7 posts tagged “songwriting”

[...] "Everything in life is about personal relationships – including the way one feels about music. I want to create as many opportunities for people to have that 'aha' moment – give people the chance to really connect with the composers." [...]

[...] "Musicians, like actors and writers, can be maddeningly inarticulate about what they do – because they do it, not talk about it. Marin is that rare exception. She has such a lucid, human understanding of music that she can explain something the way that others might tell you about certain items on the wall of their living room." [...]

"Marin Alsop breaks the glass baton," Elaine F. Weiss, Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 26, 2007

the making of "beauty and crime"

[...] “I met Philip Glass as I was walking down the street,” she explains over the phone from, of course, Manhattan. “I run into him fairly often. And he said, ‘How’s it going?’ I said that I was without a record deal, and he looked really happy and said, ‘Congratulations. That means you can do what you really want and finally have freedom.’

“I wasn’t clear how I felt about it at the time. I wasn’t seeing it from that point of view. Two weeks after 9/11, I found out my deal with A&M was up and asked them for another year on the label, and they didn’t pick up the option, so I quietly went away.”

But she began thinking about Glass’s reaction. “I decided to hire an engineer to work with, Brit Myers, and we just played music into the computer. I riffed around and made loops and things, without lyrics. It was a new way for me to work, and part of the sleekness of these songs may be that I was working on a computer, which compresses everything and allows you to edit and alter your work in really interesting ways. It becomes like a collage." [...]

That's from Ted Drozdowski's "Village Folk" in The Phoenix

[...] Time changes when you listen to Steve's music. It is, or rather was, so unorthodox, that the pulse and rate of breathing, thinking, and being, changes. It's like someone invented an alternative way of keeping time. A more human way - reflective of the ominous pain inherent in modernity and the future - whatever it may hold for us. So debased and insulted by the abomination that is the modern pop single, humans have forgotten how to actually listen to music - music that shows us something other than which clothes to buy, or how much to spend on that Sweet Sixteen Party, or which ride to pimp. Steve shows us that there is a different way. Would that we could all listen to him. [...]

Sam Gustin, Huffington Post, "Steve Reich Rocks New York"

[...] If lyric poetry is, as Czech novelist Milan Kundera recently wrote, "the most exemplary incarnation of man dazzled by his own soul and the desire to make it heard," surely the pop song is the highest incarnation of all-consuming love and its fundamental need to be shared. [...]

Marc Hogan, Pitchfork, "Peter Bjorn and John, Writer's Block"

The top 10 most requested songs were:

1. Goodbye My Lover, James Blunt.
2. Angels, Robbie Williams
3. I've Had the Time of My Life, Jennifer Warnes and Bill Medley
4. Wind Beneath My Wings, Bette Midler
5. Pie Jesu, Requiem
6. Candle in the Wind, Elton John
7. With or Without You, U2
8. Tears from Heaven, Eric Clapton
9. Every Breath You Take, The Police
10. Unchained Melody, Righteous Brothers

Frequently covered favourites, including the traditional song Danny Boy and Bob Dylan's Knocking on Heaven's Door, were among the top 20.

Other somewhat surprising entries on the list included the rollicking rock track I'll Sleep When I am Dead by Bon Jovi and Fame (I Want to Live Forever), the Oscar-winning theme to the 1980 movie and subsequent TV series Fame.

... and a solar-powered recharger, and I b'leeve I'm good to go.