Stay Awake and Standards
This Wednesday, I’m participating in a benefit concert for St. Ann’s Warehouse, a performance center in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Last year’s benefit consisted of performances of sea shanties and pirate ditties curated and musically directed by Hal Willner. This year he’s been brought in to (sort of) recreate Stay Awake, a record he produced in 1988 featuring unexpected singers and musicians performing songs from Disney films.
The song selection is drawn primarily from the vintage classics, movies like Snow White and Cinderella, rather than The Little Mermaid and Enchanted. For some, these older Disney tunes have become standards, and many were in fact written by the classic songwriters of that period. I would argue that the grammar and lexicon of the classic pop songs would become the classical music of the 20th Century. These songs were often innovative and complex in their construction, but always tuneful. Sophisticated short symphonies were balanced by equally sophisticated jazz and blues compositions, which at that time, held the public enthralled.
In the last couple of decades, the Disney songs are more convoluted in structure — more a mix of sung banter and hook and less compact. I prefer the old tunes, but that could be because I heard them on red and yellow kiddie vinyls as a child.
Years ago, I eventually joined the ranks of millions of others who found many of these standards moving and beautiful. I often dislike the way they were performed, all schmaltzy and with swing in inappropriate places. I don’t care for Sinatra, for example. It was probably Willie Nelson’s Stardust produced by Booker T. Jones that finally won me over. I started picking up the songbooks and fakebooks and learning the songs at home.
I have no ambition of following Bryan Ferry or Rod Stewart and recording a series of standards’ albums. But, by playing these songs, I began to sense how they were constructed, how they used certain devices to pull at the heartstrings and others to keep a melody interesting. I suspect I began to incorporate some of these “tricks” into my work, but in my own way, and with my own lyrics, which are usually miles apart from the lyrics of the traditional pop song. Although, Cole Porter’s “list” songs, and similar ones by Gershwin and others, take on a form I find easily adaptable to a lot of styles.
Under African Skies
The following week, I will join Paul Simon for a series of performances at the BAM where he currently holds a month-long residency. Simon invited a number of guest performers to cover his material, and divided the shows into three series: the Latin and doo-wop influenced material, the African and Brazilian influenced material (the nights I’m performing), and his own classic songs.
Like many others, I grew up listening to and learning the Simon & Garfunkel repertoire. However, it was one of his more recent records — You’re the One — that really knocked me out, even more than Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints, which one might expect me to identify with, since I was also collaborating with musicians from Africa and Brazil around the same time. The record didn’t sell that well, but to my ears, he had finally internalized all he’d learned from his earlier collaborations. He had made something that didn’t sound like any of his sources or inspirations, yet couldn’t have been made without them. We crossed paths somewhere and I told him how much I liked that record and maybe that helped break the ice.
Some months ago, we started meeting occasionally and we’d fall into talking about how we write and what the process is and where we get stuck and when it’s easy. I would sit, rapt, as I felt like I was hearing the words of a master songwriter, a kind of magician who was going to reveal to me, over lunch, some of his best tricks. Here was a more contemporary Gershwin or Cole Porter who was going to tell me a little of how it was done. Listen up.
Well, it didn’t happen exactly like that. Specific harmonic devices don’t always work for everyone in the same way, for example. At times, Paul and I might actually use very similar ways of writing words, but in the end, what we gravitate to — the lyrics we choose to be best and most suitable — is unique to each of us. So his tricks are essentially useless to me. I could, however, extrapolate, and find common ground in the decision-making process along the way. Our discussions yielded more about what might drive an artist to continue creating than they did songwriting advice. What does one do when confronted with a problem? And how can an artist remain passionate and interested in writing little songs?
