all, blah, blah, blah. But there's a deep personal feeling about that song that it connects to me on
a very personal level. I wasn't there when Marvin wrote it, unfortunately. But I, you know, it's,
there are several times in my life where that song has had a much deeper experience,
connection to me, because of certain things that have gone into my life that, that, has had a much deeper experience, connection to me,
because of certain things that have gone into my life,
that as a consequence,
has framed it in a very personal way,
and I just think,
I love that,
I love that concept,
that's brilliant,
this is great,
one other,
you see, this is when Music Monday absolutely shines,
I love it when people talk about music,
and we all share our love of music,
if anybody wants to come up on stage
and share their favourite tune
and something that's special to them
but they feel is really well crafted,
then please just invite yourself up.
We're all friends here.
We don't bite.
Let's come to Jigsaw.
I haven't seen Jigsaw for a while.
Jigsaw, great to see you.
Ninja, I see...
Sorry, who was it?
Tricky, but I see you as well. But Ninja, let's come to you first and then we'll great to see you. And Ninja, I see... Sorry, who was it? Tricky, but I see you as well.
But Ninja, let's come to you first
and then we'll go to Tricky.
Jigsaw, welcome as always to Music Monday.
Thanks for coming and taking the time to be here.
As everybody.
And please remember to retweet the room.
Always come up and tell us what your favorite song is.
Which Jigsaw has done?
What's yours, mate?
What's your tune that you feel is like
it sort of it has an incredibly personal attachment to that you have or but also is beautifully crafted
hmm i mean there's really endless endless amounts of music that do that for me but one that i feel
like is pretty universal that um a lot of people probably can connect with.
It certainly has an impact on me is Time by Hans Zimmer on the Inception soundtrack.
That song is like...
I don't even know how to describe that song.
I love that it has no lyrics and that it, for me, I mean, I guess I'll just speak for myself.
It just creates, it really exemplifies like just being a father and being like aware of time passing and being, I try to be, I try to spend my life as present as possible to be connected with the present moment in reality that is at any moment
that i can help um and that song it just i feel like is i don't think i don't think any composer
could ever capture the feeling of time passing and how tragically beautiful and sad it is then that song has done like that song
it's like it's like a poetic expression of how time will never stop moving forward and that's like
horrifying but then the beauty of it being that way, so to harness the present moment, to really pay attention to the moments that you're given in your life that matter the most, which is the very present moment right now. it's like so simple it's just it's like it's like literally like eight notes and yet it just
expresses itself so powerfully and it does the same thing over and over again the entire song
it's the same sequence of notes and it just amplifies with strings and synthesizers and
then it like dies down with a piano and then it builds back up with more strings and more piano
and more drums and then it dies back down and it feels the way that I feel when I watch my son grow
up and it's like I have to mourn the death of the children they were yesterday and then celebrate
the people that they are today and who they're becoming because it's like every ounce of my being wants them to
stay four years old and need me and want to play with me and to connect with me and to depend on
me but then then I'm so proud of the individual person that they're becoming and I feel like
time that song just like I don't know if any other composer or i don't know if any song will
ever exist that will do it the way that that song does it um it's just so wonderfully beautiful
and so simple too it is not a complex song but it is so powerful that was amazing mate beautiful
words i mean fantastic words and summing it all out.
I'm totally in agreement with you about the time.
And for me, Interstellar is obviously the one that means more to me,
I think, in general, just because it's such a fantastically haunting piece of music.
And, you know, I think, is it the cornfield chase, I think, or I can't remember which one it is, but the one that's, you know i i think is it the cornfield chase i think or i can't remember which
one it is but the one that's you know boom boom boom you know it's just phenomenal that that piece
of music that's and and to you i mean hans imo what a guy he he is has this incredible knack
of finding these very simple again simple yet complex complex in a simplistic way yeah
interstellar phrases for me i was like it's a toss-up between interstellar like cornfield chase
or time it's like man i feel like cornfield chases it's simple because that main melody right that
don't don't yeah and that goes through the whole movie
but i feel like cornfield chase as far as like complexity goes it has like these really cool
arpeggiations and these really cool like movements with the strings and stuff it's like inherently a
little bit more complex as far as an execution goes versus time where it like it really doesn't
shift it doesn't go up in in octave It doesn't go down an octave. It
doesn't do any kind of musical trickery to make you think you're coming to some kind of resolution.
It stays the exact same key. It stays the exact same notes throughout the entirety of the song.
And it's just like, holy cannoli. And yeah, Hans is like, he's an inspiration. I very much, I used to be a Hans Zimmer impersonator for the first like eight years of my career.
Jigsaw, that reminds me a lot about Ravel Bolero, like how Ravel Bolero just built upon like those chord notes and rhythms and polyrhythms.
And I think that he probably probably was very influenced by that.
I love that.
It's just great the way it builds really quietly and builds and builds.
That's a piece of music that it's like, wow.
How do you even come up with that?
That would never cross my mind to do something like that, ever.
Well, this is an interesting thing because when I, you know,
as a rock and roller at Lesko at 16 and was obsessed with, you know,
Jimi Hendrix and guitars and craft work.
Jimi Hendrix's craft work and the injury in the blockades,
what a bizarre combination of things that I could be into.
And it kind of defined my life really going forward, you know those those things and the beatles of course everybody
loves the beatles back in the day um but listening to like i didn't really get classical music until
i met my wife who's a cellist and then that world opened up to me and that that is half the thing when you sit there you know we were doing
a wagner piece recently and listening to a whole orchestra playing this wagner piece and it
literally is like it's like fucking dance music it's like these intertwining kind of sort of lines
that go around around around around a hypnotic state and drones on the double basses and the
and the way the double basses work with the woodwinds with the double bases and the and the way the double
bases work with the woodwinds with the corn glaze and the clarinets to kind of the clarinets give
this kind of greenness to the top of the double bases that you don't realize and you know stuff
like that you just you know the way horns work together with bass trombones and trombones and
tubers fit in there it's just phenomenal when you have the chance to understand how orchestras work
um it gives them a whole i see it saw everything in a much much different light and
thoroughly huge amount of respect and love for orchestral music now um because of just because of
those were the those were the ingredients that they had you know two three hundred years ago
they had those ingredients to play with.
They didn't have millions of plug-ins and millions of this and that and t'other and all this kind of stuff.
They literally had clarinets, horns, bass trombones, you know, cor anglais, you know, they just had these things that they had to know how these tones fit together.
And some of the best classical music is when that that works in a really really
powerful way um like great choices tommy like carmina burrana like the dun dun dun dun like
note choices note choices yeah three four notes but the way you put them together the cadence of
them the rhythm the it's it's just it's crazy how much there are there's
been so many rock songs that have borrowed from classical music for their hooks yeah it's not even
fun yeah same with pop oh i mean yeah yeah yeah i mean i mean i mean obviously you know we we we
always you know we stand on the shoulders of giants all of us you know and that's just how
how it should be and you know hopefully we become the giants that other people then stand on their shoulders.
Let's come to...
Oh, Will Lucas.
Nice to see you again, man.
Asking you the same question I ask everybody else.
A piece of music that means something to you that has been crafted in an unbelievable way
that possibly AI would never even dream of being able to come anywhere close to doing.
I'll take two.
I won't take up a whole lot of time.
Nice to see you, and thanks for inviting me up. I won't take up a whole lot of time, but two of them that really strike me is one is, this is an odd one, but Katy Perry's Last Friday Night.
Friday night. So the reason that that has such a resonance for me is because when my oldest daughter
was a young teenager, I saw her with her friends. I was picking her up from school, and I saw her
with her friends, and it was when that song was popular, and they were all just jamming to that
song, and they were all screaming out the lyrics to get together. And it just reminded me of that, of that, that freedom you have when you're a kid and you're listening to
your favorite songs with your friends and you're riding around the top down and there's a song
blasting on the, well, in my time on the radio and everybody's just, everybody's just having a good
time. And it's, it's a certain kind of freedom and it's a certain kind of freedom, and it's a certain kind of appreciation of music that you kind of don't get at any other time in your life.
And it just, I will always have that memory in my head of her with her friends just screaming out that song.
And it reminded me, because I thought the song, it was a well-crafted pop song, sure.
But the song just never really struck me because, well, I'm not the audience.
I was a 40-something-year-old man.
But what struck me as a well-crafted piece of music, but nothing terribly special.
But then it reminded me when I saw her and her friends of the emotional power of different musics for different generations and what it means to people. So that's a big one for me.
Another one for me is I grew up a white kid in the deep south in the United States.
So I never really got, growing up, I never really got hip-hop and rap music.
I listened to a lot of it, but I never really got it, right?
Then I went to college.
My downstairs neighbors were two black guys who I, really honestly, the first black guys
that I ever became really good friends with.
And I went down to their apartment one day,
and we were hanging out, and I was smoking a fatty with them,
and they put on the Low End Theory,
and the tune Jazz came on in the Low End Theory,
and I fucking got it.
I was like, holy shit, this all makes sense to me now.
And from then, Tribe Called Quest, Low End Theory, was my white guy intro to the hip-hop and rap world.
And I went to music school, so I think about music a lot.
So I just got it on a very, very emotional level, on a very deep musical level.
And that just opened my mind to that entire universe.
And I've been a big fan
since then. And last one is I grew up as a classical pianist. That's pretty much all I
listened to. And it's all I played until I was, I don't know, in high school, maybe. And, you know,
I was playing Chopin etudes and Bach English suites before I was playing Louie Louie. And then I heard, for the first time,
I heard two pieces. Number one, Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, right? Opened my mind to what piano could
be and how a group could play together in a way that I was completely unfamiliar with. And the
story behind how Kind of Blue was recorded just kind of blew my mind in that musicians
could interact in that way in such an incredible way. And last one is Jean-Michel Jarre, Oxygen.
Growing up as a classical pianist, it was the first piece of music I heard that was a keyboard
player doing something unusual and exotic and blending classical with pop stylings
in a way that was popular and that people loved. And that's why I think today Niels Fromm is one
of my favorite musicians because he stands on the shoulders of Jean-Michel Jarre and people like that
that made the way possible. All right, that's what I got. Thanks, Johnny.
Great, great choices.
Let's start with the first one.
I mean, I think if ever there was a wonderful example
of why music, we need to invest in music
as a concept, as a culture,
it's exactly that first story,
which is, you you know your daughter and
her friends owned katie perry that was her that was their artist it wasn't the beatles it wasn't
nirvana it wasn't it was their artist was katie perry in the same way that you know some generations
are owning like sabrina carpenter or charlie xcx or you know or whatever you know those the younger kids today have got their
artists that are not their parents and i think that's so important music is a coming of age
drug it helps to unframe your coming of age of particularly in our adolescence that first
understanding of who you are, who you might
be attracted to, who might be attracted to you, you know, your independence, your, your
achievement in like, you know, on a scholistic level or whatever, you know, those things need
help. They need support. And you need something that you believe is yours that has been through that
because they're closer to your age than your parents' age.
And so I think that is a great, great example of that.
I mean, I think Katy Perry is a fantastic artist.
He's made some brilliant, brilliant music.
And I think that's a really, really cool example.
I think the Jean-Michel example is another really, really interesting one
because that is, again, you know, instrumental music follows,
like, you know, standing on the shoulder of giants with classical music,
particularly is the continuation of instrumental music.
You know, for me, it was, you know, like we just talked about Hans Zimmer,
obviously, but for me, it was people like Kraftwerk
and the electronic stuff, Tangerine Dream, you know like we just talked about hans zimmer obviously but for me it was people like craft work and the electronic stuff tangerine dream you know a lot of that sort of thing
philip glass steve reich all of those kinds of instrumental things which just blew me away when
i was when i was a kid because of the first time i heard music oh my god first time i heard music
for 18 musicians yeah i was like holy i didn't know that was possible right and that's live you know when they're playing it live you're like how the fuck do
you do that you know and i've talked to my wife about that and she's like oh they just you know
they make a mistake but they make it sound like it's like you know that's how it was supposed to
be uh one one very quick fact for you and for emily revelle because i played a lot of revelle revelle interesting
thing about revelle and debussy and foray and the impressionists they were of age they were coming
of age as composers during the same time that jazz was first starting to be a presence and if
you and you never associate the two in your brain but look online you will see that um uh some great
pictures of when revelle and gershwin met and played together and composed together.
Ravel was a big fan of Bix Beater Bickey, an early jazz saxophonist that played a lot in Paris.
Ravel and Debussy specifically were incredibly influenced by the early jazzers and by early jazz music.
And if you do block chords of things like the Debussy Preludes and Après-Médi-Le Fond from Ravel, they're jazz chords.
It's jazz progressions.
Debussy is jazz progressions that are arpeggiated out
and brought to bear with a classical sensibility.
But impressionists in jazz, same era.
You know what?
That is crazy.
Crazy. I got to look this up that's absolutely
but it makes total sense yeah just look up look up revel gershwin picture and your brain your
brain will be blown when you see maurice revel and george gershwin in standing by a piano together
i mean it makes a lot of sense because they both were so sticky like Ravel was so sticky and Gershwin was like ridiculous
right so like it makes sense that they were friends totally makes sense that's crazy thank
you for that I love that that's so cool and I also love the fact that one of my the the uh Debussy
story that that I knew about was was when I was bali and i found this out and there's an instrument in
bali called the gamelan which has this kind of bizarre sort of atonal kind of sound to it that
when you first listen to it you think oh it sounds like a really weird cowbell that's like
loads of different cowbells all playing at once um but actually once you settle into it has this wonderfully mesmeric hypnotic vibe to it and
apparently Debussy was very influenced by Gamalame music and took a lot of that into some of the
things that he wrote I can't remember specifically I'll try and remember what I think we've mentioned
this before on music about that connection so again wonderful thanks for that mate because
that's a great example of how music, you know, different styles of music and different musicians impact on each other. And totally agree with you about Low End Theory. For me, Tribe is one of the greatest, not just greatest hip hop bands, one of the greatest bands ever. You know, they just, again, the three of them coming together and making this incredible sound consistently.
And again, so unique to them, you know,
the Tribe Called Quest sound is really unique to them.
And, you know, when you had obviously sort of touched a little bit into that Daisy Age, Three Feet High and Rising,
De La Soul vibe, of which there was quite a lot of that around the time,
but it was just cooler than that. It was, you you know de la sol was a little bit silly sometimes a little bit
i mean beautiful amazing stunning albums stunning music but tribe always just had edged the coolness
for me they just were a bit cooler um and uh yeah fantastic great choices wow wonderful wonderful
space we're having tonight amazing unfortunately i will need to wind it down soon because I've got some shit to do.
I've got work that I need to finish off.
But we're not just yet. Not just yet.
Let's come to Moonbeam.
And Moonbeam, welcome to Music Monday.
What's your choice?
Well, first, I have to say I'm a Hans Zimmer fan now.
That is beautiful.
I was sitting here listening to it and also the Jean
Magier love it his instruments are that is crazy how he has that set up and that's why mine y'all
are gonna Bjork I don't know if you've ever heard of her one of my favorite songs she does is it's
oh so quiet she is like I'm a huge classical.
I was raised in classical, trained in classical, did a German piece.
I was like 22nd out of 4,000 people.
It was amazing to sing.
I love singing classical.
It's like the Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs Bunny turns into the composer
and he holds his hand up there for the composer to sing and
I've always wanted to do that but Bjork has came up with instruments she is it's a retractable is
one of them she calls them biophilia instruments but it's kind of like you know when you have a
music box the little the little thing that's in there that makes the music that you turn that is what she has like
big ones and she they she plays it she's the only one in the world that has this y'all need to look
it up and the other one is the retractable it i think y'all would really enjoy it because y'all
just turned me on to two new composers that i had never heard in my life that um the time song is
phenomenal um now one that y'all may know is Pharrell Freedom um I like that song because of
the words um the feeling that it gives um the whole background but y'all really need to look
into Bjork and I have to say thank you y'all need to post look into Bjork. And I have to say thank you.
Y'all need to post these names because I was typing as fast as I could.
But this is an amazing space.
But wow, look up the retractable.
Has anybody ever seen it or heard of it or any of her instruments?
They're really cool.
Isn't the retractable this plug-in that's like,
oh, I'm getting confused with Reactor actually native instruments reactor the old the old sort of modular system that that
they i don't even know if it's still available actually that they used to have um and i thought
retractable was something to do with that but i'll take it out i mean there was this period of
really interesting like back in the sort of 90s and 2000s,
where people were making really interesting new musical instruments.
And, you know, some of them sort of slightly took hold,
but none of them ever did.
But they were really kind of, I mean, they would, you know,
people like Bowie and Bjork and so on.
And, you know, Peter Gabriel had the absolute incredible honor
to meet Peter Gabriel a couple of weeks ago.
And he was telling the story about how he heard about this thing
called a Fairlight, which was the first ever sampler,
polyphonic sampler.
And it was made by an Australian company.
And it cost like £40,000, which is like what's probably
back then probably about $60,000, $70,000. And it was monophonic, eight channel monophonic,
and it had a very short sample rate. But he loved it and was able to do things with it that
he'd never been able to do before so he rang up the
company and said look i'll distribute this for you so him and his mate this is peter gabriel the
rock star him and his mate are like distributing fair lights uh trying to get people to buy you
know these sort of 60 70 000 keyboards back in the days back in the 80s. I love that story. And I think, you know, one of the things that I'm always saying to musicians
and creative people in general is,
do not be scared of technology.
Embrace technology.
You know, embrace AI.
Embrace all of these things.
Find ways of being creative with them
because if you don't, someone else will.
And, you know.
You met him?
No, you did not.
Peter Gabriel.
Just a couple of weeks ago.
I love Peter Gabriel.
I posted the retractable up there.
I love Peter Gabriel.
Oh, yeah.
I was fainted when you said that.
I was that close to someone that just met one of my favorites.
He is, like, amazing.
He is.
He is.
I mean, he's probably, I know I say this a lot about artists,
you know, they're my favourite artists.
He probably is one of, he's definitely up there in top,
you know, three of artists.
Because he just, you know, I was a massive Genesis fan
when I was a kid and loved and still do love Genesis
and Peter Gabriel.
But actually, really, i was a gabriel fan
i think more than anything because you know i loved the early genesis stuff when he left after
he left i didn't quite enjoy it as much i loved all the early genesis stuff because i because
really i just love peter gabriel i thought he was amazing so yeah i was like a giddy school girl when
i met him not that you him a couple of weeks ago.
I just was like, oh yeah.
And you know what?
I told him what I was doing and what we're doing with Token Tracks and how we're embracing modern technology
and we're trying to build systems for creative people
to be more creative, not less creative.
And he just loved all that.
And he said, come see me at Real World and stuff.
So I'm going to pluck up the courage to go down talk sit down and talk with him about what we're doing and uh
yeah i mean exactly he's of course got a tune on my in my top 60. um let me see who else have we got
up here uh tara you got your hand up you want to add something to this i just wanted to add when it comes to bjork and
the instruments um she played a knight in philadelphia back in oh it wasn't even 2000 yet
but anyway um her love of strange instruments and her love of inventing new instruments is really friggin amazing and she's played the sharpsichord
She uses a tesla coil
She has recently been screwing around with a theremin
And the sounds that she produces
Out of all of these things and combining them together are amazing
So yeah, if you don't know,
like look into the instruments that she uses live, um, they come out on these tables
and, and the things that go on and the use of her choirs and everything in her performance
is just phenomenal. And she did it, um, in the venue in philadelphia uh was a small venue with a uh
the man music theater that had a moving stage that spun around in a circle and just the sound
in that room and what she did was unbelievable so i was trying to find I'm googling like crazy and trying to find any like maybe clip
or anything of it but I think it was in like 1997 98 ish so I can't find any video of it but if I do
I'll share with you guys in the music group and and maybe next Monday if I can get anything but
it's really really out there and crazy and phenomenal and the sounds are amazing
I think that's when Hyper Ballad came out she's coming to Raleigh I've never been able to see her
and Tara you don't know how I feel right now it's like a big birthday present and she's I'm gonna
see Bjork like I do fashion design I've always like her and Lady Gaga, I would faint. You know, thank goodness someone knows what I'm saying because she is phenomenal.
I mean, it's crazy how good she is.
I think her and the gentleman that Tom was talking about, Peter Gabriel, that I love so much, should get together and do a piece.
That would be crazy I think you know there are yeah I I'm with you on Bjork she she's always been an exceptional
artist and and changed my attitude towards live when I also saw her many years ago I was making
an album with a guy called David McCalmon, who's an amazing singer.
And we were sort of all going around the houses.
He'd already been around the houses a lot with a bunch of different producers,
and it was my job to kind of come in and try and sort everything out,
which was often my role.
Back in the day, I was kind of Mr. Wolf to a lot of projects where all else fails is like,
get right, you know, get Tommy and he'll sort it out. And I was trying to sort out this album and it was all really all over
the place. And then me and David went to see Bjork and it was just, it was Bjork and Andy,
not Andy Bell, thingy Bell, Dave Bell, was it Dave Bell? The guy from 808 State who
she worked with a lot. I with something bell and um and then
an eight piece string section and we just watched it and both our eyes were lit up when she was just
performing and we came out going that's what we should do with you and i had to come back to virgin
who was he was signed to and say look i know i've spent 250 grand on this album or rather you've
spent 250 grand i've probably only spent a little bit because of
all the other producers that have produced all stuff i said but i want some more money please
because we're going to start again and we're going to create a different union and to be to give
credit to virgin they backed us i mean not much we only went into a little programming room you
know and which you had to do in those days because this was sort of pre like when you know laptops
and stuff really kicked in
we were using computers but it was you know it was it was we still needed a studio so to speak
and uh yeah and we went in and we made this album called little communication which is one of my
favorite albums i've ever made and it's and it's just it's like it took so much of those kind of
influences of space what we were talking about earlier a lot to do with space. I had this rule that
I would give myself that there would only ever be three other things playing when David
sang, you know, so it would like be drums, bass, and maybe one other thing, and that
would be it. And, you know, nothing. And if that, and if something else came in, something
else would have to come out. And it was really interesting to kind of create these kind of
rules around the production and arrangement style, because it kind of gave you this like, okay, I'm going to really try and adhere to this restriction.
And it was really cool.
It was really great, great, great experience making it.
Great experience working there.
And, you know, I did, I worked very briefly from afar, worked with Bjorka.
Even before that, I did a remix of when she was still in Sugar Cubes,
and I did a remix of Birthday,
and took it into this housey kind of world that I was really in at the time
when I was DJing at Ministry and all around the world as a house DJ.
house DJ and
And took this into a house world,
took this into a house world
this kind of weird 78
indie
rock track and I took it
and sped it up to 118 BPM and made
it a jazz house record and
she loved it she called me up and said how much she
loved it and you know Nelly Hooper who went
on to produce her first album said that was a really
big influence on him
what you could do with that so I kind of feel like you know I help them on their way on to produce her first album said that was a really big influence on him uh in in in in what
you could do with that so i kind of feel like you know i helped them on their way a little bit with
my thinking um but you know hey i just i just introduced them to the concept i didn't make the
music they did that and that was incredible that for the first couple of bjork albums were just
stunning amazing pieces of music but she's not in my top 60.
Sorry about that, Bjork.
She's not there.
I could put my remix in, but I'm not going to.
Okay, guys, I'm going to wind this down.
I want to say a massive, massive thank you to everybody.
I've got a really cool thought, a really cool idea for, I think, next week's Music Monday.
We're going to stay in a music vein for next week and i've got a really
really interesting as we were talking out tonight a really interesting concept came into my head
which is a great question which i will be posing next week i'm not gonna i'm not gonna tell you
what it is you're gonna have to tune in next monday to find out what it is but it's a really cool question and um i
think it's going to open up a really interesting load of conversation around it uh thank you very
much as always to everybody for coming here on music monday this is the longest running music
and art space uh around on twitter that talks about music and regular i might add regular because
we've done this every monday pretty much we missed few Mondays. I've had to miss a few recently because of work
and travel and stuff like that. But on the whole, we've been here every Monday. We are
here, always here every Monday at 6pm UK time, 1pm Eastern time, 10am Pacific time, and wherever
you are in this world, you can tune in.
I hate this platform now, I really do, but I will continue to do stuff on this.
I'm also on Blue Sky over there, which is a bit calmer, a bit nicer, I must admit,
but can get a little dull.
Certainly not as fruity as X or Twitter or whatever it is you want to call it can be. But I'm over there and I'm also on Instagram and all those kind of things. Interesting stuff coming up with Token Tracks. Loads of really great
things I posted up the top there. For those that don't know, Token Tracks is my tech company
that I formed in 2020. And we build Web3 infrastructure for the creative industries, not just music,
but film, TV, sports. We're working with a perfume company at the moment. We're working
with a number of different ticketing companies to create on-chain ticketing. We're working with a perfume company at the moment. We're working with a number of different ticketing companies to create on-chain ticketing.
We're working with one of the biggest festivals in the UK,
building out a whole membership space for them.
We're doing all kinds of incredible stuff.
We just dropped on a brand new blockchain called Polymesh,
which is a really cool blockchain.
We just dropped a couple of things with them,
one of which was Josh Savage's NFT,
which you can go and buy if you want to
support josh and support the musicians because that to me is what it's all about it's about
supporting the eyes but not only is it about supporting the artists it's about supporting
the fans because for the first time fans are able to potentially trade and cash in uh not cash in
but but but be rewarded for support you know when you buy people's NFTs, yes, you are supporting an artist.
That's really cool.
But, you know, those NFTs may go up in value.
They may, you know, it doesn't appear to be the case at the moment,
but you just never know.
You never know where things are going to go with this technology.
And people may look back at this golden, as this period of NFTs
over the last two, three years and be really, like as a golden period.
And there may be NFTs that come out that have done nothing
that end up being incredibly valuable.
You just never know.
You never know.
That's the beauty of music.
You never know what you're going to come up with.
This has been week 175,
and it's been what the best music ever i'm gonna love you and
leave you we've won another one of my top 60 and i'm gonna play this tune because i just talked
about him it's peter gable it's from his first solo album and it's tunes called here comes the
flood and there's something incredibly magical and powerful
about this but what pisses me off is how bad the production is on this the production on this song
is so bad and it really pissed me off but the music the song is so beautiful and if you can
go and find there's a version of him they have him playing the song just on a piano it was on
like a tv show actually it was a kate bush tv show and he he's performs in
the middle he performs this song just him and the piano and it's absolutely stunning
the production is but the song is still amazing this is here comes to flub and peter
cable's first album which they never called anything but they call this one car so this is Here comes a flood.
When the night shows, the signals grow on radios all strange things they come and go there's early warnings stranded
starfish have no place to hide still waiting for the swollen Eastertide
There's no point in direction, we cannot even choose a side.
I took the old track, the high shoulder crossed the waters.
First, the waters on the tall cliffs, they were getting older, sons and daughters, jaded
underworld was riding high, waves of steel, of metal at the sky.
And as the nails sunk in the cloud, a sign, your baby is still alive.
If you'll be alone, you'll give me your life, you're still alive.
Dwayne, Dwayne, Dwayne, Dwayne. to survive I'll let you
you can go and listen to that one yourself
I think actually I'm a bit cool on that one
the production's not too bad it's just a bit cliche
and a bit dated I think the thing that pisses me off about it is the vocal sound.
Far too much reverb on someone who's got such a beautifully rich voice.
I want to hear more of the richness, the tone.
I don't need to hear a funky, like he's singing down a fucking well.
Anyway, thank you very much, kids.
You're all amazing.
I love you, and I'll see you next monday take care have a good one kids
adios
